writing

How looking ok nearly undid me

Today, the third anniversary of a close encounter with the fragility of my own life, I'm reposting, below, on the necessity of asking for help, of allowing ourselves to be vulnerable, and of turning towards darkness when it presents itself.It turns out that spontaneous blood-clotting is relatively common and often not well diagnosed. If you are interested in finding out more, check out the website of the Hughes Syndrome Foundation.

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Looking Good

Could it be that it's time for you to give up looking good so you can be real instead?I'm not saying this lightly.Two summers ago, I found myself rendered momentarily speechless, mid-conversation, as a dear friend and I walked together for lunch. A few minutes later, flat on my back on the pavement, heart pounding, short of breath, mind racing.I knew for certain only after a few days - but had an inkling as it happened - that an undiagnosed blood clot that had been forming in my leg for some time had at that moment broken loose from its moorings.Terror, love, longing, hope, confusion.I called home while we waited for the paramedics to arrive."I'm fine," I said. "There's nothing to be worried about".Not, "I'm scared.". Not, "Please help me". Not, "I don't know if I'm going to be ok"."I'm fine".It was a hot June afternoon, blue skies, but there must have been clouds as I remember watching a seagull wheel high overhead against a background of grey-white."I'm fine".Just when I most needed help and connection I played my most familiar, habitual 'looking good' hand - making sure others around me had nothing to be worried about. A hand I've played repeatedly since I was a child.Even in the most obviously life-threatening situation I had yet experienced: "I'm fine". Too afraid to be seen for real, to be seen as something other than my carefully nurtured image of myself.It was there, on the pavement, that I started to understand in a new way the cost of holding myself back from those I most care about; the power and necessity of vulnerability and sincerity; that my humanity, with all its cracks, complexity and fragility, is a gift to others, not a burden.I began to see that the realness I treasured in the people who love me the most was my responsibility too - a necessary duty of loving in return.I'm still learning, slowly, how to fully show myself.One step at a time.And I'm learning, too, that sometimes we'll carry on trying to look good, even if it has the potential to ruin our lives as we do so.

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We are the environment for each other

It's clear that we human beings are deeply affected by the environment in which we find ourselves. We are in a constant exchange with what is around us, both shaping it and being shaped by it.And so it's worth remembering, because it's mostly so invisible to us, that we are each the environment for one another.Which means in turn that difficulties that occur for other people and with other people can often be addressed, first, by taking responsibility for what is ours, and how it's affecting those around us.

Two tiny miracles

So many times I’ve forgotten that my body is alive. And so many times - in a culture in which we’re so quick to reduce ourselves to units of production (always more to do, always some target to hit, always the possibility of pushing harder) or consumption (so I can get more, more, and more) - I’ve seen taking proper, exquisite care of myself as a luxury, or as a distraction, or as an interruption to the ever pressing demands I’m apparently meant to be satisfying.

If I stop to go to bed - I won’t get enough done.

If I stop to eat properly - I won’t get enough done.

If I stop to rest, or to meditate, or to exercise, or to pause, or to look deeply into the eyes of a loved one, or to sit quietly among tall trees, or to walk in the fields, or to have a massage, or to read poetry, or to play with my children, or to listen to beautiful music, or to paint, or to just talk with someone, or to write - all of which support my aliveness - I won’t get enough done.

This understanding of myself - that I’m more like a machine or an object than a living breathing being - is seductive, and powerful, and pervasive. We’re taught it in our schools. It's embodied in many of the practices of our workplaces and the narrative of our politics. And when I’m not paying active attention to it, when I’m rushing around in busyness or greediness or hollowness, I can quite easily forget myself and what it takes to flourish and support others in their flourishing.

I know I’m not the only one who is affected in this way. Even the idea that flourishing is a serious subject for our attention is difficult for many of us.

And after some days recently of feeling too tired, achy, and restless, of pushing too hard and denying it, I have stumbled back upon two simple, revelatory miracles that I have known time and again but then forgotten.

Miracle 1 - Sleep

There is, simply, no substitute for enough sleep.Good sleep is foundational for a life in which I get to create and contribute.Good sleep is foundational for life itself.Good sleep is neither a luxury nor optional but a basic, non-negotiable necessity.

Miracle 2 - Water

Getting dehydrated happens easily and it matters. When I don’t pay attention to this I spend my days tired, distracted, confused, and my mental and emotional acuity is blunted.

I’ve started carrying a bottle of water everywhere with me over the last month, drinking regularly, and the way I feel, as well as my sense of presence and sharpness, has been transformed for the better by it.

I like to think I know about all of this already, but these two simple acts of self-care continue to be a revelation. And they teach me so much about how easy self-forgetting is, and how necessary it is to have ways of remembering what it is that I really am.

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It's not kindness

Sometimes, a commitment to everyone around you being ok can cause more suffering than you know.You might think you’re just being kind, principled – a person committed to harmony, peace, and the wellbeing of others.But it’s not kindness if your habit of saving others from their difficulty:

denies them their dignity or freedomhurts the people around themhas them become dependent upon youacts so that you, principally, can feel better about yourself.

It’s not kindness to insist all is well, that everyone look on the bright side, and in doing so ignore others’ difficulty or judge it as moaning or whining.And it’s not kindness to turn away from important conversations that can liberate people from their suffering, simply because you fear that you or others might get upset.Kindness like this might still feel like kindness to you. It might feed the story that you’re really there to help. But what you’re doing each time is covering up the difficulty. And in each case there’s some significant suffering that calls for a much bigger contribution from you.Kindness that makes a genuine difference to others requires enormous courage, because it can never just be about fulfilling your story about yourself, or making you feel better that you did the right thing.This kindness knows when to wait as well as when to act. It knows that cutting the bonds that hold others in their difficulty can require fierceness and sharpness as well as softness. It has a much bigger perspective than just this moment, just this incident, just what you’re feeling right now.And this sort of kindness – which looks long into the future to assess the consequences of its actions, and which casts a broad net to include many others in its care – has so much more possibility for bringing about the peace and freedom you really long to bring into the world.

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The antidote to resentment

Resentment is a mood that has, at its heart, the judgment that you have been wronged and there's nothing you can do about it. It casts you in the role of the righteous injured party - the one who must get even in order to have any self-esteem, but is denied any route to do so - and the other person in the role of villain. It's no wonder then, where resentment leads - either to a cold, aloof distance or to silently but subversively trying to get even. And when resentment shows up in relationships that matter (can it ever meaningfully show up anywhere else?) it quickly has a powerfully corrosive effect by perpetually casting you as the victim to the other's persecution.The antidote? Learning how to make requests. Because requests bring us in close, back into relationship, into contact - even if the other person says no to what's being asked of them. Making requests of another accords the other person dignity, elevating them from mere object of your scorn into a full human being.And sincere requests accord you the dignity of once again being human too - being one who has the power to make your needs and wishes heard. So learning to ask when you're resentful, rather than distancing yourself, might be the most counter-intuitive and the most healing move you can make.

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It can only be love

 When you find out about death...And when you yet feel your own aliveness coursing through your body, heart pumping, breath breathing without your having to do anything, thoughts thinking themselves into existence...When you see and feel how much is alive around you, in you, with you...When you look into the eyes of another...What else can it be, all this life, but a boundless expression of love of which you are, indivisibly, a part?

The humanity of the other

The enabling step, David Broza said, in bringing together Jewish and Palestinian musicians in such a tense, fraught, risky situation was to eat together. The evening feasts organised around the recording involved up to a hundred people talking, eating, and singing with one another - catered for by Israeli and Palestinian chefs - a series of encounters that laid the possibility for everything else, an extended conversation for relationship. This, he said, is how things really happen in middle eastern cultures. But it's also the way of humanity.The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas makes a similar point. Discovering the human world of others, he says, is a primary moral obligation. And once you see that another person is a human being, as you are, once you enter into an I-You relationship with them, other moral obligations necessarily follow. In the face of the other you are obliged to listen, to enter into dialogue, to say what is true, to extend yourself as far as you can to understand the other's world, and to respond with both compassion and wisdom.Perhaps it's this very fact that leads us to avoid the intimacy of genuine human to human contact in so many situations between communities and in our organisations (where it's quickly dismissed as 'touchy feely', as if that itself seals the matter). Because when we encounter the other as human, we discover that we have responsibility towards them.Without attending to this, anyone - lover, friend, colleague, child, neighbour, visitor, customer, a whole people - easily becomes an object; an 'it', a means to an end, a supply for our own need to be loved, to be right, to rage, to hate, to earn, to judge, to feel superior. When you have eaten with someone and, more significantly, when you have allowed yourself to feel what it is really like to be with them it is much harder to see them this way. When you have heard them talk about the longing of their heart, when you have shared a meal, when you have understood the feel and detail of their ordinary domestic life with its concerns and struggles, when you have looked into their eyes, when you have been in contact with their humanity it's more difficult to see them as an object: the enemy, the boss, the subordinate, the supplier of my needs, the one to mistrust, the one placed on a pedestal, the Palestinian, the Jew.

East Jerusalem, West Jerusalem

Yesterday evening singer-songwriter David Broza was in London. I was fortunate enough to be at an event where he spoke, and sang, and showed his film East Jerusalem, West Jerusalem, which documents the recording, over eight days in an East Jerusalem studio, of an album featuring Palestinian and Jewish Israeli musicians.The music itself is really quite something, but what struck me even more was the deep longing and humanity expressed in the film by each of the musicians participating, both Jews and Palestinians. The longing to be seen, the longing to be in I-You relationship with others and the longing to express hope and despair and love and sadness. And what happens when that longing can be met with sincerity by the longing and humanity of others, however apparently different their culture and background.In his talk about the project David spoke about how important hope is. Once hope is replaced by the cynicism and despair so familiar in our times, he said, nothing is really possible any more. Cynicism closes off so many avenues that hope keeps open. And so hope, or a faith in our capacity to improve things, becomes a moral imperative, a necessary condition for the resolution of suffering and the solving of our most complex and confusing difficulties.He also said something deep and important about time. Peace, he said, like so much that is important to us, requires a multi-generational commitment. We misunderstand it, as we do so much else, by insisting on immediacy, too quickly concluding that it is impossible because we're not personally seeing the fruit of our labours. There is a significant kind of peace and understanding between people that can only be brought about by the diligent commitment of many over long periods. It requires persistence, and patience (surely in great decline in our current age), as well as the hope I described above. How many of us, I wonder, are willing to dedicate ourselves to anything big enough, and difficult enough, that it takes more than the span of our own short lives?And he spoke, as did Du at our event last month about what it is to respond to a vocational call (though he did not use this word). The East Jerusalem, West Jerusalem project, he said, is but the latest expression of the one and only contribution he finds he can uniquely make, given who he is, when in history he is living, and what he loves. It's clear from being with him and listening to him play that this is not so much a choice he is making as a call that life is making on him - where his heart's particular longing and gladness meets the particular troubles of the world in which he lives. And in responding to life's call his part is not to make grand political gestures, but to be in close, in intimate relationship with others, making music and inviting the humanity of close-in relationship and singing about what he uniquely sees and what uniquely moves him.And what beauty it brings about, as you'll see if you have an opportunity some day to watch the full film, which as yet does not have a distributor.There's a film of David Broza speaking recently at a TEDx conference in Jerusalem which you can see here. I strongly recommend watching at least the first few minutes in which he plays and sings one of the central songs of the project. And if you're prepared to dedicate a few more minutes of your time, you might find something of what I'm saying above in what he has to say.Here's a video of the title track from the album, recorded with Wyclef Jean.[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSU5YxIkyko[/embed]

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We see others as we are, not as they are

Even before we've really studied ourselves and developed some kind of understanding of the vast contours of our inner worlds, we're presented with a difficulty in relating to other people, because in so many ways the personhood of others is mostly invisible to us.We see our own commitments, cares, and intentions - and interpret our actions in the light of that knowledge. But when it comes to others we can only see their actions, which we most readily interpret in the light of our way of knowing the world.Or, said another way, we see others not as they are, but as we are.And how much difficulty, trouble, and suffering can come from that simple, basic, misunderstanding. Until, in due course, we find out how to soften the certainty of our own interpretations and open, with curiosity, to the very otherness of even the closest of others.

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