Ordinary heroics

It's very easy - easier than you might notice - to slip into an almost constant background of self-criticism:

All the ways you should be doing better, being more diligent, pushing harder, being more reliable. All the standards and measures - formally identified or not - for you to meet. All the people you imagine are watching you, judging you.

Yes. Because you care about what you're doing, and how things are going.But how about, for today, declaring the inner-criticism committee free from their duties? They're more interested in keeping you in line and protecting you from shame than they are in helping you with what really matters to you.In the quiet their absence creates you might get to marvel at the ordinary heroics of your life. The strength and persistence you're bringing. Your capacity to keep going even at your most uncertain, day in, day out. Your ability to feel so much, whether joy or determination or sadness. The creativity and ingenuity you have to bring to even the most simple of actions. The relationships you're sustaining at work, at home.There's much to be said for recognising, with gratitude and humility, the enormous capacity and skilfulness and dignity you're mustering, minute by minute, that supports you in engaging with life in the way that you already are.Just living each day requires a set of super-powers we rarely stop to appreciate. And what you are sure are your failings are also marvels of this one human life you are in the midst of living.

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Hafiz - a poet of wonder and love

Some days, we lose touch with our essential aliveness, with the source of our power and agency in the world. And on these darker days it can be helpful to be reminded of the possibility and life that's always surrounding us, of which we're always inescapably a part - however separated we might feel.One source of help in this that I've found particularly valuable is the work of the fourteenth-century poet Hafiz, particularly in the beautiful English translations by Daniel Landinsky.

Landinsky's book A Year with Hafiz offers one poem a day for the entire year, and each is a tightly packed jewel - often uplifting, searching, frequently challenging, always loving. A wonderful resource for any of us who aspire to live fully in life.Here's one of his poems for this weekend, a reminder of the costs of the defences we put up between ourselves and the world:

That Shield You Hold

There is a shield you may still hold because ofso many battles.

I guess another conflict could begin at any moment,so maybe lugging it about could be of some use;or is it just an undermining habit?

Does it not get heavy, so much that yousometimes carry it on your head at noon?

And then do wonder, with your insecurities sointact... about casting darkness as fears canshadows

even if the sun is out, if the Sun is out - if Godis really all around in the middle of a beautifulday or night.

Yes, how amazing that a small umbrella or anillusion, held over your head... or clung to, canhide the stupendous fact of omniscient Light.

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Yes and no and...

When someone makes a request of you, there are at least four possible helpful responses.Many of us have only one of these in our repertoire, and a lifetime of habit that makes the others invisible to us:

1 Yes (which means, I promise to do what you ask)

2 No (I promise I will not do what you ask)

3 Here's a counter-offer (I don't intend to do what you asked me, but can imagine this alternative that might be acceptable to you)

4 I promise to commit later (I don't know yet how I'm going to respond to your request, but I can promise you a specific time by which I'll let you know).

You can build your capacity to respond genuinely to others' requests by practicing the responses that are less familiar to you.And if you're a serial 'yes-er' (as so many of us are) who then gets overstretched and resentful, practicing response 4 can open up much needed space in which you can settle on an answer that's true, heartfelt, and takes all your existing commitments into due account.

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From where does behaviour appear?

In my work in organisations I frequently come across people trying to bring about meaningful change by making lists of 'behaviours' that people should take up. If we can just pin down how people behave when they're being loyal, or creative, or leading, or trusting - the theory goes - and can convince people to agree to it, we'll be done.But it is woefully insufficient. Easy to talk about, easy to imagine, and based on a misunderstanding of what human beings are.You can do a simple thought-experiment to show this. Start by making a list of all the behaviour that constitute 'trust' for example.Can you make a complete list? Whatever you write down, there will always be something important left out - some situation you didn't yet think of where trust would be expressed in a new way. A phenomenon such as 'trust' is way too complex, too rich, and too changeable to be enumerated like this.Now, look at the items you have written down on your list. Can you imagine situations where somebody does the opposite of what you've written but it still could constitute trust? For some items on your list the answer will be yes - because human behaviour is always contextual. We make sense of a particular moment in the light of the particular situation, its history, the future possibilities and intentions we're pursuing, and who is involved. There is no context-free list of behaviour that defines trust. We know trust when we experience it, but its way of being expressed is particular to this moment.Lastly, imagine a robot carrying out those behaviours - a robot that has action on the outside but is empty of feeling or meaning on the inside. Would that constitute trust? I don't think so.Can you see how this extends to empathy, leadership, friendship?Yes, we can make lists of behaviour that can help us understand. And, yes, bringing change into being does require us to change our actions. But our lists of behaviour can never be definite and they never are by themselves the phenomenon we are trying to bring about.Just because I've agreed to your list doesn't mean I'm going to be able do it in anything more than a robotic fashion, or know how to respond when I find myself and others acting 'outside' of the list.Bringing about change by tying people into lists of behaviour fails in large part because it's a technical response to a developmental issue.Instead of reducing trust or leadership to something measurable and observable in a fixed way, we need to look upstream at what gives rise to it, and work there. This takes new questions - more powerful, and more complex. How does trust appear in me, between us? What practices make it possible? How might we correct ourselves? And how do we need to speak with one another, when it's not appearing?

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Confusing Action and Relationship

At work we often confuse getting things done with doing good work. They are not the same thing.Sometimes the very best work comes precisely from not rushing into anything at all. And when we forget this we sacrifice quality for the sake of production, rushing to do things even when the doing will be manifestly unhelpful.Similarly we confuse conversations for action with conversations for relationship. We mistakenly think that to solve our difficulties with one another we need to produce things - policies, procedures, processes - rather than turning towards each other in new kinds of conversation.And so when we are having difficulty trusting our colleagues we make lists of 'behaviours' we imagine will help us. We say 'we'll be able to trust one another when we have better communication' and head off into producing plans to have this happen, rather than simply speaking directly and honestly to one another.We're scared, of course, because turning towards one another and extending trust and openness requires us to be vulnerable, to take the risk of being seen.And so we tell ourselves the story that talking is a distraction, and relationship-building soft, when there's the hard work of 'work' to do.But we forget that all work done with others only happens because of relationship. And that if we're not attending seriously to relationship as the foundation for all action, we're not attending seriously to our action at all.

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I've written more about this here and here.

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Becoming ghosts

Robert Montgomery is a poet who makes 'recycled sunlight' poems. This is one of my favourites.

It's a reminder of what I wrote about yesterday.

In the end most of what we leave behind us is very simple, however impressive our ambitions and our plans, however grand our status or fame.

Much of what we leave soon crumbles away.

So perhaps we can leave lives touched by our presence, and the way those lives touch the lives of others because they happened to meet us.

In that way we become ghosts in the lives of others, in the sense pointed to by Montgomery.

And perhaps we need to ask ourselves, most urgently and frequently, what kind of ghosts we are working on becoming.

Extravagant Purpose

A life of extravagant purpose, a grandiose mission to 'change the world' and 'leave a legacy'

~ or ~

Genuinely touching the life of each person you meet with truth, kindness and simplicity?Many people in apparently mundane roles change the lives of people they encounter simply by being generous enough and available enough to make genuine, heartfelt contact, person by person, in their work, in their family, on the street.Many in supposedly powerful roles hardly leave a mark.The repair of our world is mostly made in small, close in, contributions. The kindness and truthfulness that touches one person, lightening their load or reducing their suffering, has them make an impact on others' lives, and on the chain of lives they touch in turn.Don't underestimate the significance of ordinary lives lived consciously and whole-heartedly.They really can change the world.

Photograph by Kate Atkinson

Four truths

Three truths that you might be hiding from yourself:

• You will grow old.
• You will at some point, inevitably, get ill.
• You, and all of us, will die - as do all our projects, our creations, and even, over time, all that which we thought would be our 'legacy'.

Nobody escapes this. No balm, no cream, no status, no wishful thinking, no protestation of the unfairness of all of this will make a bit of difference. It is simply the way of the world.You can run away from this realisation for only so long. And then you have to choose - will you turn towards life because of it, or away?Because the fourth truth is simple:

• Right now, you are alive.

What kind of life, leadership, relationship, work is produced from your turning away?And what kind of life, what kind of leadership - what sort of fierce, practical loving-kindness - might be produced from living in the full knowledge that these four are the case, inevitably, for every single one of us?

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On Regret

It's the nature of all of our lives that we have to choose, repeatedly.

And because we have to choose, it's the nature of our lives that we experience regret.

Every choice we make involves not choosing something else.

Sometimes we forget this. We try to live without regret, as if we could avoid it completely. But that forces us in turn to live without choice.

And this in turn produces a bitter new regret all of its own - the regret of a life we have chosen to freeze in place.

And so regret cannot be avoided. But we can choose to feel it rather than run from it. This way we can allow our regret to bring us its hidden message, which is to remind us that we care, and what it is that we care most about.

Avoiding regret turns out to be a way of avoiding life. And turning towards regret a way of turning back fully, towards our lives and towards ourselves.

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Yes to your life

What would it take - how much walking, meditation, silence, prayer, music, reading, talking, singing, running, teaching, contributing to a community, making art - to at last say a wholehearted yes to your life?

Are you working on this?

Doing something, anything, that might even begin to make this a possibility?

And if you're not saying 'yes' to life, what are you doing instead?

With what cost to you, and to all those whose lives you touch?

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