Inexhaustible

It's tempting to treat yourself as an inexhaustible resource."It's only for a while", you say. "Right now there's just so much for me to do".Though when you look back at the nights with insufficient sleep, the days on which you didn't stop even for a moment, the weeks without exercise or eating healthily or the gifts of true friendship or time to reflect or a massage or listening or being heard or reading for pleasure or giving gifts or receiving them or looking at the sky... when you look back you discover it's been so much longer than you could have imagined.And if you observe more closely, with more honesty, you'll begin to see the price you pay. How your generosity, imagination, vitality, courage, clarity and love are all diminished by your resolute commitment to finishing everything else before you can at last turn your attention to your own self-care.How will this turn out, do you think, if you keep on abandoning yourself so completely?

Why listening is so hard

It's extraordinarily hard to listen to other people so that they're actually heard.For most of us, the difficulty begins early on. We're so caught up in our own concerns, twisted and knotted with our fear or inner-criticism or self-interest, that we rarely extend ourselves with the kind of patience and openness that will make listening possible.Then, if we're able to find the part of us which does want to listen, we find that our interior world is filled with chatter: endless, whirling, disjointed. To listen to another calls upon a rare inner stillness that will give what is said a place to land, soft ground in which to take root.And then, perhaps most difficult of all, is that other people's worlds are so startlingly different from our own. Even those who are closest to us, those into whose eyes we gaze with longing and love - even they inhabit vast worlds whose degree of overlap with ours is tiny in comparison with their dissimilarity. The web of meanings, associations, stories and interpretations of another are, in the end, never fully knowable. And it is out of this web that people speak.It's miraculous that we can ever understand one another at all.If you will listen to another, you'll need to work with each of these. And in the end you'll need to release yourself into the speaker's vastness and know that you can never fully know what it is to be the person who said what you heard. Only from this suspension of knowing can real listening emerge. Only from here can you listen to the other as a real 'you' rather than as an 'it' that you figured out already.

Anywhere but here

How often are you really here, fully in the midst of what you're up to? And how often somewhere else, caught up in the details, demands, worries, reminders and anticipation of

tasks still incompleteemails to respond torepairs to makebills to paytrips to planhurts or slights visited on you by othersinner criticismconversations to haveold wounds stirreddreams to dream?

Our unique imaginative capacity gives us endless ways to be anywhere but here, even in those moments when being here is critical. When you're listening to another, for example, or maybe in the simple acts of eating, walking, appreciating a sunset.And if you're not here, how can you lead, listen, or really love?

The quiet darkness of the night

Sometimes, it's only in the quiet darkness of the night that we get to see what kind of life we're living.In the brightness of the waking day with its activities and conversations, its commitments and frustrations, we often can't see our lives at all. We're like children with our faces pressed to a glass window, or fish in the bright blue ocean - so close to what we're in or up against that it's transparent to us.But when the house is quiet and the lights have dimmed, we can sometimes glimpse what's been right in front of us: what we have and what we've lost, what's become hidden and is crying out for attention. In the dark of the night we can get a sense of the more secret world of love and longing that we've carried with us for so long.It can be tempting to discount the way we get stirred up by all of this as a trick of the darkness - to ignore the vivid dreams or the wakeful imaginings as so much late night illusion. But it could serve us greatly to treat it as an indication of those ever present parts of ourselves that have not been addressed adequately in our day to day lives. Those parts that are crying out for air, for the space to be expressed in life.What bigger, more vibrantly alive possibilities are calling out to you from the still of night's quietest hours? 

Image: Yvan leduc (Own work) via Wikimedia Commons

Taking the quest for wisdom seriously

The ancient philosophers dedicated their lives to discovering what kind of person one could become as a result of taking the quest for wisdom seriously. For many of us in contemporary times the possibility of inquiring this way never arises, so absorbed are we in the busyness and business of our lives.So wonder, for a moment, what it would take to dedicate yourself seriously to cultivating wisdom, alongside the other commitments of your everyday life.

What would you read?Who would you spend your time with?Who would you have conversations with? About what?How would you make choices about your time?What practices, activities would you take up?Which of your many distractions and diversions would you put down?

And if you were to dedicate yourself to the pursuit and expression of wisdom, in word and deed, what new, life changing possibilities would emerge for you and those around you?If you're not cultivating wisdom through the way you're living your life, what are you cultivating? It's bound to be something. Is it what you intend?

Image: By böhringer friedrich (Own work) via Wikimedia Commons

Doing it for what purpose?

Watch yourself at work, in your life, for a while.Can you tell - of all the activities, rules, procedures, measures, frameworks that seem so important, so necessary - which are there because they bring something of actual value to the world? And which are there essentially so you can feel better?So much that we cling tightly to, that seems essentially un-negotiable, particularly at work, is really there to save us from the yawning experience of anxiety: the mood which shows us how unpredictable and how complex the whole human situation is.What would become possible for you and those around you if you started to pay attention to this more often?

Misunderstanding kindness

We misunderstand kindness by taking it to be soft, or a push-over. Genuine kindness arises from a heated engagement with the world and with life. It's borne of our efforts and our sadness, our gratitude, frustration and loss, our hard-won experience and our encounters with life's finitude.Kindness calls on us to:

face our difficultiesspeak truth rather than cover it over with self-justification or evasionpoint out what needs changingdraw attention to situations lacking integrity or good judgementwitness others' distress and disorientation and share our ownsay yes and no clearly, without excusestake a stand for what mattersspeak outmagnify dignity and possibility for everyonebring forward both our tenderness and our fierce courage

When we think that kindness is a push-over we're mostly thinking of kindness without discernment or wisdom: kindness that stands back from difficulty, kindness that robs others of dignity by denying their distress, kindness that strips people of their capacity to act for themselves, kindness that serves to make us feel better but does nothing to make the world better, kindness that's simply cotton wool to life's hard edges.In the end, that's no kindness at all.[Here is a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye that expresses all of this beautifully]

No end of trouble

I-It relationships: when we treat another human being as an object, or as a means to an end.I-You relationships: being in relationship with others that allows them to show up as human beings - undefinable, vast, essentially unknowable.We need I-It relationships in order to get up to anything in the practical world. If I want something done, there's a sense in which I have to think of you for at least part of the time as a vehicle for my intentions. That's a particularly 'I-it' way to relate to you. I have to ask you or maybe convince you to act, and then express my delight in the result or show you my irritation at your delay or your standards. Often I'll want to measure what you're up to: how you're using your time, whether this is value for money, the results your efforts are producing. If you're here to fix the network and I'm busy making plans, I might most usefully choose to engage with you as the IT person rather than allow myself to encounter you as a living, breathing human being with a past and future, with hopes and dreams and plans and feelings. Often, I'll have to relate to myself as an 'it' in just this way too.But so much is left out, in our workplaces and in our wider lives, if we only ever relate to the world in an I-It way. We miss the possibility of encountering the extraordinariness of being human. We lose the chance to connect, and to bring forward our courage and compassion and wisdom. And we cannot discover the deep veins of meaning that underpin all of our efforts in the world of plans, actions and things.A solely I-It world is pragmatic, utilitarian, productive and flat. A world with only I-You relating is vast, mysterious, surprising, meaning-laden and extraordinarily impractical. Each is the shadow of the other, and both are necessary for lives well lived and good work well done.Yet we've built most of our work places and much of our lives as if I-It is the only possibility.It's got us into no end of trouble.

Organisations - a defence against anxiety

We easily forget that the way we run modern organisations was invented by people to deal with the challenges of the manufacturing age. 'How,' the inventors asked, 'can we arrange for large numbers of people to perform routine and repetitive tasks efficiently, effectively, and with minimal risk of error?'Their responses:

Organisation charts. Layers of management. Design and control the work carried out by the people below you.

Systems and procedures to make sure everyone fits the shape required by the task. Behaviour frameworks. Policies to address every eventuality. Whatever it takes to produce what's needed with maximum predictability and minimum surprise.

All of these make perfect sense if you're organising thousands of workers to perform routine tasks repetitively, accurately, and without variance. They might just work as long as you're trying to have people be completely predictable.But we have forgotten that this is only one of many choices available to us. And when we forget that the machine metaphor for work is not a given, we blind ourselves to its limits.What was a massive and very effective project to manufacture products on an enormous scale has become, in many workplaces, an equally effective project to eliminate anxiety. The anxiety we experience when we encounter human freedom.For one example of how this is the case, just look at how often we insist on dry, detached business language that leaves out everything that's personal and most of what's meaningful. Or see how often we try to manipulate people with rewards or threats, generating the insecurity that will keep them in line rather than supporting them in acting with integrity, exercising good judgement, or cultivating their wholeheartedness about the work they do. In order to eliminate the anxiety that we'd feel if people could take up even a small measure of their true creativity and freedom, we've had to treat ourselves and others as if we were objects. We've had to make ourselves part of the machine.You might say that in uncertain times what we need is more control, not less. More predictability, less humanness. But can you say that the way most organisations are run is working out well for the people who work in them or for the world in which we live?If we were to face our anxiety and allow for more human creativity and dignity, integrity and freedom, who knows what possibilities we might bring to the world?[For an example of a contemporary attempt to address these questions, see HubSpot's Culture Code here]

Kind and gentle and wise

"I don't have time to be kind and gentle and wise. Can't you see how much pressure I'm under? Don't you understand anything about how much there is to do?"What if, contrary to everything you've understood, kindness, gentleness and wisdom are the source from which everything that matters can spring?What then?How would this call on you to be with your colleagues, your family, with your own life? And what would be granted to you that you have denied yourself and others for the longest time?