Your emotions and moods.A distraction? An interruption to your dispassionate, rational, critical faculties? Out of place in your work? In your family? Best ignored? Even better supressed?No.A mood is a place from which you relate to the world.Moods are disclosive: they actively show the world to you, bringing forward some aspects so that they can be seen, and having others recede into the background.And it's important that you pay attention to them because there is no dispassionate, uninvolved place from which to relate to the world. There is no 'mood-free' way to be which would show you everything all in one go, at least in everyday life.A mood of love: the object of your love (a person, an idea, a project) fills the world you experience. You find yourself turning towards it or them again and again in your thoughts and activities. For a while, the world revolves around whatever or whoever it is that you love, and you get to see that which is inspiring, thrilling, life-giving about them.A mood of frustration: when there's something that matters to you that you can't get to happen. Once again, that something figures centrally in the world for as long as you're frustrated. Everything seems to point towards this something that matters, to contribute to your sense of being thwarted.A mood of fear: brings forward that which is or seems threatening to us or to that which we care about, and has everything else fade away, so that we can take focussed action.A mood of boredom: has everything fade into the background. Nothing seems important enough, stirring enough, exciting enough to move you.A mood of resentment: has the person or situation you're resentful about become central, and reveals to you the myriad ways you might take revenge, get your own back, or otherwise cause hurt.A mood of gratitude: shines a light on the unlikeliness of your presence in the world, how little you had to do to end up surrounded by people, objects, possessions, possibilities. Illuminates the extraordinariness of the everyday.Rather than being errors in perception, your moods are always a way of attuning to aspects of the world that you might not otherwise pay attention to. You might say each mood functions to reveal the world in particular ways, showing you that which in a different mood would be hidden. And mostly this isn't apparent, because for the most part moods are in the background, invisible. They're like the air you breathe, omnipresent, necessary, and transparent.So being able to tell what mood you're in is a huge opening. It will show you what possibilities you might be missing, or how it is that there seem no possibilities at all. It will tell you much about what you really care about, because moods always arise from your cares, values and commitments. It will show you how what seems central right now, and what incidental, is only one way to look at things.And as you learn to cultivate different moods from the ones you're most used to - for example gratitude where there was resentment - you'll have revealed to you much that you never really saw before. And you may also discover that the world and other people are never simply this way or that, and perhaps even open up the possibility that they're something else completely from how you're used to relating to them. This is a huge and necessary step if you want to bring yourself fully to the world and to open up rich new avenues for relationship, possibility, and action.
Always changing
One of the surest ways you can treat other people as objects is to believe too strongly the stories you have about them.
"He doesn't care""She's only interested in herself""He's so frustrating""She's so fixed in her ideas, it's impossible""He's a loser"
and equally
"He's so caring""She knows about everything""He's so strong - nothing gets to him"
It's not that your stories have no truth to them.But people are so much more vast and mysterious than you can possibly know, and changing all the time. Any story you have is, in a significant way, partial and instantly out of date.If you're committed to treating people as people, you'll have to start taking all this into account. You'll have to loosen your hold on your stories. That way you'll have a chance of encountering the person that's actually there, rather than the idea of them you're so determined to hold on to.
What life wants
Instead of wondering when life will work out for you, or figuring out how to get the life you want, you could try asking what life wants from you.Perhaps an entirely different orientation to what matters, what's possible, and what's called for might emerge. And who knows what courage, kindness, wisdom and work you might discover.
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Not Kindness
Sometimes, a commitment to everyone around you being ok can cause more suffering than you know.You might think you're just being kind, principled - a person committed to harmony, peace, and the wellbeing of others.But it's not kindness if your habit of saving others from their difficulty:
denies them their dignity or freedomhurts the people around themhas them become dependent upon youacts so that you, principally, can feel better about yourself.
It's not kindness to insist all is well, that everyone look on the bright side, and in doing so ignore others' difficulty or judge it as moaning or whining.And it's not kindness to turn away from important conversations that can liberate people from their suffering, simply because you fear that you or others might get upset.Kindness like this might still feel like kindness to you. It might feed the story that you're really there to help. But what you're doing each time is covering up the difficulty. And in each case there's some significant suffering that calls for a much bigger contribution from you.Kindness that makes a genuine difference to others requires enormous courage, because it can never just be about fulfilling your story about yourself, or making you feel better that you did the right thing.This kindness knows when to wait as well as when to act. It knows that cutting the bonds that hold others in their difficulty can require fierceness and sharpness as well as softness. It has a much bigger perspective than just this moment, just this incident, just what you're feeling right now.And this sort of kindness - which looks long into the future to assess the consequences of its actions, and which casts a broad net to include many others in its care - has so much more possibility for bringing about the peace and freedom you really long to bring into the world.
Inputs to Outputs
An extraordinary number of people have effectively become processors, for much of their working lives, of the endless emails served up to them by the internet.How much the intelligence of the world is turned into this: we become reduced to nodes in the network, transforming email inputs into email outputs, which then go on to be processed in the same way by someone else.If you weren't demanding people do this with their time, can you even imagine what might become possible?Isn't there a bigger, more courageous contribution they could be making, one that you and we so desparately need?
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On change
We've been in the midst of enormous change for some time now.Has the world ever been different from this?Perhaps we imagine that we are the first to face such uncertainty, the undoing of so much that had seemed secure and obvious. Whichever way we turn, that which we thought we understood is being called into question. The nature of work, of money, the structure of society. Our ideas of what is of enduring value. Our relationship to technology, other human beings, our place on this planet and our impact on its future.We wonder where all of the endless shifting and changing will end.Perhaps whatever anxiety we feel as we consider this can become a reminder to us that the world has always been this way. What is changing now is unique to our times. But endless change is always part of the fabric of things, no matter how hard we work to deny it.The nature of life itself is change.And the opportunity here - if we can seize it with courage and resoluteness - comes from our human capacity to change ourselves. It isn't at all easy, and it requires the action of many people simultaneously. But if you doubt it's possible, just look at how much we and the worlds we create have changed in the last generation, in the last century.Are you working on becoming someone who can stay in the anxiety of change so that you can contribute to our collective response?Or are you living your life in a way that obscures all this and allows you to hide from it?
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Three conversations
Three different kinds of conversations to be in:1. Conversations for Relationship
The foundation for everything.
Doing what it takes to build lasting foundations for possibility and for action together. Discovering what you share.
Shared interests make it possible to continue talking, and it's where most people start. The ubiquitous 'What do you do?' when we meet people is an attempt to begin this.
Shared concerns deepen the relationship. When we find out that what matters to others matters to us also, all kinds of possibilities start to emerge. And a longer conversation becomes interesting.
Shared commitments deepen still further. If you and I are up to something active in the world that we both really care about, the possibility of collaborating over extended periods of time comes into view.
2. Conversations for Possibility
Where we wonder together what we might get up to. This is what's being addressed when people get into brainstorming sessions or just start musing about what could happen.
Conversations for possibility sound easy and obvious, but if you approach them from a cynical position ('nothing can ever work out') or pretend to be interested when you're not, you'll find that very little that matters comes from them.
3. Conversations for Action
Where we decide what to do, and commit to one another in a way that makes action obvious and possible. It's the moment of commitment where everything happens - where the future we're embarked upon changes for all of us involved.
Much of the difficulty that arises in working with other people comes from our not paying attention to the differences between these three conversations and our failure to recognise that each requires the other.To discover meaningful possibilities, you have to have genuine relationship in which you and others are dedicated to the same interests, concerns or commitments.To design effective, worthwhile action you have to have chosen which of the many possibilities you are committing to follow.No end of trouble is caused because people fake this.We say of our colleagues at work "we're a team" and then wonder why we're having such a hard time getting in to projects that feel worthwhile. Did we spend any time in an effective conversation for relationship? Do we even have a relationship in which we care about the same things?We throw ourselves into action plans but don't stop first to have a conversation for possibilities. "I'm too busy", we say. "Can't you see how much I have to do?". We make it look like we know what we're up to, but what we're doing is pointed in the wrong direction, or maybe we're all pointing in different directions. We never took the time to stop, to admit our confusion, to ask together where are going or find out together what we might get up to.Faking these conversations is understandable. We're taught to fake when we're very young (faking our interest in subjects at school, doing just what we're asked by adults without questioning or pushing back). And then mostly we're taught this again when we join the world of work (saying yes to what we're asked, unquestioningly taking on the targets and goals we're given in order to get ahead).But the more we fake, and the more we fail to attend to the basic conversations that make everything worthwhile and possible, the more difficulty and suffering we're creating for ourselves and others.So the first step is to get real.Which conversation have you not had, yet? Name it. Invite, enroll, cajole, demand that the people around you stop, long enough, to do the talking together that was missing.Talk and listen long enough to build a relationship that can be the foundation for the possibilities you're pursuing and the action you want to take. It's never too late to do this, even if you completely skipped it the first time around.Own up to your confusion and your deflation as well as the times when you're excited and bursting with energy. If you're confused about where you're going, other people probably are too. It's a conversation for possibility you might need to have here.By paying attention to all of this and talking about it with others, you'll begin to address your stuckness, your overwhelming busyness, and the endless waste of people doing things that didn't need doing or that didn't matter.And that has to be worth doing.
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World A and World B
World A: A world of mass market, mass industry, mass conformity, in which everyone only brings what the system tells us is required, and we can only contribute what the mass gives us space to contribute.World B: A world in which people take seriously their responsibility to discover what is theirs to bring into the world, and dedicate themselves to bringing it; in which we can at last benefit from the immense human capacity for imagination, relationship, truth, ingenuity, creativity, compassion and fierce love of life.Which world are you in the midst of creating?
Ending
Everything you're involved in, everything you're committed to, everything you know - all of it will come to an end.When you understand this, can you really continue in your detached, distracted way? Or keep holding back because of your fear? Or mute your voice and your contribution until you are sure that others will like it, and like you?Surely, when you know that everything will come to an end the only response is to throw yourself deeply into what you care for, with both fiery commitment and a fierce, unshakeable compassion towards yourself and everyone around you.What else could life and work possibly be for?
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Nodes in a network
In the past two to three centuries we have been swept up in some powerful cultural narratives that have served, among other things, to obscure the nature of our changing world and our inevitable part in it. The revolution in thought that ushered in both modern science and the enlightenment drew our attention to the apparently ordered nature of the universe and then opened up huge possibilities for shaping it through reason and technology. We began to conceive of ourselves as almost endlessly powerful, freed up from the constraints of nature through our ability to stand apart from it and intervene in it.As this unfolded into the industrial revolution we also shifted our understanding of ourselves. Human progress would come increasingly from industrial processes that could be applied reliably at vast scale and over global distance. What would make this possible was the suppression of human difference (including our passions, that which we most strongly feel and which we most deeply care about) in favour of the idea of the mass - mass production, mass standardisation, mass culture.And as science and technology have progressed we've understood ourselves more and more as part of them rather than as the creators of them (science, as a discipline, is a human creation as much as any other). Today we are increasingly likely to understand ourselves as the product of neural pathways in our brains (drawing on physics) or to treat ourselves as disembodied nodes in a vast computer network.The technology we have created gives us unparalleled opportunities to make everyone the same, to obscure our uniqueness. But it also gives us huge possibility to free up our creativity for the good of everyone, to support people in reaching out to one another thoughtfully and intentionally.So this is where we might work out together how to respond to the swirling uncertainty of today. It will take us understanding ourselves in new ways, paying much closer and more rigorous attention to what we truly care about, to what the totality of our experience including our emotions and bodies have to tell us, and to what it is to be a human being.And it will take us understanding that we, and others, are neither nodes in a network nor neural machines nor simply animated lumps of matter, but deeply connected actors in a huge world of meaning and possibility. As well as our science - greatly needed at this time - it's going to take each of us bringing forward our passion, our art, our love, and our lives.
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