The myth of the Garden of Eden is so brilliant and powerful because it expresses our sense of having profoundly lost something essential and elemental from our lives, something we need.
We long to return to the peace and beauty of the garden. It's a place we feel we once knew but from which we’ve been exiled, and we imagine there’s something we can do to get back so that everything can be alright once again. When we return we will at last stop feeling so separate from the world, so alienated from it. It will be a place where we’re fully welcomed and loved, where we don’t need to strive any more, where the resources of the world will effortlessly meet our needs, and where we no longer need to feel afraid or ashamed. And in this way the myth of the garden promises to fill an enormous hole that we don’t otherwise know how to address.
Perhaps we’ll meet the right person, a friend or lover or saviour whose acceptance and care for us will be our return (maybe it’s this sense that draws us towards particular people in our lives in the first place). Or perhaps it will come through fame, a big enough bank balance, or through attaining a certain status or prominence in our work or our wider culture. We can become convinced we’ll be readmitted to the garden by following a spiritual path, by being kind, or by cultivating depth, integrity, knowledge, power, courage, or equanimity. Maybe receiving the right email in our inbox will do it (is this why we check so often?).
We wonder if we haven't found our way back because we didn’t try hard enough. So we keep on with the same strategies, despairing that they don’t seem to work out.
Our suffering is magnified by our finding that nothing and no-one we encounter is able to return us as we’d hoped. We are terrified that it’s our own failing, and if not that then the unfairness of the world towards us, that keeps us away.
The story rings true because we all know Adam and Eve’s loss at loss first-hand. We began our lives in the wondrous and cushioned embrace of the womb, deeply connected to the being of another inside whose body we floated, totally and unquestioningly cared for. And now we find ourselves thrown into the messy physical world where nothing ever quite goes our way, where we don't feel held, where we feel anguish as well as joy, and where we have to take responsibility for ourselves. The pain of leaving the garden is nothing less than the pain of living in the world with the memory of a once simpler time when we experienced only our oneness with all of it.
The Eden story’s brilliance is not only that it so perfectly describes our deep longing, but that it also calls into question our wish to return. Adam and Eve are children - barely aware of themselves, barely able to know anything, unable to distinguish between this and that, between actions that bring wholeness to the world and actions that destroy. They can remain in the garden only as long as this remains the case. Once they eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, once they develop the capacity to engage with the world in its fullness of both dark and light, once they grow up, the spell of the garden is broken and they have to face the world as it is. A return to the garden would not be the idyll we imagine because it would mean giving up the capacities and faculties that make us adults, most notably the capacity to discern, and the capacity to choose.
So, how should we live in the light of this? One path, for sure, is the path of nihilism, the certainty that all is lost and that, faced with the prospect that nothing ever works out apart from death, nothing is of meaning. The other path, which seems much more life giving to me, is one in which we simultaneously turn towards that of the garden which is already present in the world (beauty, love, compassion, the wonders of nature are just a few) and towards doing what we can to reduce the suffering that we know cannot be avoided completely. This second path also means learning to live with the hole-like feeling of incompleteness - perhaps to be human is always in some way to feel incomplete - and yet continuing to bring as much of our capacity for goodness and integrity as we can. The second path means giving up the idyllic myth of Eden for the much more grown up task of living with dignity and compassion with the world as it is and us as we are. And in order to do this, we have to give up on our fantasy of returning to the garden, a fantasy that adds difficulty to difficulty and so readily has us hold back what we could bring.
And, as well as this, there is another possibility, which is to look deeper into life than we are yet accustomed to doing. The separateness of our bodies so convinces us we are separate from everything and from one another - and it's the very compelling feeling of distance that has us long so urgently to return. The anguish of this, and the longing of it, is very familiar to me as I write this today. But from another perspective, which I glimpse now and then, we all arise from a wholeness from which we have never been apart - call it the universe, 'the one', emptiness, God, life itself - there are many names. In those moments when we get to see that we’re all together an expression of something which has always been our home, perhaps we get to relax our desperation a little, and this in turn allows us to contribute without trying all the time to grasp too tightly something that is already here.
Photo Credit: けんたま/KENTAMA via Compfight cc
Whenever we bring our commitments, longing, plans and requests to others there's the possibility of some kind of conflict. We could avoid this only if world were made up of billions of clones, designed to sweetly anticipate and accommodate our every need and wish. But because people are different from us in uncountable ways, we're always called on to listen, to make ourselves vulnerable, to hear what we're not expecting to hear and to feel what we're not expecting to feel, if we're going to navigate our difference with dignity and for the good of everyone.Too often, perhaps because it feels safer, we try to find our way around conflict without doing any of this. We imagine we can force our way through (wishing for those clones, again) and in this way spare ourselves from encountering any real resistance, and from having to be changed by the encounter. Or we accommodate, keeping our own wishes, desires and requests quiet, silently and resentfully bending ourselves to fit in. Both of these positions diminish everyone involved. Both appear to keep us safe by keeping us out of contact with one another. And both, I know, are approaches I've fallen into countless times.I'm reminded, though, that avoiding the heat of difference between us doesn't make the conflict go away. It only changes its form - into silence, or resentment, or insincerity; or shifts its location - from the public realm to our inner lives, where our avoidance of outer conflict leaves us in ongoing conflict with ourselves.
Yes, there might well be a storm brewing. An economic storm. A social storm. A storm which will call on us to rethink ourselves, to undo ideas and categories we've become attached to. A storm that will at times have us be afraid. That will sometimes throw us apart from one another and at other times bring us in close.We're probably already in the storm.In one way or another we've always been in it, even when life seemed calmer, more straightforward. Even when we were turned in the other direction.It's easy to understand the upending energy of the storm as an entirely negative or malevolent force. But as Rainer Maria Rilke writes in 
There's no doubt that I wish it hadn't happened this way.I wish we hadn't voted to leave the European Union; that the public debate had not been so filled with fear, and lies, and near-lies, and evasions; that we did not live in a society sliding into such deep and despairing inequality. I wish that there were less mistrust, suspicion, and denigration of the other in others, and of the other in ourselves. I wish we were not stepping out of institutions and structures that keep us in relationship with others, that require mutuality and compromise and, most of all, talking together. I wish we'd found a way of working out what to do that was more generous and expressed bigger commitments than only trying to get what we want.I wish I felt more confident and less afraid than I do today.But I'm also discovering that the part of me that is afraid doesn't only become so about political upheaval and all of its unknown consequences. It's afraid when projects I initiate don't go so well, when others get angry or bring conflict my way, when it looks like I'm not getting loved in the way it expects, and when there's a risk I may get shamed or embarrassed. It's afraid when I lose my umbrella, when I forget an appointment, when I'm running late, and when I've sent an email that might upset someone. It wishes, beyond anything else, to be able to control the world so that nothing bad can ever happen.When I engage with the world by trying to control it, my fear so easily becomes terror because it's a patently impossible project. I lose contact with my own resourcefulness. I lose contact with the support and generosity of others. I quickly forget myself and my capacity to contribute. I feel alone and helpless. I spin. I know many people feel like this today however they voted in yesterday's referendum.I also know that when I give up trying to control that which can't be controlled, so much more becomes possible. My fear right-sizes itself. I get to see that while there are things to be afraid of there are also reasons for hope - in our own capacity, in the capacity of others, in the relationships we make - that are quite distinct from how things turn out. I see that there are things to be done. Listening and speaking, holding and thinking and inventing and contributing. And I see the possibility that this situation, however it turns out to be, and however tricky, has the possibility of bringing out from us the generosity and compassion and wisdom that's always possible for us human beings.And for all these reasons, while I am afraid I am also hopeful, and seeing what I can do to treat the many obstacles ahead as part of the path.
Our glorious, exhilarating, revolutionary Coaching to Excellence programme - a two-day programme on working compassionately and wisely with ourselves and others to lessen difficulty and to step in more fully to our lives - is running again in July. I'll be there, teaching, in London July 18-19.
We like to think we're over messiness. Done with it.That the world - our families, the organisations we work in, found, lead - can be ordered by the sharpness of our reason, by the power of our technology, by our sophistication, categorisation, and strength.That all disorderliness will be excised. That the world will bend to meet our will. That change - in ourselves, in others - will happen on our schedule, to our specifications. Like the world is a machine. Like we are too.And when it does not happen - when the mess of it all seeps between the lines, bulges out around the edges of our spreadsheets and to-do lists, whips the corners of our carefully planned timetables and calendars, unravels our hard-planned goals - we think someone must be to blame.We blame others, fuelling our frustration that they don't get it, won't get with the programme, won't make themselves into the image we have for them.We blame ourselves, turning the blade of self-doubt and of self-criticism. If the world can't be kept to order then we must not be trying hard enough. So we redouble our efforts - the inner wheel of perfectionism, the outer wheel of agitation. We tighten the armour across our hearts another notch. And we feel our bodies grip as the mess spills out behind us, just when we're not looking.And what we've missed in all this is that messiness is inevitable. Messiness is the underpinning of the world. Messiness is life's sacred heart. Messiness is the only way this crazy mix of quarks and protons, atoms and molecules, people and conversations, firing neurons and imagination, poetry, pulsing blood, falling rain, money, children being born, ethernets, tumbling rising markets, music, dust, pencils, love and egg-shells can be.
I'm excited to announce that my friends and colleagues at New Ventures West have launched a new podcast today.
Important questions for any of us who care about our work:
Of course, our organisations are filled with