Actually asking

If your requests to others aren't resulting in much in the way of action, you might like to look at whether you are actually asking anything at all.

"That office needs tidying"

"The rubbish is collected tomorrow"

"We're spending more on travel than we should be"

"This is really difficult"

"It's my birthday next Tuesday"

may sound to you like clear requests for help. But they quite possibly sound nothing of the sort to the people around you.Indirect requests are a manipulation, a demand that others show they love or respect you by being able to work out what you really want. But when you don't get what you were expecting the result is frustration and resentment. And confusion, for everyone else, when you've become annoyed, or angry, or withdrawn - and they don't understand why.Over time, such vague requests erode the foundation of your relationships even as you're trying to get people to come in closer.Please, if you want to enrol others in supporting you, ask them directly for what you want.It creates so much more possibility and dignity for all of us.

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All the same

Seen against the ever-present certainties of our lives - we will die, we will grow old, all that we build or create will eventually fall apart - differences between us drop away. We are all the same.It's so hard to live consciously with this in mind, to reach out across the space we imagine separates us and be open to one another. So hard to share our fear, our longing, our truest hopes. So hard to stay present long enough to look deeply into the eyes of others, to fall into them, allowing ourselves to know and be known.Why so difficult? Perhaps because of the shame we necessarily picked up along the way: sharpened every time we had to be told not to do this or that, to be this way or that way in order to fit in with our families or with our culture. Because of our self-doubt and our inner-criticism, which make it so hard to love ourselves fully (a pre-requisite for allowing ourselves to un-self-consciously love others). And because we are afraid.And so we hold back, always reserving some distance even from those who love us the most, because that way it feels as if we'll hold on to some measure of safety. Or we judge others, resent them or hate them, turning them into less than human-beings in our hearts, because it makes us feel better for a while.Even though we know that our deepest connection with one another is precisely that which can save us from the void.This is the great ethical work, so difficult to do and so necessary, which calls to us - learning the sensitivity to respond and be open to other people, who we take to be so different from us but with whom we share common ancestry, and common destiny.For we are intimately related.Family.

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Living your own life

"In the end, we need to feel that the life we lived was our life, not someone else's, that it was chosen rather simply our following the instructions on the box, and that we stood in a respectful relationship to that which is larger than ordinary comforts and provided a deep sense of meaning, of satisfaction, and reciprocity. Then it may be said that we have really been here, living the life we were meant to live. The task, and the path we take in addressing it, will be different for each of us, but that is the gift we are asked to share, the gift of our separate selves."

Beautiful, important words from James Hollis, who has written insightfully about what it takes to live a life that matters, to ourselves and the people around us.For today, no more than that, and a link to the full article - essential reading if you're asking big questions about what your life may be for, beyond getting what you want.

--

The book of his I've been most enjoying reading recently is Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up.  It's beautiful, profound, clear and practical, filled with wisdom for any of us who've woken up with the realisation that in all likelihood more than half of life is done already: when life starts saying 'this is it - time to turn towards living while you still have the chance'.

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Harmony

I'm rediscovering the joy of working with physical materials instead of computers. The experience of creating or writing with high quality pens and paper is so different from working with a screen and keyboard. I'm more present in the work, my creativity flows from me with less inhibition and more immediacy, and I can lose myself in the feel of making something new with my hands.For years I've forgotten that I'm a pen and paper person. I'm slowly remembering myself again.And so here, instead of the typed word, is a written and drawn exploration of the nature of harmony in organisations - the mistakes we make, and what might become possible as we become more genuine and brave with one another.In particular, it seems, harmony in its fullest form is nothing like 'niceness' or 'calm' or 'synchronisation'. Those are oppressive, stifling forms of uniformity, which itself is constrained and lifeless. Instead how about the possibility of bringing together difference and unpredictability, and being spacious enough to hold the inevitable riot of conflict, togetherness and creativity that emerges?More ideas in the image - with drawings inspired by the work of Dave McKean. Click to see it in its fullness.

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Measuring

For the past century and a half, we've become driven by measurement, a consequence of the revolution in philosophy and science ushered in by the work of René Descartes in the 17th century.Descartes' profound contribution was to make detached, analytical observation of the world central to human knowledge. He gave wings to the scientific method of hypothesis and experimentation which has transformed our way of living. And he did so by being committed to objectivity - what's independently observable and measurable, as opposed to subjectivity - the particular first-person lived experience of being-you or being-me that cannot be described in objective ways.By dividing subject and object in the way that he did, Descartes gave us tools to stand back from the world with a critical, doubting eye and to make new startling new discoveries. But in order to do so he had to split 'I' from 'world' - leaving out personal experience completely because of the way it appears to arise from the mysterious insides of a person's mind rather than being 'of the world'.Descartes gave us a world in which we take 'hard' - what's objective - to be real and of primary importance and 'soft' - what's subjective - to be secondary, often so far as to be considered of no value at all. And so completely do we live in this Cartesian world that it can be difficult for us to see how much we systematically discount by looking at the world, and ourselves, through these eyes. Even the words 'hard' and 'soft' say much about our orientation to these matters.There will be much more to say about this over the coming days and weeks. But for now, a simple question - how often in organisational life are you insisting on looking only for what you can measure, and consequently how much of the human world of your work are you not looking at, at all?'Hard' measures can tell you much about machines, or processes, or inventory, or money. But they will leave out most of what's meaningful about the people who work with you - the 'soft' stuff that isn't 'soft' at all and which can only really be discovered by being in conversation with others. And this is precisely because people are not objects but subjects, the kind of being that the Cartesian world in which we live goes to great lengths to discount.Hard measures - productivity, hours worked, behaviours observed, profit earned - will tell you nothing about vital human concerns such as meaning, aliveness, longing, camaraderie, friendship, love, dedication, frustration, resentment, inspiration and so on - because people are essentially 'I' rather than 'it', subjects rather than objects.You may well be trying to shape the life of your organisation by paying attention to what's measurable when you should also be paying attention to what's not measurable, but equally real.

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Our stories about our feelings

When you feel emptiness, what do you do?

Reach for something to eat?Turn on the TV?Pick up the free paper on the train?Hide away in sorrow and resignation?Zone out?Lash out at your colleagues or your family?Find someone to blame?

What's the story you're telling about what this feeling means that has you act in this way?We're so quick to tell stories about what we're feeling. This feeling is something to be fixed, a sign I've done something wrong, proof my life is heading nowhere - or that it's heading somewhere. It's because of you, it's because of my parents, it's to be avoided at all costs, it's precisely the thing I need to feel in order to know myself and be ok.But our familiar, habitual stories about our feelings can imprison us in smaller worlds than we deserve.There's always another story you can tell.Maybe the emptiness is because you're tired. Or you're under attack from your inner critic. Maybe it's pointing you towards something essentially true about all of our existence - that everything is changing all the time and there's not so much for us to stand on.Or maybe you're feeling it because you've forgotten something important - your essential aliveness, the deep roots of your history and biology, all that supports you moment to moment.Each of these stories points to a different course of action. Same feeling, different response. Sleep perhaps, or an act of self remembering (creating art, meditation, poetry, music, prayer, beauty, touch).Or maybe what to do with what you're feeling is simply to allow it to be for a while, no correction or compensation required. And no story either. Let it do its thing and watch as it eventually, inevitably, and with no apparent help from you, changes you and turns itself into something else.

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This Is Water

This week I have been re-reading David Foster Wallace's short work, This Is Water: a book about taking up an I-You relationship to the world, the importance of freedom, and a caution against enslaving ourselves to our own self-centredness. It's a call to think about how we think, and about how we pay attention to our lives.

"Everything in my own immediateexperience supports my deep belief that Iam the absolute center of the universe, therealest, most vivid and important personin existence."

If we're prepared to examine this kind of narrow habitual thinking, argues Wallace, we can live in horizons much wider than a life lived on automatic pilot. By taking our part in the construction of meaning seriously we open up possibilities for connection even in the most hum-drum, irritating, everyday situations of life. We can

"experience [even] a crowded, hot, slow,consumer-hell-type situation as notonly meaningful, but sacred, on firewith the same force that lit the stars -compassion, love, the subsurface unityof all things."

The book is a warning that much of what we uncritically worship (and we're always worshipping something) has the capacity to consume our lives: worshipping money and things leads us to feel that we never have enough; worshipping intellect leaves us feeling stupid and a fraud; worshipping power leaves us feeling weak and afraid, always needing to pursue more power in order to feel safe.And so it's an invitation to choose, to orient our lives around meanings that are big enough to break us out of the prison of our selfishness, our sense of being the centre of everything.It will take you all of 20 minutes to read this beautiful and challenging invitation to the work of a lifetime.

"Not that that mystical stuff's necessarilytrue: The only thing that's capital-T Trueis that you get to decide how you're going to tryto see it."

Essential reading for anyone who has responsibility towards others in life - whether as colleague, friend, family, customer, citizen, or passer-by.

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Sleep

Sleep.Source of our energy, our creativity, our compassion, our sanity.And in the buzz and rush of our culture, in our

always-on,

'but they need me',

'I'm so important',

endless to-do-list,

'I should',

'I ought',

'I want'

target-driven,

shame-filled

always-more society

in which we wear our busyness,

and our exhaustion

as badges of honour

perhaps the most undervalued currency of all.

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Heaven and Hell

In the The Barefoot Book of Jewish Tales written by my friend Shoshana Boyd Gelfand is "Heaven and Hell", a gorgeous story for children and adults about how our interpretations and practices are constantly shaping the world around us.In the story, an elderly woman named Ariella is given a tour of each of two possible after-lives. Hell, to her surprise, is an elegant palace nestling in beautiful gardens. Tables are set with delicious food and everyone is gathered for a feast. But as Ariella looks closely she sees that they are all frail, desperate, and starving. Their arms are held straight by long splints and because of this they are unable to bend their elbows to bring food to their mouths.Hell is a beautiful paradise filled with longing, sadness, meanness and misery.Isn't much of the world this way?Heaven, even more surprisingly, looks exactly the same. Same palace, same food, same splints. But here everyone is well fed, and happy. The difference? The residents of heaven know about kindness, and have learned to feed one another. The very same physical situation with a change in narrative and different practices brings forth a radically different world.It's so easy for us to imagine that the world we inhabit is fixed, solid. We come to believe that we are a certain way, and the world is a certain way too. But it's more accurate to say that we're always making the world together through our interpretations and actions - what's 'real' about the human world is much more fluid than at first it might seem.

And of course the worlds we bring into being in turn change us. The narcissistic, individualistic, cynical world brought about by the residents of hell keeps their meanness and their resentment going, and their starvation. And the world brought about by the residents of heaven amplifies their kindness.

When we head off the possibility of change by claiming the world is, simply, "the way it is", or when we say "but in the real world this could never happen", we need to understand that we are active participants in having the world stay fixed in its current configuration. The world is never only the way it appears. And that ought to be a reason for great hope for our families, organisations and society. And a call for our vigorous action on behalf of an improved future for all of us.

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In the heart of the storm

When you're in the midst of a storm in life - some difficulty, confusion, fear, or uncertainty - it's easy to imagine that something must have gone terribly wrong.After all, aren't you meant to be successful? Aren't you meant to be on top of life? Aren't you meant to be in control? To have it all figured out by now?And if you're in trouble isn't it clear that it's your fault?The narrative of personal striving and personal success that so many of us have taken up as the benchmark for our lives doesn't help here. It's too individualistic, too solitary. It assumes you have infinite power to shape your life. And that your success or failure, your happiness or your despair are down to you alone. It's not a big enough story to account for the kind of difficulty you're in, to account for being a participant in a world that is so mysterious and so much bigger than you are.No, there's a bigger, more generous account of finding yourself in life's storm that goes far beyond blame and fault, far beyond success and failure. Haruki Murakami has found the words to express it beautifully and clearly, in his Kafka On The Shore:

“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts.

Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you.

This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step..."

But the storm will pass, he assures us, and once it is over:

"You won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over.

But one thing is certain.

When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in.

That’s what this storm’s all about.”

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