Human beings - endlessly creative, filled with stories, explanations, hopes, dreams, fears, our minds able leap into an imagined future or remembered past and time-travel effortlessly between them.Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that we have so many millions of ways of being anywhere but here, and in anytime but the now of our lives.
Photograph by Emma Gregory
We live in stories. We breathe them. They're an inescapable part of being human.Our stories tell us who people are, what life is and what's possible for us to do.Our capacity to delude ourselves with stories that cover up what's true is most on my mind today.We tell ourselves stories that bolster our self-esteem and blind us to the consequences of our choices. We tell ourselves stories that ignore our own actions or interpret them away. We tell ourselves stories that make the world about us alone, and stories that explain things as we like to explain them, because we feel better that way.And while every story opens up a world of possibilities, it closes down another, so the stories we tell ourselves matter.So often, we'd rather believe our familiar stories than look at the world and what we're up to in it with wide open eyes.
Take a look at the many ways the threat of shame is used as an almost-invisible shaping hand in your own organisation. Or in your family.Can you see its unspoken possibility embodied in the way you do appraisals, award bonuses, promote people, speak to your colleagues, give feedback?How do your organisation's values, frameworks, and stated mission work to keep people in line because they'll feel shame if they stand out?What about all the ways you keep people feeling insecure about their positions - working harder and harder, but not necessarily more creatively or effectively, to avoid the shame of redundancy or losing their job?And how about the ways you quietly support people working crazy hours, giving up on their family life, and being seen to do the 'right thing' even if it's not, actually, right for them or for the situation?Or do you support a culture in which people are instead very nice to one another, and so are unable to bring up what they see that might be troubling, upsetting, or challenging to the cosy picture you're promoting?Shame must be almost invisible, but not quite, for it to have its powerful effect. Its invisibility means many of us simply get on quietly - not standing out too much, taking it as a given part of the background of working life.Wouldn't it be a wonderful act of leadership to start to point out the hidden threat of shame everywhere you see it, and to begin to undo it so that the people around you can at last begin to flourish?
So many of us live life as if it is a mountain to be climbed: a struggle to reach the place where everything will be settled, where happiness, fulfilment and meaning are at last enduring and secure."No time to stop", we cry, "I'm too busy climbing". It's the narrative of many organisations as well as individual lives. And in the frantic ascent we rarely get to feel the rock beneath our fingers, breathe the air, or notice our travelling companions in their struggles beside us. We suspend our lives.If you live this way, particularly if you have some influence over other people, you'll draw them into the story with you. Before long, everyone's joining the scramble to the top in the hope that life's questions will at last be resolved. And being bound to the mountain becomes its own form of slavery with its own profound suffering.Because there is no place where everything comes good as in a fairytale or as promised in 'The Secret'. At what we took to be the top of the mountain, even if the view is breathtaking, are the same human questions of belonging, meaning, and contribution, and the same fears of isolation, death, freedom and meaninglessness. Life at the 'top' continues to be life, in which everything is provisional and changing, full of joys and sorrows, pain and healing, delights and sadnesses, light and shadow.Giving up the struggle to the top that was never there is difficult. But perhaps it can free you, at last, to be up to something bigger than securing for yourself the fairytale promise of our times. And, crucially, it frees the people around you to join you in doing the same.
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We've believed that somewhere, at the top of the mountain we feel like we're climbing, everything will be alright at last. We'll be fulfilled, at peace, happy.And so everybody's climbing the mountain, and everybody else seems to be trying to sell us something that will get us there more quickly. 'Buy this product', the advertisements scream, 'and at last you'll be ok. At last you'll be able to rest'.So we climb, faster and faster, harder and harder, exhausting ourselves along the way. We're sure the answer is at the top. We tell ourselves, 'When I have that job, that house, a beautiful lover, children, money, fame, the right car, or body shape, or clothes, an advanced degree, my name on a book, when I retire, I'll be there'.And the climb becomes more frantic, more determined, because it seems that other people have reached the top of the mountain already. Film stars, celebrities, billionaires, models, TV presenters, novelist, the people in the next street with the nicer houses, your friends - many of them look like they have it together, that they at last have reached life's destination.There are books, and courses, and coaches and products that promise you all of this - that there's some secret to the climb that's right in front of you if only you'll buy it, some magical way to accelerate you to the top.And all the while, you're hardly in life at all. Always postponing, always deferring, and piling suffering upon suffering as you compare yourself with others who seem to be further ahead, living the life you should be having.But the mountain has no top.Each crest simply hides another, and the genuine, heartfelt relief that comes from reaching it is soon replaced by the understanding that you didn't arrive yet, that you have further to go. Gradually you realise that staking your life on reaching a peak that never existed isn't what you'd bargained for.Or - alternatively - you discover that you're already at the top of the mountain. And that you always have been.
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It seems more and more to me, as I watch myself and others, that the source of our endless checking of email, Facebook, twitter and all is that we're secretly hoping to be saved.Seeing this first requires admitting how lost many of us feel so much of the time. There really is very little solidity to stand on in the world. Everything changes so fast. We have to navigate through boundless complexity, of which we understand only a fragment. And everything we know and care for can be taken away in an instant.So there's a part of us that is longing for the moment when someone bigger and more solid than us will show up to show us the way, to tell us that everything is going to be ok, to soften and soothe our racing thoughts and secretly pounding, anguished hearts. And wishing for this is not so surprising or unusual: anyone who had caring adults around them when they were small will have visceral memories of just this happening when the world got too big for them.Perhaps that's the secret promise we're holding out for in our email and social media - that in among all the updates will be the message from beyond which will at last, conclusively, set the world straight again, and release us from our fear.So we check, soothed momentarily by our hopefulness. But the message we longed for is not there. We check again, and again. Each time, for a few seconds, the anxiety abates. And we get addicted to this fragmentary feeling of safety.Weaning us off our addiction requires each of us to let go of the saviour myth and, ultimately, let go of needing to feel safe all the time.Then we can face the weird and incomprehensible world in its fullness, and feel it all without the need for a glowing prop to see us through.
Shame is a powerful, primal human emotion, stirring up for us as it does the overwhelming sense that 'I shouldn't be here... I cannot be here...'. It has us contract, freeze, mute ourselves, and make ourselves acceptable at the price of our aliveness and creativity.It is the perfect mood for forcing us to fit in, to withhold anything that might cause others trouble, to keep us in line. Which is why it's used so powerfully and effectively in the life of organisations.And because owning up to shame is, for most of us, itself shameful, we hide it from others and deny it to ourselves, living quietly with the suffering and wounding that it brings. We pretend we are not feeling shame even as we experience it most acutely.And we pretend not to see how our leadership and organisational structures actively promote it - how shame is often the unspoken currency of organisational life.
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For all of us who find ourselves pausing on the brink of stepping in...For those of us who, finding that we're called to take on a responsibility that we're not ready for, hold back...For each of us who, sensing that there's something important we must do, imagine we'll never be ready...... a reminder from Katagiri Roshi, a great teacher in the Soto Zen tradition:
The time will never come that you will reach your idea of maturity.It is an endless process.So, whether you feel qualified or not, all you have to do is accept what's in front of you and do your best with whole-heartedness.Make every possible effort to meet the position with modesty and humility.The position is of a bigger scale than the person you take yourself to be. So set yourself out in the big scale of the world. Before you are conscious of it, your life is deepened by the position.And in that way you will develop, very naturally.
Set yourself out in the big scale of the world. Find yourself deepened by the possibility you're stepping into. Know that this is the way you'll develop, and that it will be the most natural thing in the world.As natural as, and very different to, all the ways you're waiting.
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Sometimes, in the midst of all our striving, longing, and reaching, our building of towers and the making of names for ourselves, it's important to remember that one day we will, with certainty, lose it all.Some of this will happen piece by piece. We'll gradually say goodbye to people as they leave life. We'll realise, perhaps suddenly, that their presence in the world touched our hearts and lit up our eyes. We'll find out that their worth is beyond words.And for all of us, the loss will also come entirely at once - maybe at a time when we least expect it, before we can even know it's happening - when it is 'I' who is leaving and it is others who have to say goodbye.Some of us take a long time to find all this out, holding our inner gifts back from the world until we're sure the time is just right - a time that may never come.But others seem to live with this understanding so fully in their hearts it's as if nothing is withheld. They've discovered that the point of life is life itself, and that each of us is simply another expression of life's beauty and wonder. And from this understanding flows their kindness, their generosity and their wisdom, so that they shine brighter than the sun.
For Christy
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What if, just in the way that rainstorms, traffic jams and computer crashes are not personal, moods were not as personal as they seem either?We get a glimpse of this at a football match, at a concert, at the movies, when we most obviously get swept up in moods that are shared. But even when you're not in a crowd, each mood you experience is only available to you because of the human condition, the biology and physiology you have in common with the billions of other people who have ever lived.And so, in some fundamental way, all moods belong to everyone, and they're not nearly as private, or as personal, as they feel.This means you can let go of the idea that they're yours alone. You don't have to be ashamed of them. You don't have to hide them all the time. You can open up opportunities talk about them, ask for help with them, share insights into them, welcome them, celebrate them, offer support to others with them.Perhaps you can learn to be with them, without self-pity (how can this be happening to me?) and without self-aggrandisement (I must really be something to be feeling this good). And you can start to develop genuine compassion: the deep understanding that we're all in this experience of being human together.When your fear can be understood as a manifestation of the fear that's all of ours, your sadness an aspect of the sadness, your love an aspect of the love, then the tight drawn-in-close boundary that seems so clearly to separate you from others - particularly in your most difficult moments - can dissolve a little and you can start to discover the enormous possibility for living that comes from being part of the family of things.
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