What struck me most at Sunday's Yom Hashoah ceremony was the way in which each of the survivors who spoke had committed themselves to life.One woman, who'd entered Auschwitz as a teenager, had dedicated herself in adulthood to teaching young people about the dangers that come with ignorance of one another. Now nearing her 90s, she was fiery and warm and loving and energetic. It was clear how passionately and completely she'd taken up both living and being of service to a life much bigger than her own.Another speaker described how being exemplars of love and kindness had become central for her parents during the time after the genocide, when they'd chosen to raise a new family in the long shadow of those dark years, still unable to speak of their shattering personal experiences and their grief at the deportation and murder of their two-year old daughter.A dear friend of mine told me recently that the artist Roman Halter, himself a survivor, used to say to her how important it is to trust life - to turn towards life's goodness and not lose ourselves in self-doubt and worry.And Etty Hillesum, who wrote diaries first from her home in the Netherlands during the early years of the oppression and, later, from Westerbork transit camp (the holding camp for Dutch Jews on their way to Auschwitz, where she was murdered in 1943) wrote from the camp about her sense that 'that one day we shall be building a whole new world. Against every new outrage and every fresh horror, we shall put up one more piece of love and goodness, drawing strength from within ourselves. We may suffer, but we must not succumb.'I write all of this in no judgement of the countless millions who lived and died in those times - and in other horrors - and were irreparably broken by the experience. Which of us could be sure we'd be any different? But I'm struck by our responsibility in the light of all this, and how easily we can confuse ourselves about the times we are living in. This moment in the early 21st century is full of uncertainty and many dangers, yes. But however bad we fear things are, and however frightened we get about it, we can and must learn from those who found in themselves a way to live, and to turn towards life, in the midst of the most unimaginable horror and its aftermath.That they were able to plant flowers that grew from the darkness leaves us, who right now live in not nearly such dark times, with the responsibility to find a way to do the same.
Remembering
In the Jewish world today it is Yom Hashoah, or the day of remembering the Holocaust.Last night I joined a beautiful ceremony at the community which I call home. At one end of the room, a table filled with the shining light of tens of memorial candles. And in front of it, one by one, the testimonies of survivors and their families, woven together with prayers and with music composed by those who lived and died in the ghettoes and camps.Already in the 1930s, one of the speakers who was a child survivor of Auschwitz reminded us, the seeds of dehumanisation were being planted in public discourse, and in law, in countries across Europe. By the time the genocide and its unspeakable horrors began in earnest there had been years of acclimatisation in language, and in speech, and in shifts in public culture. The Holocaust, as Marcus Zusak reminds us in his extraordinary novel The Book Thief, was built on words.This year, perhaps more than any other I can remember, I was deeply moved by what I saw and heard. Something is cracking open within me. A certain turning away from the world, a well-practiced semblance of 'being ok' is dissolving. I felt, and feel, more open, more tender, more raw, more available, and more touched than I have done for a long time.I'm grateful for this because, as I listened to the accounts of the people speaking with us, I was reminded once again how our turning away, our avoidance of life, is not so far from our capacity to dehumanise, to blind ourselves to the sacredness of the other, and to absolve ourselves of the responsibilities that come with our own goodness. And when we turn that way, collectively, it's not as hard as we might think to turn towards the shallow rewards of exercising power over others, bringing back into the centre our apparently bottomless capacity for cruelty, disdain, destruction and death.In this time when fear seems to have such a grip on the world, in Europe and the US in particular, I hope that remembering what's come before can help us find out what we're avoiding paying attention in us and around us. And I hope it can help us remember our own goodness, compassion and capacity to be of service - all of which are vital in steering a course together that points us towards life.
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Ritual and culture
Our rituals give us an opportunity to rehearse a different kind of relationship to ourselves and to others than those in which we ordinarily find ourselves.This is exactly what we're doing with the ritual of a formal meeting where we take up assigned positions (chair, participants, etc) and give ourselves new ways of speaking with one another that are distinct from everyday conversation. It's what we're up to with the ritual of work appraisal conversations, which are intended to usher in a new kind of frankness and attentiveness than is usually present. It's in the ritual of the restaurant, where the form and setting gives us, from the moment we enter, a set of understandings, commitments and actions shared with both other diners and with the staff. And it is, of course, present in all religious rituals when performed with due attention, which call us for a moment into a fresh relationship with the universe, or creation, or the rest of the living world.The more we practice a ritual - especially if it's one practiced with others - the more we develop the imagination and skilfulness to live in this new relationship in the midst of our ordinary lives.It is for this reason that among the most powerful ways we have available to shift a culture - in a relationship, in a family, in an organisation - is to imagine and then diligently practice new rituals.And by naming them as such, by declaring that they are ritual, we can help ourselves step in and be less overcome our inevitable resistance, our anxiety, at trying on new, unfamiliar and much needed ways of being together.
Part of ourselves
How easily, how readily, we see in others - we project onto others - what we don't want to see about our own lives. And how easily our projections turn others into an enemy to be corrected, scorned, hated or feared.How easily we end up enslaving ourselves with all this. We lock ourselves into battles in the outer world, when what we want to correct, what we hold in contempt, what we need most to be reconciled with is actually part of ourselves.
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Investing ritual with meaning
Of course, any of our rituals, even those already laden with meaning and significance in their structure and content, can be approached with cynicism, detachment and avoidance. It's true of prayer, of meditation, and of the various rituals we have for loving our children, our partners, our friends.Whether to invest our rituals with presence, aliveness, contact, wonder and truth; or whether to use them as a way to go to sleep our lives really is, to a large extent, something we each get to choose.
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Reimagining Ritual
We human beings need rituals, and we create them everywhere. We have rituals for getting up in the morning, rituals for brushing our teeth, rituals for making breakfast, rituals for leaving the house, rituals for speaking to our families, rituals for paying the bills. And our organisational life is brimming with them - rituals for checking our emails, and rituals for responding to them; rituals for interviewing, hiring and promotion; rituals for the presentation of documents and proposals; and rituals for meetings.Each ritual, whether private or public, gives us a stable form for our actions and relationships - a way of navigating without having to reinvent ourselves again and again. But each is far more than just a repetition of particular behaviour. A ritual - with its particular structure and pace, style and mood, and with the specific roles taken up by those engaging in it - brings out and rehearses a kind of relationship with life and with one another. And the more we perform it, the more habitual and familiar that style of relating becomes for us.This, in itself, can be a fascinating area for study. Who am I being when breakfast is a coffee grabbed on the run from a street vendor on the way to the train? And who would I be if I made time to prepare food for myself with care and attention, and with enough time to eat? Who are we being when we gather in the meeting room, rehearsing the familiar pretence that we've read the agenda already and checking for emails under the table? And who would we be if we set our devices and papers aside, looked one another in the eye and talked about something really important until we were done?We don't have to continue simply enacting the rituals we've inherited in a thoughtless way. We could make a start by understanding that even the existing rituals with which we're familiar are fertile ground for reimagining - and that there are many interpretations available which could bring us into more truthful, engaged and alive relationships with ourselves and those around us.We could sometimes take up the ritual of travel from place to place as a way of cultivating wonder at the world. We could reinterpret the rituals of getting up in the morning as a way of bringing out exquisite care for ourselves and those closest to us. We could take on our rituals for spending money as an opportunity for cultivating sacredness rather than running afraid or getting just want we want. And we could even take up the ritual of meetings as an opportunity to build welcome, truth and openness rather than as a way of reminding ourselves who's in charge, how busy everyone is, and how in control of things we are.
The time it takes
In recent days I have been studying my relationship with time, and how much trouble it can bring me. Most often there is not enough time. And I become sure of this as I become sure of all the poor choices I have made, all the hours I have wasted.Sometimes, if I'll quiet myself and look afresh, I'll see the questionable construct upon which all this stands. It starts with "there's something wrong" and includes "there's something wrong with me". It assumes that time is inevitably in short supply - that whatever I have done can never be enough. It assumes that enough is not, in fact, possible. And that I must use whatever time I have left in an impossible game of catch up, an attempt to atone for my mistakes, to redeem uncountable time already squandered.But what if it is the case that things just take the time they take? That trees take the time they take to grow? That the sun takes the time it takes to rise? That it takes the time it takes for human beings to live?What if we were to live lives in which we learned to trust in time, to befriend it, rather than run from it as if it were an enemy, or something to be grabbed at with desperate hands? What if we learned to savour time, like we might a good wine?And what if sometimes we trusted that we, and the work of our hands when attended to with diligence, attention and care, grow at a pace that is quite natural and not ours to control?
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Too short, too precious
Life is too precious, and too important for us to believe the stories of our own unworthiness, to plead that we have a special kind of suffering unknown to anyone else, to wallow in shame at our incompleteness, our falling short, our confusion, our lostness.Yes, let's feel it all, but let's not take it to be the only truth about our situation. Because life is too short for us to wait until we feel better before we begin.Let's allow ourselves to look at life with childlike eyes that see again the wonder in things, and that live it all, fiercely and passionately. Let's learn to drop our defences, to give it all away, and use our experiences, all of our joys and all of our sorrows, as a channel for aliveness.Life is too short, too precious, and too important for us to waste our time doing anything else.
Renewal
On Living and Working is four years old today.When I started, on a warm April afternoon in 2013, I had no idea of the possibilities that writing here would open. I have learned much about myself, and about what I care about, by putting thoughts and questions into words, and making them available in the public domain. And I have started enriching conversations with people from many parts of the world who have contacted me in response to what I've written. It has been an enormous gift to be part of what a project like this can make possible.Today I'm particularly aware of how dependent I am on the support of other people in having all of this happen. From people close-in: my friends, family and colleagues who offer advice and feedback and sometimes have searching questions to ask about what I'm saying. From those of you read, reply, comment and share with others. From those who have taught me, and those who have written the books and blogs, articles and lectures, podcasts and films that have inspired much of what's here. From the countless others who designed, manufactured, shipped, sold, connected and maintain the technologies upon which we rely to communicate with one another so widely and effortlessly. And from all those who guided, raised, fed, clothed, paid and otherwise cared for all of these people in the ever-widening circles of support that surround us.Many of us live in a culture that pays inordinate attention to individual achievement. It can lead us into narrow kind of self-obsession that in turn becomes a sense of entitlement - a belief that the world owes us a particular kind of life, and a particular kind of recognition for our efforts, as if what we do is solely the produce of our own hands, hearts and minds. Today, on the fourth anniversary of this piece of work, it seems to me that we have it the wrong way around.I am, we all are, truly indebted to a vast network of living interactions upon which we absolutely depend. A network that holds us, nourishes us, and makes what we do possible, always - and which we did nothing to earn. In a world so obviously filled with troubles, it is nothing short of a miracle that such support unfolds around us and renews itself minute by minute with such unerring grace.
Helping ourselves, and others, learn to live
What if we gave up the idea that anyone else can have easy answers about how to live our lives? What would happen if we took up the project of cultivating our curiosity, our openness to life, our sense of wonder at ourselves and others?What could be if we started to look for the ways we keep ourselves running in habitual, tiny circles, avoiding and hiding so that we don't have to experience that which we don't want to experience?What could be if we could find practices - daily ways of living and cultivating ourselves - that bring us more fully into contact with the possibilities around us, with our own bodies and hearts, with the people with whom we're in relationship, and with our lives?What would it be to do this for ourselves? And what would it be to become more skilful at helping others do that too?I'm thrilled to be leading our regular two-day Coaching to Excellence programmes in London in May and July, in which we'll get into all these questions together.