We've lost touch with the life-giving possibilities of rage.For the most part we understand rage only for its destructive possibilities, as a hateful force directed against others, as what shows up when we're angry, or vengeful, or when we've concluded we're superior to other people such that they deserve our scorn or our hatred. And of course rage can be all of these. The history of the 20th and early 21st centuries are filled with indescribable acts of violence that were stirred in this way.But what we've forgotten is a more generous account of rage that's been around since the time of the ancient Greece, that was once the central understanding but is now peripheral. This is rage as a vital, life-giving force that has us break out of the boundaries that hold us, rage as in raging torrent, rage that sweeps us into action that's bigger than our own individual concerns. It's a mood that attunes us to what needs to be done on behalf of everyone and everything, and which can lead us down paths that might be quite different to what we've been up to so far. What I am describing here is rage-for-life, and that's quite different from the me-centred or my-group-centred rage-against-others that we know so well in our culture and work so hard to suppress in pursuit of civilised society.In suppressing rage-for-life along with all other forms of rage we've blunted our ability to break out of constraints that could benefit from being broken, and to imagine together life-giving futures that could have us flourish. Instead, we've oriented our society around desire - a more socially acceptable mood that makes getting what we want our most pressing concern. And this is turn has given rise to an economy and to organisations in which being generous is often difficult and in which committing to something bigger than our own interests or those of our shareholders has for a long time been considered weak or peripheral. In a desire-led society acting on behalf of life itself is judged as a distraction from the hard-nosed business of the bottom-line, and we evaluate ourselves and others not so much on how we have lived but on how much we managed to accumulate.But in a world in the midst of economic turmoil, in which we're experiencing the cumulative effects of our pollution and wastefulness, and in which we still fail to feed everybody, we are starting to see the limits of our desire. Our deference to power and wealth and status, our understanding of ourselves as consumers rather than contributors, our willingness to stay quiet and keep our heads down and hope it all will pass: all these lead us into a small and self-protective stance. We could do with working urgently and seriously on all of them, and on cultivating more rage on behalf of the life that makes it possible for us to be here in the first place.It's time we allowed ourselves to feel the generous, rage-on-behalf-of-it-all that's waiting to emerge from behind the protective facade of our conventional lives. Imagine what we could do if we could harness and express its fierce, energetic commitment to life and possibility for everyone and everything.[I'm grateful to Norman Fischer for his work with me in preparing our shared workshop on 'Rage and Imagination' at the recent New Ventures West UnConference, and also to Peter Slojterdijk and his book Rage and Time which provoked much of my developing thinking on this topic]
Image: Wolfgangbeyer at the German language Wikipedia
It's quite unusual, it seems, to meet anyone who's genuinely made friends with themselves.For good reason, the people who love us as we grow up teach us all kinds of ways in which we can keep the socially unacceptable parts of ourselves out of view. And while that's a necessary part of becoming an adult, it leaves us with at the very least an aversion to fully being with ourselves. What we might discover, we think, will be too much to deal with - frightening, unpredictable, incomprehensible.For perhaps the majority of us, it's not so much an aversion to fully being with ourselves as a downright loathing or terror. In some fundamental way, we feel ashamed at all that roils and turns within us. And so we turn away from ourselves, into busyness, or distraction. Into activities that occupy us without really stirring us. Into the numbness of our devices and our habits.And if we can't befriend ourselves, we can hardly befriend others. When we're so busy avoiding ourselves, we don't have the openness and receptivity to be fully with anyone else. Even though it's contact with others - the experience of seeing and being seen - that we long for.So, for all these reasons, the task of befriending ourselves is not luxury but responsibility, so that from there we can reach out and touch the lives of the people around us.And we have to start by understanding that this - all of it - is an inevitable part of being human. The joy, exhilaration, rage, anger, resentment, gratitude, longing, love, doubt, fear, anguish, fury, desire. The loathing and shame. We have to begin to experience it not so much as our deficiency, but as part of our fullness and part of our heritage.When we befriend ourselves, we befriend being human, and we open the possibility for the first time of befriending life itself.
You're always choosing.You're choosing how to live, what to care about, who to speak to, how to speak, what to listen to, what to dedicate yourself to, what to notice, what to ignore.Even your choice not to choose is a choice. As is your choice to carry that which has been given to you by others - your culture, your organisation, your family, your history, your friends.When you see this, maybe you'll rediscover your responsibility to choose wisely, with care. And, even if you continue choosing everything in exactly the same way as you are already, you'll at last start becoming the author of a life you can call your own.
You probably learned that you were meant to be a solitary hero at school, where you were first told that collaboration, partnership, and learning from peers are a form of cheating.As a result, many organisations are populated by adults who feel desperately alone: the only one with this much to carry, the only one with so much to do, the only one who can shoulder the huge responsibility. And because you're alone, and because you're meant to be a solitary hero, the only direction is to turn away from each other: to pretend you're ok, to look good, to never let the difficulty you're in show.Of course, the way we've set up our organisations so that so many people feel insecure about their roles and their future doesn't help with any of this.When you take the courageous step of turning towards one another and asking for help, you'll find how many others are having a similar experience to you, and how much support there is available right in front of you if only you'd ask for it.And then, instead of burning yourself out proving just how strong and independent you are you might start to make the contribution that you really came to make.
Conversations frequently left out of the discourse of professional life:
You're standing in the midst of your life.Just behind you, one to each shoulder, stand your two biological parents. Behind their shoulders stand their parents, your four grandparents. Behind them now, shoulder to shoulder, their parents - your eight great-grandparents. Sixteen in the row behind, then thirty-two just five generations back. Over a thousand in the tenth generation behind you. And on, and on, row after row after row of ancestors. The rows stretch back, beyond the beginnings of recorded human history, back through our primate ancestors, back and back and back in an unbroken chain.Everything you are, you owe to them. Your biological heritage - brain, limbs, heart, circulation, senses, breath. Your linguistic heritage - the capacity to speak and listen, the words you use to move and describe the world, your capacity to observe and make use of your observations to create and shape. The practices that help you navigate and make sense of the world, clothing, social structures, houses, technology. Narratives that give you an identity, a place to take up in the midst of the world's complexity. Even your capacity to reinvent yourself, to reconfigure the world in ways they would never recognise - all bequeathed to you by them.Can you allow yourself to experience for a moment the scale of that which stretches behind you? Its beauty and its extraordinary unlikeliness?This great chain of life lies behind every moment of ordinary, everyday human life, our hopes and our struggles, our striving for 
The idea of progress is so deeply built into our culture that most of us are conditioned always, and only, to look ahead. Our difficulties will be resolved, we tell ourselves, if only we work harder, or get clearer about what we want, if we can accumulate more, manage our time better, finish this project, get that job, win that customer. It seems so obvious, this idea that everything that human life and work is about is more, better, faster, and that we will only really live when we arrive in the future that it will bring.The difference between what we imagine is supposed to happen and what often does can leave us feeling lifeless, depleted, shallow, resentful. And so we push harder, go faster, blame ourselves and others for our situation, because we believe we ought to be able to get just what we want. We become people with only an ahead, and we forget what is behind us. We become beings with no history to speak of, always judging life on where we have yet to get to, and excluding where we have been.But it's only one way of telling the story of a single life, or of a society, and it leaves so much out. For one thing, the world often doesn't respond straightforwardly to our efforts in the way the story would have us believe should happen. How many countless hours of your effort leave the world just as it was before you started? For another, the story does not account for the events that were already in motion before we each arrived on the planet, out of which we were born and into which our lives are always unfolding, which are much bigger than each of us alone is able to see, let alone control.Can you see the progress story acting in your own life, and what it brings? Can you imagine taking on a different story in which behind you and around you are as significant as ahead? A story in which you are an expression of, and always part of, something much bigger than you are that began long before you? And could you find a way of being fully, vibrantly present in your life even if it turned out that today - whatever it is like - is as good as it gets?
You might have more of a fight going on inside than you think, particularly if you're set on never feeling certain kinds of feelings. Check it out - are you knotted up inside, like a clenched fist, determined to not let anything get to you?If you're always pushing away, how present to your life can you really be?No, you didn't choose the experience you're having, and perhaps you'd prefer something different. But when you allow yourself to feel what's actually happening in this moment you'll bring yourself bracingly back in touch with your own life and with that of those around you. And in the end, that's all that any of us ever really have.
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