In the end, all of us die.We'll lose all our relationships and all our possessions. As will everyone else we know.What to do with all of this?You could slip into a denial of life itself, as many people do. If it's all going to end, and if you can't have immortality for yourself, your ideas or your projects, you could lose yourself in a sea of triviality: toys, distractions, status symbols, diversions. You could numb yourself, turning away from life so you can avoid the anxiety of facing its finiteness. If you've never really lived, perhaps life's end will exact less of a price.Our you could try frantically to build, to make a mark so you'll be remembered. At least this way it looks like you'll have a way of cheating death. Inflate your ego, shout the loudest, build the tallest, be the richest, out-fame the famous. Make a name for yourself, whether for good or for ill. But, apart from for the tiny handful of people whose fame is enduring, within a couple of generations your name, all your achievements, what we take to be your legacy will be gone: all faded into the vast, anonymous, shifting background of human life.The problem with both of these responses is that they put you at the centre of the world. They're an attempt to force life to treat you on your terms alone, to give you what you want because you won't take life as it is.Instead, and more meaningfully, you could turn into the fierce heat of life itself. Understand that the point of life is life, and that you cannot be separated from it. Discover all the ways in which you are an expression of a process that is immeasurably bigger than you are and is at the same time undeniably part of you.From here, the response to your own life's finiteness is no longer cheating death but finding a way to contribute to life's unfolding.This calls on us to connect deeply with others, to contribute generously without knowing what will come from it, to find the courage that comes from openness and vulnerability, to speak out, to lessen suffering, to cultivate dignity, to seek wisdom, to create, to teach, to innovate, to serve. And to do all this as an expression of whatever work we've taken up in the world: running a business, founding corporations, mastering a profession, raising a family, inventing technology, leading a team, educating people, designing a product, investing in markets, delivering the numbers.All of this is what makes possible living life not as a way of getting what you want, but as a contribution. And perhaps it's also a way of living life as a work of art.
Stop now.
Please stop whatever you're doing right now.
Put everything down. Yes, everything, right now as you read this. Really.
Take a seat. A deep breath. Allow it out with a long, slow exhale.
Let your shoulders drop, as far as they'll go. Allow them to feel the weight of gravity. Your lower jaw too. Feel the way the floor supports your feet. Now the way the chair supports your body.
Don't rush. Stay with this long enough to experience what's happening.
Are you starting to remember that you have a body? That you're not just a head filled with thoughts and plans to rush from one engagement to the next?
Take a moment to notice the sensations that are there. The grip or looseness of your fingers, the warmth or coolness of your hands, the feel of your arms. Your toes, feet, ankles, legs. Your abdomen, chest, shoulders, neck. Your face.
Stay a moment longer, please. Turn to the sensation of your breath as it enters and leaves your body. The coolness of the inhale and the warmth of the exhale. The gentle way your ribs move to allow for all of this. Listen quietly for a moment for the beating of your heart. Allow yourself to marvel for a moment that any of this is possible.
When was the last time you stopped like this?
When did you last allow yourself to remember, beyond all your tasks, your commitments and your endless busyness, that you're a living, breathing human being? When did you last stop long enough to experience the feeling of being alive?
And if it's been a long time, at what cost?
Start with yourself
Your relationship to everything in life starts with your relationship to yourself. Mostly we don't even know that we have a relationship with ourselves. I'm just 'I', aren't I?Being human means being in relationship to everything. And it's not the way the world is that shapes our lives, but how we relate to what is. Relationship is the prism through which all of life is experienced. You could say that the way we relate is what constitutes the world.So, let's start with your relationship with you.In the 1500 years since Saint Augustine introduced the idea of original sin to the western world, we've mostly learned to understand the being of being human as essentially flawed, and profoundly broken. Check if this is true for you. What's the nature of your secret inner conversation about yourself? How much judgement is there? How much "I messed up" or "they'll find out I'm a fraud"? And how much puffed-up pride that covers a basic sense of not being enough?And what about all the labels you have for yourself? Idiot? Good-for-nothing? Imposter? How much hidden shame? How does all of this feel?
You might have to observe for a while and be scrupulously honest with yourself to catch on to the harshness of your inner world. Sometimes you've lived with it for so long, it's become invisible. But, in as much as it's the way you relate to yourself, it's also a foundation for your relationship with others. The constant, gnawing sense of not being alright fuels our harsh judgements of our colleagues, friends, families, children. It leads to our bouncing between grandiosity and deflation. It has us engage in repeated strategies to feel at ease again: helping so that we can feel that people need us more than from our genuine concern; self-aggrandising; pushing others aside so we can show how important we are; being defensive; distracting ourselves with the soft screen-glow of our devices; busying ourselves with tasks that contribute little but make us feel of significance. It interrupts our generosity, care, and gratitude.The first step in freeing yourself from the grip of this to relate to yourself with great kindness. Recognise that the part of you that is harsh in this way is not the whole of you. Give it a name: inner critic, the resistance, the super-ego. Naming it can allow you some breathing room, some space from this phenomenon, the possibility of releasing yourself from being swept up by it quite so much.And understand you did not do anything wrong to have this, though the inner critic will insist that's the case. It's just part of our human inheritance.Finding out that inner critic is there, seeing the shadow it casts, and giving up identifying yourself with it is the first step. It's a move that can start to liberate you to fully make the contribution you're here to make.Because when when you learn to relate to yourself with kindness, you can at last relate to others with kindness too.
Explorer of the world
Sometimes, in the midst of our busyness and the endless rush of life, we lose sight of what's immediately around us. Have reports, screens, emails, to-do lists, deadlines, late nights, budgets blunted your capacity to pay attention to the world?Allow yourself to be an explorer of the world for a while.Start to pay close attention. Really close.Treat the ordinary and everyday around you as a source of wonder. Marvel at the ingenuity of designers, the complexity of objects, the way form and function meet. See what happens when you suspend your detachment and allow the world to draw you in. See how wonder can lead to gratitude, and gratitude to the renewal of your possibility to contribute.[gallery type="rectangular" ids=",354,352,353,350,347,346,349,348,351,345,343,344"]
Photographs of objects and features in public spaces, London, 2013
On Kindness
The 'hard' stuff:
Pragmatism, efficiency, metrics, decisiveness, action, toughness, resilience, the bottom line.
The 'soft' stuff:
Kindness, compassion, love, generosity, vulnerability.
Though, of course, none of the soft stuff is soft at all. Genuine kindness, compassion, love, and generosity all call us into an I-You relationship with others. They require us to meet the other person openly, to abandon all the ways we'd use them for our own ends. They demand we meet people as they are, not as we would have them be. And rather than being soft, all of this takes great openness and even greater courage.In the everyday life of work we've become used to calling these qualities 'soft' simply because we're too scared to do anything else.
Yes to what?
Many of us will say yes to anything.If you observe closely for a while, you'll discover that this is effectively a yes to nothing. Wrung out and over-extended, you find yourself in a half-hearted, resentful relationship with others and eventually with life itself. And although it might look to you like you're only trying to help, it turns out that you're serving your own sense of being needed more than really helping anyone.The antidote to all of this is neither giving up nor retreating from the world. It's finding a genuine, wholehearted yes which allows you to discriminate; a yes that goes beyond looking good, getting ahead, or feeling better about yourself; a yes which allows you to genuinely serve; a yes that at last allows some things to be more important than others.Commit to a yes that comes from your deepest principles, your integrity, and your heartfelt longing to contribute to something bigger than yourself, and you'll find that a new form of clarity emerges. Now it's possible to respond with discernment, to say yes over and over again in a way that serves everything and everybody. To care for yourself and for others. And to say no, to what was never yours to do in the first place.
Screaming at a seed
It's no use screaming at a seed to grow faster.And it doesn't help to nurse resentment or frustration, to say to the seed "how dare you do this, to me? How dare you keep me waiting?" All you can do is provide the care, water, light and support that will allow new shoots to appear. In the end, living things always take the time that they take.People are not so different from this. It's no use insisting that we align to your needs alone, that we change to meet the strength of your insistence, your urgency. Instead, how about listening and observing carefully so you can find out what we need to grow. And then being witness to the beauty of our unfolding?If you orient this way to others, perhaps you'll find that you unfold a little yourself.
Heaven and Earth
Two common errors that rob us of our freedom and our integrity.The first is imprisoning ourselves with the facts of our lives.
I couldn't possibly do that... I'm a teacher, a lawyer, a man, too old, shy, not funny, the vice-president of operations, a woman, embarrassed, a parent, unprepared, too important, not qualified, just following orders.
Live only from here, and we're entirely defined by our history and circumstance, by the identity we've taken on or been handed by others. Held back from the freedom to step fully forward, we're denied the opportunity to speak out, to surprise, and to shape new futures for ourselves and others.The second error is imprisoning ourselves with what we can imagine.
I don't have to face my responsibility. It'll be ok... when I win the lottery; when I get promoted; when I become the next Steve Jobs; because I'm thinking positive thoughts (and the universe will answer me, just you wait).
Live only here, and life is forever suspended, awaiting the miraculous turn of events that will make everything alright. The wider culture we live in encourages this kind of magical thinking with its ceaseless search for novelty, its fixation on the lives of celebrities and millionaires and its obsession with quick-fixes.To live fully, we need to be in both worlds: feet on the ground, mind in the heavens.Our unique human capacity to transcend the facts of our situation allows us to imagine infinite possibilities for ourselves and for the people around us. But we abandon our responsibility when we forget that we inhabit the world through our physical bodies, in which we're always in relationship with others and always in circumstances with very real constraints.To be fully human is to be connected to both heaven and earth simultaneously: to imagine wild possibilities, and then pursue them with diligence, creativity, persistence, compassion and pragmatism.
Stardust
Consider this, next time you feel alone, separate from others and from life:The only element present in significant quantities when the universe began was hydrogen, the lightest and simplest of all. Every other atom ever produced was forged in the fury of a star or supernova. Which means every atom in you.You, and everybody and everything you know, are quite literally stardust. When you understand this, how separate from anything and anyone can you ever really be?
Got your number
If I can treat you as an 'it', then I've got your number.You're a lawyer, a doctor, a teacher,a nuisance, a blessing, a distraction,always late, always good for a laugh, always boring,infuriating, beautiful, unreliable.It takes courage to treat you as a 'you',because I might find out that you're none of these, that you defy language or explanation. I might find out that you're not who you were when I left this morning, that you're not who I'm trying so desperately to have you be. I might have to allow myself to be bowled over by your vastness and your mystery. I might have to allow myself to feel your suffering. It takes courage, because when I find out how little of you I really know, I might find out that I also know only a little of myself.And when I'm open enough to treat you as 'you', there's a chance I might get to be 'I' in return.