So now we wait. And some time later today we'll know the result of this election that has many millions, in the US and outside, holding their breath.Crazily enough - and understandably enough - there is a part of me that is convinced that I can control how this goes. If I check the news often enough, if I screw up my eyes and wish enough, if I think hard enough, if I hold my breath for long enough, if I pray enough. I say this simply because I have indeed found myself doing all these things. And not only is it clearly futile, it's also a source of great difficulty. When I'm in the grip of this story, which inflates both my power and my responsibility to extreme proportions, I'm also in the grip of resignation, frustration and despair. If I can't have it my way, the logic goes, I'm powerless and ought to be ashamed. And so I bounce between grandiosity and deflation, neither of which give me the best chance to be of use to the world.Which is why I think acceptance is so important. Tricky times may be on the way - have always been on the way. The world is going to go how the world is going to go, and it really is not in our power to change it. But acceptance is neither giving up nor tuning out. From knowing the true limits of our power, from ending our attempts to control what we cannot control, comes a new kind of power and responsibility. Instead of clinging on with a vice-like grip we can cultivate our capacity to respond with dignity, freedom and integrity. And, boy, we are going need all of these. And, while learning to be patient with our own difficulties, we can cultivate the capacity to attend, urgently, to the difficulties of others. Let's start with our own lives, and with those around us. And, yes, let's extend ourselves into the world so that we are not perpetuating cycles of fear, and denial, and mistrust. And let's know our limits, so we don't paralyse ourselves with how big the task is. And in the light of our limits let's each - and together - do what only we can do to repair what has already been torn asunder.
The state of the world
I am coming to see that what I take to be the state of ‘the world’ is frequently a slew of silent assessments that have little to do with the world at large and everything to do with whether I feel accepted or rejected, welcomed or abandoned, moment by moment.
I am coming to see how often my sense of self is shaped by these assessments: I’m ok if accepted, deficient if abandoned. And that my actions, even the most subtle expressions that cross my face, are often an attempt to gain acceptance and avoid rejection.
I have started to closely observe the flow of emotions and bodily sensation when I’m talking with people and I can see that this too often follows the scheme. A tightening in the gut if there’s dissent, a racing of the heart if it seems I’m not understood, a gentle and settling calmness if my partner in conversation ‘gets it’ and is welcoming me home.
My self-assessments are often narrow and prone to error. I get to feel alive when I take myself to be accepted by others, and diminished when I take myself to be rejected. Neither of these often have much to do with other people's actual acceptance or rejection of me. They are more an ongoing acceptance or rejection of myself, by myself.
It may strike you that living in the midst of such a scaffold of assessments is a pale approximation of living fully in the world. It leaves out so much, particularly when the assessments themselves are inaccurate. But even when I'm right about how others see me it denies the full, rich, vibrant life that is possible when rejected and misunderstood.
There are gifts in disturbance, in confusion, in disagreement, in screwing things up, in making a ruckus. There is life that comes from standing out, from being an annoyance, from having something fresh and challenging and different to say. The value of a human being has nothing to do with how we're seen.
The more I study this, the more I find the parts of me that are afraid, scared of being abandoned, hyper-vigilant to acceptance are just parts doing their very best to protect me. And that their narrow self-assessments, born of a much earlier time and place, cannot truthfully define a life, nor truly value a life.
And it is a great relief to discover that there are other parts that know and trust life much more deeply, that understand that I do not need protection, and are dedicated to my bringing myself ever more fully forward into the world while there is still time.
Naming
How strange and beautiful names are.We know we are not our names. You and I are not a Justin or a Sue, a Peter or a Dan, a Zephaniah or a Helen, a Lucy or a Grace, even if that is what we have been called all our lives. Our names never capture us in our completeness, our wholeness, or our complexity.And yet we also know that our names are powerful. With them we can be referenced, talked about, called to account, questioned, criticised, recalled, honoured, resented, planned for, dignified and loved in ways that would not have been possible before human beings had names for one another.What we name becomes available to us. Naming brings us into relationship. Naming directly shapes who and what we'll notice and pay attention to. And naming shapes who and what we have to take care of, just as avoiding names shapes what we'll ignore.And this is why it's important we find out what we're resisting naming - in our families, organisations and politics. And why finding accurate names for what we're turning away from is a deep and necessary act of creativity, dignity, and responsibility for one another.
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The perfect mistake
My school German teacher would not tolerate mistakes. His way of teaching was to interrupt us, every time, if we made a grammatical error, even if we were halfway through a sentence. And so while I learned German just fine as an academic subject, a detached exercise in reading and writing, I never learned to speak with any facility. My body - faced with a real German-speaking human being - simply wouldn't do it.It's this that clearly illuminates the difference between learning about a subject and developing ongoing, embodied skilfulness to do something with it. Learning a skill always requires risk and the possibility of getting it wrong. Indeed, we become skilful in the very process of messing up, feeling ashamed and confused, and then trying again in the light of what happened. Making mistakes, and the possibility of shame, call from us the kind of engaged involvement that's required for our activity to have sufficient power to disorganise and reorganise us, which is the mark of any lasting learning.As Hubert Dreyfus argues in On the Internet, this is why online learning (now so in vogue in the world of organisations) is fabulous for learning facts but not good at all for learning to master any complex or sophisticated skill - there simply is not enough contact with the bodily presence of others and insufficient social risk to have our mistakes (or the risk of mistakes) affect us.It's also why author William Westney argues (in The Perfect Wrong Note) that our fumbling errors made when learning a musical instrument are so constructive, useful, and enlightening, especially if they happen in the presence of a teacher or group of peers.And it's why my teacher showed us German, brilliantly, as an exam subject but did not - because he would not let us fail - teach us how to speak.
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Humanities
It's not just that fear is easy, that it makes us feel important, and that it sells.When it's unaddressed it also turns us away from our humanity.When our society turns to fear as the background mood, the humanities themselves come under such assault. We're turning away from the study of literature and poetry, art and philosophy, music, language and culture as ends in themselves. When we're afraid and in denial about our fear, as so many of us are, we want just that which will demonstrably help us go faster, complete more, make the money, hit the targets, beat the competition, keep out the outsider, make us feel safe.The humanities do none of those, at least not in obvious ways. They won't settle, or soothe, or rush us into action. They'll take their time. They'll trouble us, stir us, have us ask bigger and deeper questions than we're asking. They'll open the horizon and the wide sky, connecting us with the wisdom and humanity of those who have come before (who may have a thing or two to teach us about our current circumstances), making us feel our vulnerability and possibility, opening us to others, inspiring us, and reminding us what a store of depth and capacity we human beings have to respond to life. This is the very depth and capacity which, as Marilynne Robinson writes in her latest book, might well be 'the most wonderful thing in the world, very probably the most wonderful thing in the universe'.When we turn away from the humanities as a serious path, and allow ourselves to be possessed by our fear, we reduce ourselves in profound ways. And, when our democracies and our organisations turn this way, we lose the very thing that makes both democracy and organising together work: our trust in the capacity and dignity of the other human beings with whom we share the places in which we live.The humanities teach us how vital, how possible, it is to live and work with other people even when we disagree - and how much we must be prepared to learn from others, both those living now and those long gone, if the world is to be bigger, and better, than that tiny and narrowing patch of land we each defend at all costs simply because it's the only remaining patch of land on which we don't feel afraid.
Fear is easy
Fear is easy.Really easy.It spreads, like wildfire - my fear becoming your fear becoming their fear becoming my fear again.It makes us feel special - if I'm so afraid, there must be important things to do, like saving myself or saving the company or saving the country. At last, because of fear, I have a role to play.It makes things look simple - there is no choice here, no nuance, no time to talk together or think together about what's really called for, or if we're doing the right thing, or what the consequences over time might be. There is just action, this action, my action, and now.It helps us look right - how dare you suggest another way, a different way? Can't you see what's at stake here? How risky this is? How much we have to lose?It saves us from having to listen to one another - if you're not with me you're against me, and if you're against me you must be wrong, and it's because you're wrong and all of those others of you who are wrong that we're in this terrifying mess in the first place.It saves us from having to think - that there might be another way to see this, that your point of view might have merit, or integrity, or something to offer.It saves us from shame - at the ways I'm hurting you, or hurting myself, or hurting those who will come after us.It sells - the idea that I'm the best, that my way is the right way, that we're the chosen ones, that they're out to get us, that you have to work harder, that you must never stop, that our values are under threat, that we have to do this vital but terrible thing, that after all it's only business or politics or necessity.It allows us to justify - these punishing targets, our culture of hyper-activity, my monitoring of your every move, the hours I expect you to work, our obsession with measurement and deliverables, my not listening, our race to the lowest common denominator, your being available at every moment, our treating others as objects.Of course, fear works best when it doesn't display itself as fear. It's at its most potent when dressed up as civility, and best practice, and just-doing-business, and competency frameworks, and HR policy, and micro-management, and 'smart' goals, and this-is-work-not-a-playground-don't-you-know.Fear is easy, and fear is cheap, but it's dignity that sets the human spirit free to contribute, and create, and address our difficulties, and listen, and change things, and improve our situation. And dignity takes work, and courage, and honesty, and sincerity, and integrity, and wisdom and compassion and humility and love.Yes, love. Not a much-respected word in many organisations or in politics, and easily dismissed by the easy politics and business of fear. But it is indeed love that reminds us how brilliant human beings can be, how capable, how varied, how much there is to marvel at in our situation and our capacity, and how much we need all of this right now, just as we always have done.
On the side of life
How about we get on the side of life, which means not being on the side of death?The side of life: taking ourselves seriously, which means taking seriously all of these and more: aliveness, vibrancy, intimacy, vulnerability, openness, courage, integrity, play, joy, anger, sadness, dignity, compassion, wisdom, uncertainty, fear and freedom.The side of death: turning away, suppressing, denying, avoiding, constraining, limiting or controlling anything on the side of life.The side of death is alluring, comforting even. Deadening ourselves means we won't have to feel what we don't want to feel, or experience what we don't want to experience. And perhaps if we can deaden others, they won't bring us any of that either.If we're unlucky, we can live a whole life on the side of death, perhaps only waking up to life when it's too late (see Tolstoy's short novel The Death of Ivan Ilyich for a stunning account of just this).Whole organisations - their structures, processes, practices - can be dedicated to the side of death too (the difficulty here is that the side of death looks so respectable, so reasonable).But it doesn't have to be this way. Life is never out of our reach, even in trying circumstances.And the good news is that there are many people, and many organisations, whose commitment to life shines strongly, and who are just dying to share with us what they know.
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The end of things
Walking among tall oaks in London's Hyde Park, my thoughts turn towards the end of things. Leaves are falling, their curled crisp edges crunching beneath my boots. There are still many trees clothed in green. The end of this will come soon, I can see, leaving the dark shape of curling branches clear against the sky.One day, each of these trees, too, will be gone.It is a relief to know that this is how it is. That things come to an end. Quite naturally. Quite ordinarily. And that it is true for us too.How many mornings I have awoken with such deep lonely sadness at all this. That I will lose myself. That I will lose all of my faculties. That I will lose everyone I love, and they will lose all this too. That all this has already begun.But here, among the trees, I am gladdened. Losing it all is not my fate alone. It is not a gross unfairness visited upon me. It is not something I always need to mourn. It is the way of life, and always has been. It is the condition of humanity, and always will be.I am joined in this path by every living thing that has ever existed, and every living thing that will exist. I am unified with all of life, indivisible from it.Yes, deep sadness at how all of this ends has its place, reminding me how I long to live and how much there is to lose. But equally appropriate is joy, and wonder, exhilaration and radical amazement that any of this is happening. That I get to take part. That I am, for now, here.My heart quickens and my eyes widen at the beauty and fragility of life, at its preciousness, at how fleeting it is. I see that there is no time to waste. There is so much to do, so much I can do. Whatever contribution I am here to make, now is the time. Every moment until now has been preparation for this. Every moment to come, however many or few, calls with the promise and possibility of participation in life's grand, beautiful, tragic, surprising, endlessly creative unfolding.It is time, as it always is, to begin.
Back
Stepping back from serious writing for a couple of months has been a necessary joy.And I've discovered again the joy of having something to say.I'll be back tomorrow.Thank you for holding on for me.
The intersection of philosophy, family, and the lives we live
I'm thrilled that the latest episode of the New Ventures West podcast features me exploring the intersection of philosophy, family, and the lives we live.Over the course of 26 minutes I talk with my colleagues Adam Klein and Joy Reichart about how philosophy can help us inquire into the mostly invisible background of practice and culture that shapes our lives, how our early families play a part in this, and how we might expand our ways of taking care of the world and of others in the light of what we find.Along the way we explore the legacy of the philosopher Rene Descartes and the consequences of his powerful method for inquiry on our education system and our sense of ourselves; how more recent philosophers have sought to develop more inclusive and complete accounts of what it is to be a human being; the intersection of philosophy and science; and what all of this means for how we live our lives with meaning and dignity.I'm delighted with the way this has turned out. I hope you will be too.[audio mp3="https://justinwise.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/episode-5-philosophy.mp3"][/audio]You can listen online here, or subscribe to the podcast (which features many of my colleagues) through iTunes here.