Are you so busy because there’s so much to do?
Or are you busy because you can’t tolerate what you feel when you stop?
Yes. There’s a lot to do. There always is.
But there’s much to be said for cultivating your ability to feel your anxiety, longing, despair, sadness, and emptiness instead of launching into action all the time.
Because as long as the source of your action is running away or a means to fill a hole, it’s much harder than it needs to be do what genuinely matters. And - perhaps this might surprise you - it’s also much harder to feel the joy, satisfaction and fulfilment that comes with doing it.
So how about dedicating even a small amount of your time to letting things be? And to finding out what you’re running from?
It's 
When we find out how much of the world is made up - by us - it's tempting to pull everything apart. We pull apart institutions - because we see how groundless their authority is. We pull apart politics - because as we see more into the ordinary lives of our politicians we discover that they are ordinary and flawed like us, and we no longer have reason to simplistically trust either their intentions or their abilities. We pull apart relationships - because we don't feel any reason to commit, beyond our moment-to-moment likes and dislikes. And we pull apart beliefs and practices that can bind us together.This step - using reason to see through what we'd taken to be unquestionably true is in so many ways a necessary developmental step for each of us and for our society. Indeed, it's the step that allowed us to discover science and its methods of rigorous, grounded inquiry. And it made it possible to undo the divine right of kings to rule over us, and to bring about democracy.But it's also so easily the route to nihilism: the move to render everything meaningless, everything pointless, everything disposable as we discover that the structures and stories and roles we used to trust were made up by other people. And, as the philosophers Kierkegaard and Nietzsche warned us, this ends up with us tearing meaning apart too, as we find out that what meaning we encountered in the world was only there because other people declared it anyway.And so the next step important after undoing it all is to find out that it's also within our power to put things back together, to declare meaning for ourselves. To find out that there are many kinds of truth, including those that take into account goodness and beauty as well as just reason. That out of the fragments of what we have taken apart, we can still choose practices, people, relationships, stories, commitments and vows to live by that invest life with purposefulness, care, and dignity. And that this is possible, and necessary, in every sphere of life - in work, home, community and politics - specifically because we've found out that without it there is so little for us to stand on.
How much of the pain we cause others at work comes from our own unacknowledged pain?How much do we wound others, because we feel wounded?How much do we have others not be seen, because we do not feel seen ourselves?And how much do we project our own harsh self-judgement so that we see others through a harsh lens rather than working to see ourselves, first, with more kindness?Each time I'm told that work is not the place to address what's personal, it seems clearer to me what a mistake this is. We have to learn to look at all this. And talk about it.If treat work as if it isn't a fully human affair, we deny ourselves the possibility of dealing skilfully with our difficulties. And if we use a shield of politeness and faux-civility to turn away from our own darkness, we shouldn't be surprised that our workplaces continue to magnify and deepen our suffering. And nor should we be surprised how difficult it is to bring about the results, projects, and outcomes we wish for.
If I can 
For all the current hype about mindfulness and meditation - the does-it work or doesn't-it work, the neuroscience and the pseudoscience - at heart what's at stake is our capacity to pay attention. What mindfulness practices show us most simply is quite how little attention most of us are paying to anything.It's our capacity to pay exquisite attention to thoughts and feelings that opens up the possibility of having them rather than being had by them. And this is the foundational difference between a certain kind of slavery and a certain kind of freedom.Put another way, practicing paying attention purposefully and repeatedly over time (usually a long time) opens up the possibility of learning to respond to what you're experiencing rather than reacting habitually to it.And this is important because being stuck in repetitive habitual reactions is an enormous constraint on your capacity to engage - meaningfully, powerfully, purposefully, and compassionately - with the world.
Over the past two weeks I’ve been involved in an exciting organisational listening project.
When the Queen declares the UK parliament open, it's open.When your boss tells you you're fired, or you're hired, the declaration makes it so.Although the power of a particular declaration depends upon who is speaking (just try declaring parliament open and see if anything happens...), we all have the capacity to declare. And while your declarations don't have unlimited power they do have power.
Our preferences are formed from an early age. And it can be revelatory to find out how much they were formed by who and what was around us as we grew.Our early family experiences, the time in history and culture into which we were born, who we had as friends, what happened to us at school - all of these were powerful shapers of what we each turned out to like and dislike.Since our likes and dislikes manifest themselves most strongly and immediately as bodily sensations it quickly becomes invisible to us that we have preferences at all, and that they are just one way of relating to the world. One out of millions of others.And all of this is a reason why it's a necessary developmental step, for anyone who would lead or contribute in a profound way, to be able to move beyond doing things because we like them.It's our likes that keep us locked in busyness - because we can't stand the feeling of not having anything to do. It's our likes that have us pursuing more, more, more - because we can't tolerate being with just what we have already. It's our likes that hold us back from saying what's true, because we don't like what it feels like to stand out, or to risk, or to be disapproved of. It's our likes that keep us at the centre of things - because we can't stand not being needed. And it's our likes that keep us defended against the world - demanding that we experience life in just the way we want it.Stepping fully in and genuinely contributing to others requires that we take on a bigger possibility for ourselves. Which in turn means giving up engaging with the world as if what we liked and disliked were the primary way of deciding what's worth doing.