writing

The filling of our holes

We're told again and again that the cure for our emptiness is always away from ourselves. The promise: there will be some product or some experience that will make us feel whole again.

Eat. Shop. Work harder, for longer. Watch this TV show. Wear these clothes.It's no wonder we consume so much. The distraction of consumption, with all its promises, never adequately fills the hole we're longing to fill.But there is another direction to turn - back into intimate contact with our own lives. This requires us to cultivate a relationship with stillness, with quiet, with practices and with relationships that allow us to be just here rather than spinning away into distraction so frequently.Here we might find ourselves able to be with our own emptiness, the yawning anxiety that there is nothing to hold us. And, paradoxically, in our sustained encounter with nothing, find that we are held by everything, by all of life, without our having to do anything at all.When we know our own holes but do not move to fill them, when there is no running away to do, we can start to live deeply in the lives we are living, knowing that emptiness is as much a part of our humanity as our love, our fulfilment, and our joy.

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The silence you create

I wrote yesterday about the power of 'naming the daemon' in our own lives - what can happen when we give truthful names to the moods and experiences that transparently shape us.Of course moods are not just private, personal experiences. They exist between people, in the background of all relationships, groups, organisations and communities. And here - in the public sphere - naming can have extraordinary power too.How often we say in our work lives 'enough of the soft stuff' or 'we don't talk about touch-feely subjects'. How often we spin the lie that somehow at work we are immune to human experience, or that it is in some way irrelevant to the action we wish to take.You can be sure that mood is ever present, despite attempts to say it is not so. Fear, anxiety, pride, love, shame, resentment, frustration and all their cousins will be shaping what can be said and not said, what is paid attention to and what is avoided, what can be done and cannot be done.A commitment never to talk about this, to avoid naming, gives up a measure of your power to take effective action, to change things.In the silence you create, you'll be had by whatever mood is shaping you, rather than having it.And so the courage to talk about it with others, to find words together for what's really there - for your shared fear or shame or pride or resentment or love -  must be one of the foundational responsibilities of anyone who considers themselves a leader.

Photo with thanks to Kate Atkinson

Naming the Daemon

When you're caught up in a something that's pulling you away from life, distracting you, narrowing your horizons, or having you act in ways that don't seem to match your intentions, you could try to give the something a name.

Is it anger, shame, resentment? Frustration, boredom, cynicism? Fear? Resignation? Your inner critic?

Names have power.Moods, and our own inner critic, are often transparent to us. They recede into the background of our lives - shaping the world without us knowing, but shaping the world nevertheless.But a phenomenon, once named accurately, starts to come forward from the background. It becomes possible to point at it and to have some kind of handle on it. The something you're in takes a step from having you to being had by you, just as in the naming of daemons in the old myths - once named the daemon's mysterious power begins to dissolve.So, when you're in some kind of difficulty, you could try to see what name fits best.

Anger? Fear? Frustration? Shame?

If you pay attention you'll know when you're on to something, particularly if you pay attention to the felt sense you're experiencing in your body. An accurate name, something that's true enough, will feel different, almost as if the phenomenon you're naming turns towards you in recognition, becomes willing at last to make itself known.And once named, first to yourself, perhaps later to others, see what new purchase you have on your situation. You may find that the invisible grip of the invisible something that has enveloped you will start to soften so that something new - a possibility or course of action - comes into view.

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Nothing more whole

Right in the middle of your most profound difficulties, maybe the difficulties you've spent your whole life trying to avoid, there can be the birth of something new.Perhaps an illness, a loss, or a disappointment leads to a new kind of strength, intelligence, compassion, or kindness. Perhaps it leads to gratitude for your human faculties and for your relationships with people around you. And perhaps a deeper understanding of human suffering, and of the nature of life itself, that had previously been denied to you.Your attempts to turn away from difficulty, to pretend that all is just fine, can rarely come to much.They arise from your fear that your heart will be shattered, that there will be nothing of you left. But hardening your heart to keep you safe leaves you rigid and frozen, disconnected from what can support you most.Your attempts to stop difficulty getting to you also stop life from getting to you. And life will always, somehow, find its way through.And so this is the logic behind the words of Menachem Mendel of Kotzk

"Nothing is more whole than a broken heart"

Things are not always what they seem. Sometimes your attempts to hold harm at bay themselves cause you great harm.While you hold the world away, you can live only tentatively in the shadows of your own life.And eventually, perhaps, you turn towards it all in welcome or in acceptance, allowing yourself to feel so much that your heart can break open and life come flooding in.And you discover at last that difficulty and heart-brokenness are guests, uninvited and unwanted, who turn out to be the greatest teachers.

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On Comparison

Comparison - the key to so much suffering.Obvious comparisons that cause us difficulty - comparing ourselves with others (what they have, what they do, how they look), and with standards (I should be able to do better than this, I'm useless, my efforts are not good enough).These comparisons keep us in perpetual dissatisfaction and self-criticism, a state of never being sufficient.Less obvious, our comparisons of life now to life in the past or in the future - everything was so much better when I was younger, before I had children, before I had to work; or will only be ok when I'm more grown up, when I'm promoted, when I'm famous, when I have time to myself again, when I retire, when I live in a different town, when I'm not confused or scared any more.These comparisons keep us in stasis, unable to live now because of a life lost or a life as yet unrealised.Both kinds of comparisons absent us from the life we're already in, telling us always that life is not to be lived here, or now, but elsewhere, always elsewhere.Can you see how deeply much of the marketing that surrounds us is invested in keeping us comparing, amplifying our dissatisfaction, our restlessness and our rootlessness, rather than turning into the fullness of what's already here?Giving up comparison does not mean giving up hope, or giving up aspiration. And most significantly it does not mean giving up commitment to improving things.But it does mean giving up our disowning of this moment, this place, this ground upon which we stand - the only moment, place or ground we ever really have.

Photo with thanks to Kate Atkinson

A monster calls

"I didn't mean it," Conor said.You did, the monster said, but you also did not....Humans are complicated beasts, the monster said. How can a queen be both a good witch and a bad witch? How can a prince be a murderer and a saviour? How can a person be wrong-thinking but good thinking? ... The answer is that it does not matter what you think, the monster said, because your mind will contradict itself a hundred times each day ... Your mind will believe comforting lies while also knowing the painful truths that make those lies necessary. And your mind will punish you for both.

From 'A Monster Calls', by Patrick Ness, a short, haunting, beautiful tale about human complexity and longing that's far bigger in scope and reach than its 'children's fiction' label might suggest.It's a story about love, and our longing and fear of being seen for who we are. And it's about the innumerable ways we'll twist ourselves out of shape in order to avoid saying what's most true, because we're scared of being judged, and ashamed at our own contradictions. And what might be possible when we nevertheless summon the necessary kindness and courage to speak.

And a hymn, to those moments in life when a fearsome choice is to be made between turning away from truth, or turning towards it - which are also moments where we choose between turning away from or towards ourselves, and the people around us.

It reminded me how often we prefer the illusory security of holding back, even at great consequence to our lives, rather than the vulnerability of speaking up.And just how much of our lives, and how many of our institutions, can be elaborate constructions for distancing ourselves, right when we most need - and most fear - turning towards one another.

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Blinded to half of our lives

The separation of subject from object brought to us so powerfully by René Descartes in the 17th century (and which I wrote most recently about here) gave us new ways of understanding and manipulating the material world which in turn gave birth to modernity. His work ushered in an age in which at last science, technology and medicine could seriously take root. You don't have to look far to see how much this has made possible.But you have to look more closely to see how it has also led us into a deep misunderstanding of ourselves.In the 19th century August Comte built on Descartes' position to create logical positivism, which argued that nothing in the human world could be considered to have authority unless it could be objectively measured. For positivism what was real about people included behaviour, action taken, money earned, measurements made. Feeling, meaning and stories were distinctly second class as far as truth was concerned. In a stroke, positivism declared much of the experience of being alive, the unique subjectivity that makes us most human, to be irrelevant, a marginal footnote to the real stuff of existence.We've enthusiastically taken positivism into the heart of our institutions and as we've done so we've understood ourselves and others primarily as objects and as consumers - a surface, materialist understanding that leaves a huge part of ourselves behind. We relate to people primarily through how they can be 'of use' to us, what they can get done. And consequently we are often at war with ourselves, suppressing and denying our longing for something real, something that has depth, something that's more than surface.It should be no surprise that positivism was seized upon enthusiastically by the architects of that most modern of human institutions, the organisation. By reducing people to surface and to measurable activity, and by discounting the rest, the early factory owners could have people become extensions of the machinery of production. It is at work in so much of what's considered 'best practice' in contemporary management - in behaviour frameworks, performance grading, the banishment of the inner world from the workplace, the label 'human resources', and our insistence that people fit in rather than bring themselves forward fully.Positivism is so prevalent and so often unquestioned because, in many ways, it works - just as long as you are happy that people stop being people so they can become part of the machine.But it fails to take account of so much of what we are - symbol-making, metaphor-creating, meaning-seeking beings who navigate our lives wondering, dreaming, fearing, hoping and longing - and that our measurable doing is just the tiniest part of it.

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Alice Herz-Sommer

pianoAlice Herz-Sommer, who I wrote about in August, died this week, aged 110.A survivor of the Holocaust, she cultivated a commitment to see beauty everywhere, and a deep interest in the lives of others. In the midst of our ordinary, everyday worries perhaps the memory of this woman - who knew such difficulties and brought such grace and gratitude to her life - can help us to see our lives, our work, and our frustrations with new, and more hopeful, eyes.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oxO3M6rAPw]

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Five-fold symmetry

You step off the train, in a hurry. So much to do.Will you get it all done? What will other people think? Will you keep your job? Where will you be in a year, five years? Can you pay the bills? Will you get what you want? When will you get to rest? Will you find fulfilment? Satisfaction? Will you have to keep on pushing, putting in such huge effort? Can you stay in control of it all?So many things to worry about.And, as always, the platform meets your foot with exactly the right amount of resistance so that you can stand. Gravity holds you. Generations of human invention and discovery make possible the lighting, the locomotive pull of the train, the sliding doors, the clothes you are wearing. The air composed of just the balance of oxygen and other gases that you can breathe. And the lives of your billions of ancestors in oceans and on land, together with the extraordinary creativity of evolution, give you your eyes, mind, heart, body - the five-fold symmetry of your hands and feet.All so that this, you, and your life, are possible.So what if, as well as your fear and worry, you oriented to the day with the sense of wonder invited by this extraordinarily unlikely confluence of circumstances?

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