We're taught to ask ourselves the question 'What do I want to do with my life?'.But we're much less familiar with asking 'What does my life want to do with me?'.Asking this question requires us to see that there is a something called 'my life' that is beyond the usual narrow, more self-interested concerns that we hold.Beyond ego, beyond all the conditioning that comes from our culture, and beyond our familiar preferences lies something that is always calling to us, if we can quieten ourselves and be still for long enough.Responding to our lives in this way no longer means that things will definitely 'work out' for us in the way we've been taught. But it does offer the possibility of making a bigger contribution to life. One that goes far beyond what's possible when we only look for ways to be liked, to be safe, and to know how things are going to work out.
Photography by Lior Solomons-Wise
How extraordinary that we imaginethat the cure for our overwhelming busynessis to get betterat being busy
When your relationship with someone is proving difficult, when you're sure that they are acting against you or judging you, and just when you're sure that nothing can be done, the most helpful and most powerful move is to start making requests.Your certainty that nothing can happen from talking makes your powerlessness self-perpetuating. You're silent, because you think nothing can happen. You're silent, so nothing can happen. And you remain silent, because nothing is happening.It may well be that the other person is trapped in the same cycle, holding back from making the requests that would connect the two of you again. Your silence turns you into solo players.In the space between you - and in the stories that fill the quiet - difficulties multiply.So start asking for what you want. Encourage them to do the same.You may well discover that what is happening is quite different to what you imagined. That the other person has a quite different motive to what you thought. And that a conversation in which you raise your requests and concerns, listening deeply to the response - and in which they do the same - shifts things profoundly for both of you.
Because you’re 
We're afraid. Most of us, more than we'll let on.We're afraid that our lives will be meaningless. We're afraid of our aloneness. We're afraid of our ending.And, mostly, we're afraid of our fear. We're sure it means there's something wrong with us. We each think we're the only one who feels this way.So we hide how afraid we are, even from ourselves, distracting and numbing and enchanting ourselves with diversions and addictions and rushing and busyness that have our life pass in a blur, leaving us feeling shallow and out of touch with ourselves.We wonder how everyone else seems to have it so sorted (without realising that they are afraid, and hiding it, too).And we've forgotten (because we seem to have wilfully abandoned so much wisdom we could have been taught by those who came before us) that fear avoided and denied goes underground, holding us ever more tightly in its invisible grip. And that running from fear is really running from life.
Today, a visit to the Rembrandt exhibition at London's National Gallery - a shimmering introduction to the work of a man who so clearly loved human beings and was deeply interested in understanding human life, emotion, and meaning in all their shades of light and dark, joy and suffering.Such love for the world is much needed and yet, I think, for most of us very difficult to cultivate. Cynicism, judgement, resignation and despair about others (and about ourselves) are far easier for us to maintain. They are safer moods, less questioning, and with far less of a call on us to be open, vulnerable and affected by life than that called upon by love.Walking from room to room, it was impossible to escape the sense that exploring and expressing this love and wonder was the point of Rembrandt's life. Even in the midst of repeated personal tragedy, financial ruin, the ridicule of his peers and critics and his long fall from fame - even in the midst of all this, he never stopped painting.The room with his 
We assume that most, if not all, of our actions arise from within us. We talk about drives, preferences, goals and intentions as if they are, without question, the only forces that move us. And as a result we pay little attention to the way we're brought about by what's around us - the people, places and things we encounter repeatedly in our lives.The inner drive model gives much more weight than is due to our conscious selves - the explicit choice-making part of us that we most readily identify as 'I'. Much of the time, it's not this 'I' that's in operation, but a much more automatic, habitual aspect of us that's skilful at navigating through the world without needing our conscious intervention. This 'I' knows the world through its repeated interactions with it. It can navigate stairs, roads, chairs, doors, people, windows, showers, toothbrushes, pens, paper, phones, cars, trains... everything we have to do without really thinking about it.The automatic 'I' is sophisticated enough to take part in conversations, guide our speech (once the conscious 'I' has set an intention or a direction) and drive us home. And, rather than being separate from the world, it relies on the world to orient it. It is drawn out by the affordances that surround us - the door handles, keyholes, street crossings, utensils, chairs, keyboards, and people that we have become skilful at responding to by years of apprenticeship.We quite easily see that this is the case if we visit an unfamiliar culture where the tools, signs, symbols and practices make no sense - there we really have to think in order to get around (if we can get around at all). It's incredibly hard work. There is little or nothing to draw out from us the skilful, embodied, habitual, automatic response upon which we rely so much. In these situations we feel most acutely our separateness from the world as conscious, thinking, deciding beings. The rest of the time, when we're on automatic, in a culture with which we're familiar, there really is very little separation between ourselves and the world to which we're in the midst of skilfully responding.And this is one of the reasons why so many of our ways of accounting for the actions people take in our organisations are so unhelpful. Individual performance reviews and targets locate agency solely in the separate conscious self - we are punished or rewarded, hired and fired, blamed and praised as if it's only the separate inner world of thought and choice that's relevant to the actions we take. As if what we are in the midst of has no part to play in what happens.But we are, in significant part, being brought forth by what we're surrounded by. Which is why it should be no surprise that when we force people to leave ('manage them out') we often find the very same problems recurring in the hands of the next person into the role. We are blind to the history that's bringing about our difficulty. Which is because we're blind to the surrounding world of people, objects, places and systems that's bringing it about too.And so when trouble arises in our organisations it's enormously helpful to start looking systemically. Not simply 'who is responsible for this?', but also 'what in this system is bringing about this difficulty?'. Instead of 'let's get rid of this troublemaker' we could ask ourselves 'how are we, collectively, and our whole situation with its tools, procedures, relationships and environments bringing about this trouble?'.We'd save ourselves, and those we so easily blame, enormous heartache and practical difficulty if we were prepared take this seriously just a little more often.
Perhaps it's no surprise that our endless and often invisible self-judgement is quickly projected out into to the world and onto others.We build family cultures and organisation cultures around our wish to find, and correct, the faults we find in everyone. And we can easily make the central project of our lives comparing people to standards and finding all the ways they (and we) fall short.So how about a different project?What if you were to see and show people the possibility inherent in them that they barely know themselves? Not platitudes, not untruths, not clichés, not making-them-feel-better. Instead, the difficult and important work of noticing and naming what is waiting to come into the world through them.Who could you be if you dedicated yourself to finding the as yet unborn goodness in others - that which is struggling to free itself - and naming it for them so that it can take wing?
