Perhaps this could be a year of unusual discernment for you.Instead of your usual habits, pay close attention to what you read, who and what you listen to, and particularly to what you say.Notice what dulls you. What twists you out of shape. What sends you asleep to yourself and to the world. You can be sure if you're diminishing yourself, you're also diminishing the people around you.Notice what brings you vibrantly to life.Does this sound like an irrelevant question? I can assure you, it's of the greatest and most practical importance.Because if we're going to address the challenges ahead of us, we urgently need you to be wide awake, and we need you to shine... so that we can all shine too.
Gifts from the you of yesterday
If you're going to take up one new practice in 2014, I'd strongly recommend keeping a daily journal.Use it as a place to record questions, thoughts, feelings, experiences, and insights, rather than simply an account of what you did. Treat it as a space in which to muse, doodle, wonder and wander; in which to discover what you didn't know you knew; and in which to tap into the deep undercurrents of creativity and insight that are often just out of sight.As a regular journal writer myself, I can think of few more powerful and enriching ways of discovering the hidden threads that run through a life. Maria Popova over at Brain Pickings has been writing about this topic too. I love the way she describes journalling as an 'existential upgrade'.Here's what to do:
- Buy the most gorgeous journal you can find - with high quality paper that's satisfying to look at and to touch. Good quality, inviting materials make a huge difference to the experience.
- Choose a pen that's equally satisfying to write with. A good fountain pen is unbeatable for this.
- Set aside a fixed amount of time every day, say ten or fifteen minutes, ideally at a regular time of day.
- And then, just write. Some hints on this from an earlier post, are here.
Reading back over a journal as it unfolds can be an illuminating experience. You'll see patterns you weren't aware were there, recurrent themes and 'new' discoveries that you seem to forget and re-discover time and again. And perhaps you'll receive the gift of deep and practical wisdom given to the reader you are today by the writer you were yesterday.Please share with me your experience of taking on this practice.I'd love to hear how you're getting on.
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A year of days
To remember for the new year:
Days are like scrolls. Write on them what you want to be remembered.Bachya Ibn Pakuda
and
How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.
Annie Dillard
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New year
There's an invitation, and a trap, in the making of new year resolutions.The invitation - exercising your capacity for imagination. Dreaming up what you might commit yourself to, what you can create, and the many possibilities you might bring into the world.The trap - having your happiness and fulfillment depend upon realising them. Setting up an ongoing comparison between how life is and how you think it's meant to be.The way of imagination can beckon you into life. The way of comparison leads to guilt, resentment, the harshness of inner critic, and defensiveness - surefire ways of disengaging from the possibilities that life has to offer.Perhaps what 2014 is asking of you, in any case, is unknowable from here, on this transition point we call New Year. And what's needed most is your presence, your openness to life, and your preparedness to be surprised.
Living all the way through
Listening this evening to a beautiful radio documentary 'The Living Mountain' (based on an equally beautiful book of the same name) I am introduced to the idea of 'living all the way through' - living in such a way that we get to taste, smell, see, hear and touch the world.In our lives of busyness and distraction, in our striving to get wherever it is we think we have to be in order to be happy, in the midst of the frequent harshness of our inner worlds, how often do we remember to do this? To taste, smell, see, hear and touch any of it deeply enough that it can register?And in addition to all your plans to achieve, to get ahead, to get things done, how about the coming year being one in which to remember this as a possibility?So that this year is not a year you miss in your frantic activity, but a year that you actually choose to live?
Insight
It's common to think that insight is required before you can make a change to your life, to your work, to your relationships.But it's equally true to say that insight is what happens as a result of the changes you make.Seeing further into the world, or understanding more deeply, often requires standing in a different place to the one you're standing in now. If you're waiting for insight to strike you first, you might have it exactly the wrong way around.
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Monoculture: New reading for the new year
'Monoculture: How One Story Is Changing Everything', is F.S. Michaels' eloquent account of how the economic narrative upon we've built our society is quietly, invisibly changing the way we think about many aspects of contemporary life.Taking on work, creativity, our relationships with one another and with the natural world, education, community and health, she shows us how we've redefined value to mean 'financial value', and the far-reaching consequences of this for the quality of lives we're able to lead. And she's bold enough to suggest strategies and practices by which it might be possible to consciously engage with the wider culture without either absenting ourselves from it or simply being swept up by it.It's a powerful, provocative and pragmatic book, with enormous possibilities for changing the reader. I'd recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone who wants to see through the everyday 'common sense' we increasingly take for granted in our institutions, society, and personal lives.
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Regret's unfulfilled demand
The other problem with regret (see yesterday's post) is the way in which it keeps you living in the past.Regret is itself a kind of longing - a longing for it to be possible, somehow, to revisit what's happened and to make different choices.And so living in regret for too long places an absurd demand on you - that you could, with sufficient effort and self-criticism, turn out to have been a different person than the one you actually were back then when it happened. A person who can see what you can see now.Impossible. Because life can only actually be lived in the present. And the day-to-day living of life, in practice, can only be forward.So allow regret to be your teacher, yes.But not the horizon within which you live your life.
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Longing and regret
One of the consequences of our inevitable longing (see yesterday's post) is how readily it turns into regret.Regret that things didn't work out the way you hoped they would. Regret at the situation you find yourself in now. Regret at your part in all of this. "If only," you might say "if only I'd done things differently."And while regret, as all moods do, has its own purpose and logic in drawing our attention to what's missing and what could have been, it does little to orient us towards future possibilities. Regret is a mood that keeps us in the past, always looking back towards what we understand to be the root of our suffering.I saw the first Lord of the Rings film again this week, and was struck by the straightforward but powerful wisdom in a short exchange between the hobbit Frodo and the wizard Gandalf, at a moment of great difficulty that's unfolding from Frodo's earlier choices:
"I wish the ring had never come to me." says Frodo. "I wish none of this had happened."
"So do all who live to see such times," replies Gandalf, "but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us."
And so for all of us, whether we look back on the past year in satisfaction or in sadness and longing.There is no changing what is, but there is always the possibility of yet deciding who we will be, and what we'll do next in response to the life in the middle of which we find ourselves again and again.
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Longing and Gratitude
Longing, it seems to me, is one of the givens of a human life.What we long for changes - somewhere else to live, a walk in the mountains, fulfilling work, a friend or lover, family, peace, the return of someone or something we lost, a place where we can be home - but longing itself is a constant, born of our capacity to imagine and dream better futures for ourselves and those around us.It's a mistake, then, to long for a life in which longing itself is absent. Better, instead, to live fully in the knowledge that longing and life are inseparable.
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And although longing, and its tender sadness, is inescapable, it can be softened by gratitude - for the life we've been given, for the people around us, for the air we breathe, for the opportunity to think and talk and question and strive, for the possibility of longing itself.
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Thank you to the hundreds of you who receive and read this each day, and who sometimes allow what's being written here to touch you and change you in some way.
I'm enormously grateful for the opportunity you're giving me to write and create - itself an expression of my own deep longing to contribute in a meaningful and enduring way to the lives of others.
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