This week, five books that have the potential to profoundly change the way you understand yourself, others, and life.
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"You keep saming when you ought to be changing"Lee Hazlewood, 'These Boots Are Made for Walkin'
We live our lives by treading beaten paths, hardly aware of how we are held the same by the bodily force of habit, the stories we tell about ourselves, the familiarity of our possessions and houses and workspaces, and the expectations of those near to us.Vincent Deary's wonderful book, How We Are, charts this territory with lucidity, clarity, and humour.
"We live in small worlds..." he says, "... and, usually, we prefer to maintain ourselves in the status quo, in comfort and predictable ease. It takes a lot to get us out of that - a compelling call, an overwhelming imperative. Or maybe we were pushed. But sometimes it happens."
"We are creatures of habit," he continues, "and we live in worlds small enough for us to come to know their ways and to establish familiar ways within them. Unless we are uneasy, unless something disturbs us from within or without, we tend to work to keep things the way they are."
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And so the skilful move is to find a way to meet what the world is calling for, and what the world is offering you, 
There's power and magic in declaring a new interpretation of events.But declaring a new way of seeing things - a new way of making sense - is insufficient on its own. Because a change of thought is not automatically a change of habit. And it's through our habits and our practices that we bring about the world we inhabit.For example, declaring "I am now open to earning money", after years of underselling yourself, is a necessary first step. It opens up huge possibility. But that possibility comes into being not through the new thought alone. Rather, it's brought about because you take up the practices of asking, promising, and making offers of your goods or services that others find enrolling and compelling. And, of course, such practices - if they are new to you - will be tentative and clumsy at first. The hidden possibilities of the declaration become manifest only as you develop the embodied skill that makes its promise real.Similarly "I am now ready to be in a relationship". Yes, relationship becomes more possible upon making such a declaration. Here, however, you have to start practicing listening, understanding, kindness, responsiveness, compassion, creativity and love in order to fully bring out the possibilities inherent in what you've declared.So, please, work on shifting your interpretation of the world. But don't expect a change of mind to equal a change of circumstance. The universe is magical, but not in that simple, simplistic, wishful-thinking way.
Waiting until you know for sure what's going to happen - where people are involved - means waiting for ever.With machines, it's easy. With sufficient understanding of mechanics you can often predict exactly what's going to happen. Cause and effect, straightforward to establish.But human situations are nothing like that, even though we pretend to ourselves that they might be.Take a meeting, for example.Should you speak up about what's on your mind? Now? Later? What effect will it have on your colleagues? On the decision to be made?You cannot know for sure.Whatever insight you have about the situation can only ever be partial. You can't know what's going on for others. You can't know what they are thinking of saying. And you can't know - even if you know them well - how they will respond to your speaking.You have to act knowing that you're speaking into an unknowable situation. And that speaking up will, in all likelihood, change something, at the very least for you.But staying quiet is an act too, changing things no less than speaking up. So you have no choice but to be an actor, whatever you do, and however much you pretend it is not the case.We get ourselves into trouble when we forget all of this. We imagine that we can only act when we are able to predict the outcomes of our actions. Or we blame and judge ourselves and others when things don't turn out the way we expected.And all the while we're holding back our contribution, our insight, our knowledge, our creativity, our unique perspective because we've set ourselves standards of understanding that were never - could never be - reached.
Just because the 
It's a powerful move to discover that the truth of the world is not fixed, but shaped by interpretation.Was losing out on that project a curse, or a blessing? An example of life's unfairness, or a consequence of the endless, unavoidable change of things? Proof of your unworthiness, or opportunity to contribute afresh, discovering new skills and qualities? Cruel fate, or life calling you into a wider understanding?Different aspects of the situation come forward according to the interpretation you choose. Events take on many kinds of meaning, depending upon how they're framed.In other words, the truth of an event is malleable. Much more than you might often acknowledge.And even 'this is just the way it is' is an interpretation you're in the middle of choosing.
It may be hard to see, but every productive act we take in the outer world shapes us in the inner world.A better way of saying this might be that we are not separate from what we do. We're always being shaped by our actions, how we spend our time, what we pay attention to, who we speak with - and how, how we listen, what we make.In a world obsessed with outer productivity we rarely spend much time considering what kind of person we're becoming through how and what we're producing.Even if you have a narrow obsession with productivity this is important. Because, of course, the kind of person we each become profoundly shapes, in turn, what we end up producing in the world.
Work in the age of industrial revolution was founded on the principle that what we care about and are committed to need have no connection to what we do. The production lines invented by the great industrialists required only that we wished to make a living. We just had to show up and, ideally, set our cares and concerns aside so we could get to work.This works only as for long as we're willing to treat ourselves as the machines upon which this premise is based.It's stupendously difficult to do well anything that matters over a sustained period without caring about it deeply. It's equally difficult to do anything creative, responsive, alive, or which has depth beyond its surface appearance, without a strong sense of heartfelt commitment to the work. And it's a perilous endeavour to embark on a project without being in relationship with others who care about it too.But we forget this.So often, in modern organisations, we expect people to jump into action without addressing this essential matter of the heart. We begin new endeavours without taking the time to talk together about why it matters to us.We say "we're a team" without making any serious effort to find out what binds us.And then we wonder why it seems so hard.And why the wind seems to be sucked from our sails so quickly, and so often.
