This evening I settle down to read, and then to sleep.But my mind is restless, active, thoughts crashing in on one another. Everything is interrupting everything else. I'm whirling from one thing that needs doing to the next. Emails ignored demand attention. Projects unfinished. Shame arises, and harsh inner criticism. I'm caught by all the ways I've been inattentive, by everything that is still undone.I cannot read. And I cannot sleep while I'm in the grip of this.But there's a pattern in all this chaos, and in seeing the pattern is part of its undoing. I'm longing. Longing for peace. Longing for everything to be ok. Longing to be free of imperfection, of incompleteness, of uncertainty. Longing to be home. And I have made an error - one which I imagine most of us make, often - in thinking that the way home is to get it all done, tie up all the loose ends, attend to everything and everyone. I am sure that I can be at home only when I have met all of the world's demands, when I am perfect. And I should not be surprised my mind is so active, so frenetic, so critical, filled with so much confusion. It seems there is so far to go and, whatever I do, home feels just as far away as it was.In this way, I keep myself far from myself, far from any sense of peace.The antidote? Learning that I am home already, in every moment, in every place, no matter what still needs doing. That I do not need to pursue anything to be there. That home is not at the end of a list of tasks. Nor is home an empty email inbox. Home is not a finished project, or the recognition of others.Being home does not require the completion or achievement of anything.Home is always here.Thich Nhat Hanh offers a simple practice to remind us of this. Breathing in, "I have arrived". Breathing out, "I am at home". In, "I have arrived". Out, "I am at home".And perhaps, unsurprisingly, when I remember that I am home in every place and in every moment, when the world and life becomes my home, so much more becomes possible.Including reading. And including sleep.
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I have written before about the wonder that is Daniel Landinsky's book 
Until you dedicate yourself sufficiently to 
A wonderful line from this week's episode of 
If you want to get up to something meaningful and productive with other people, the first conversation you’re going to need is a conversation for relationship.In this conversation we’re discovering the basis for our collaboration.What we’re trying to establish, at minimum, is some sense of shared interest from which action can arise. A deeper, more powerful basis for relationship is shared concern about some issue or topic. And discovering shared commitment is more powerful still.Finding that we are all interested in technology might give a loose basis for some future collaboration. Finding that we are concerned in particularly about energy efficiency would provide a more focused set of possibilities. But it’s only when we discover a shared commitment, such as a desire to produce a high-performance electric car to go to market next January, that we immediately open clear possibilities for focused coordinated action.And all of that can only be accomplished by taking the time to talk.Conversations for relationship require us to slow down, to do our best to understand one another, to suspend judgement, to get curious, and to listen – deeply. We allow our own world to be touched, opened, by the world of other people. Done well, we give our aspirations wings – the trust of others, the shared sense of being up to something that matters.Perhaps you can immediately see the difficulties that arise if we dive into action without having this conversation. Yet it happens all the time. We declare ourselves ‘a team’ and think that will do the trick, when we haven’t even figured out whether we care about anything in common. And then we wonder why our experience of working together feels so listless and confusing. Or, because we can’t tolerate or talk about our feelings of anxiety and urgency we start to do things before we even know why we’re doing them, with all too predictable consequences.In the world of organisations at the moment the pressure to move quickly away from conversations for relationship seems to be growing, as far as I can tell. It’s like leaving out the foundations because you’re in a hurry to get the house up.We all know how that turns out.
All the dead ends, the missed opportunities, the failings, the distractions - yes, these could be proof of your inadequacy. Yes, you could be right that your judgement is poor, you've missed your moment, and that it's time to accept you'll never be somebody.But perhaps you could allow yourself to consider another possibility - that the life you think you're meant to be living is not your life at all. That the dead ends, the missed opportunities, the failings and the distractions were all what it took to get you exactly here, right where you're supposed to be. That your definitions of what it is to be somebody are only your definitions, not an enduring truth about what it is to be of value. And that what you're here to do is really not yours to decide, but to listen for.The world is whispering its call to you always.When will you give up your pursuit of somebody else's life, the life that never was nor could be, and turn towards the life that only you have been given and that only you can live?
I've been slowly reading Hannah Arendt's remarkable book 
I wrote recently about how 
When I'm in the midst of difficulties, it's easy to come up with self-reinforcing justifications for my ongoing sadness, or fear, or despair - all of which are often a way of simply keeping the situation going.It's in times like these that I find these sage words from Merlin, in T.H.White's 
How seriously do you take the aliveness of your conversations? Your meetings?When you don't pay attention to aliveness,you can easily find yourself in the midst of a conversation that's long since dead. You go through the motions, doing what one does, nodding and agreeing or arguing and debating, long after aliveness left the room.Perhaps you do this most of the time. Do you even know?When you engage in dead conversations, you're causing yourself trouble in all kinds of ways.(1) It's much more effort. Do you have any idea how much energy and force it takes to carry a person that's become rigid and immobile? Conversations are like this too.(2) You poison your own whole-heartedness and commitment. Trying to stay in a dead conversation brings about a toxic cycle of attrition in which you wear away your good intentions and capacity to contribute.(3) You smother your ability to discern what's important. Aliveness and mattering go hand in hand, and as you head deeper into dead conversations you're strengthening your ability to keep on doing what doesn't really matter.Dead conversations can span minutes, weeks, or years.And yet we seem to accept them as the norm in many situations.Much can be freed up when we pay attention to this, when we track aliveness as we go, and call out to ourselves and others as soon as we notice that a conversation died so that we can find another path rather than ploughing on.Because we're so used to accepting dead conversations, particularly in work, this can take some courage.But it's necessary, because we all have important work to do.And none of us can afford the cost of sleep-walking into the dead zone as often as we do.