When it's raining, it can sometimes feel like the rain has chosen to fall on you specifically - to mess up a plan, to ruin a day you were hoping for. But you know, even though it doesn't feel that way, that it's not raining on you in particular. That is to say, rain really isn't personal.So the same goes when there's a traffic jam, when the cupboard door comes off its hinges, when your computer crashes before you've saved your work, when the train is delayed, when there's a power cut, when the price of shares you own goes down. None of these are happening just to you.Taking each of those events as personal does nothing to help you respond intelligently to them. In fact, it may lead you down some manifestly unhelpful paths such as raging at nearby drivers, or hitting your computer, or resenting the people around you who have no influence on the situation, or freezing in fear and paralysis. It does much to increase your suffering and to limit the courses of helpful action available to you.The more you imagine the world is out to get you, the more you'll rob yourself of many productive ways of responding: you'll feel more alone, you'll need to find someone or something to blame.And you'll make it harder to reach out for help from, and offer support to, all the others of us who are thrown again and again into difficulty alongside you.
Doubting doubt
Perhaps you're sure that many things you care about are not possible for you.Perhaps you're sure that others are not up to much.Perhaps you're sure that there's not a great deal of hope of anything changing."I doubt" is the familiar way that many of us orientate to the world.What if, today, instead of taking all your doubts as the incontrovertible truth, you began the project of doubting your own doubt?
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Blessings
In the Jewish tradition, as in other religious and spiritual traditions, there is a blessing that can be said for pretty much anything. A blessing for waking up, and a blessing for going to sleep. A blessing for sunsets and for lightning. Blessings for food and for rainbows. Blessings for new clothes, for reaching special days, and for anniversaries. Blessings for the bathroom. Blessings for encountering others. Blessings, even, for bad news and for dying.The simplest way to understand blessings is as an act of thanks. But they're also a practice in remembering what is so easily forgotten - that even the humdrum and mundane is neither humdrum nor mundane. And they're a practice in noticing all those phenomena and entities which are often in the background for us but upon which all of life is standing. In this sense blessings require no belief in a deity but simply a commitment to marvel at life's sheer beauty and complexity. They are a practice in staying awake. They are an invitation to live in a state of what Abraham Joshua Heschel called a state of 'radical amazement'.The rabbinic tradition invites people to say at least a hundred blessings a day. What would become possible, I wonder, if just now and again we each started to look at what's become most ordinary and most unremarkable in our lives, perhaps even that which we've come to resent, and turned to wonder at the blessing within?
Photo Credit: by Emma Gregory, herself one of life's blessings
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And this short interview with Alice Herz-Sommer is a striking example of what a life lived through the eyes of blessing can be:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnoQ8F_CUfE
Working with the critic
When you're apparently under attack from others, a large part of your difficulty might be coming from your own inner critic. So there's much to be gained by studying all the ways it's in play.You could start simply by noticing what the critic has to say: the endless stream of criticism and judgement in your thoughts, and its absolute commitment to your unworthiness.Write it down, verbatim, and just look at all the exaggeration, wild fantasy, fearfulness, and overblown certainty. Read it back to yourself. Then it back to yourself or someone else again, this time in a comedy voice (which can do a great job of showing you all that is crazy about the claims it's making).And then, understand this:
- this voice is not you, but just a part of you
- you did nothing wrong (or right) to get it - it's part of the human heritage
- nobody who is human, no matter how successful or powerful, escaped having this
- most of us are very good at hiding it from others
- it's not helping you - even though it claims you need it
- you don't have to listen
This, the last point, is the one to work on most rigorously. Because when you stop listening to the voice of your inner critic as if it were the truth you'll discover that you can start to listen to the actual voice of others at last.And instead of collapsing or raging or tuning out, you'll have the opportunity to deepen your connection and to learn together about this strange, crazy, necessary and life-giving phenomenon we call human relating.
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Under attack
It is, it seems, an unavoidable part of the human condition to have a super-ego or inner critic, a part of you that is directed towards keeping you within certain bounds of appropriateness at all times.Long ago, when you were very small, you needed the adults around you to do this for you but now you've internalised those voices, or at least a distorted version of them, and they're quite able to keep you in line even when there's nobody else around.And now, that harsh inner voice, the voice that can wound you at the slightest opportunity, is vigilantly on the look-out for the signs of disapproval from others that it takes as evidence of your shortcomings. Before you've even thought about it, it has inserted its judgements into your stream of thoughts, scolding you, judging others. That raised eyebrow? It's because you irritate her, obviously. That offhand comment? You're clearly an idiot. When she didn't congratulate you on your work? Because you're not up to much. He didn't return your call? Because you've let him down.None of these, I hope you can see, are necessarily the case.The inner critic can turn even the most innocuous of comments into a perceived attack, and amplify a genuine attack so that it's much more wounding than the attacker intended. And then, you'll collapse and deflate, or rise in rage and indignation, and the strength of your reaction will surprise both you and your interlocutor.And, in many cases, you'll be reacting not to them at all but to this phenomenon that's going on inside you.Being under attack from others is made so much more difficult by the relentless attack you're under from yourself.
By doing
We've been taught to wait, to amass knowledge, and to know for sure what it is we're doing before we leap in. We've been taught that the only time to do something genuinely skilful, risky and creative - in other words anything that can make a contribution to the state of things - is when we know how to do it already. It's ample fuel for the inner critic, the part of us that would have us hold back until everything is just right. And it has us hold others back too.But, as Aristotle reminds us, when it comes to mastery the paradox is that
"the things we have to learn before we can do, we learn by doing".
In other words, we have to jump right in, long before we have any skill, make many mistakes, and hang on in the face of our own demons, other people's criticism, and the many occasions we'll mess it up.Does your work, your organisation, your leadership, your life allow any space for this?Or are you keeping yourself and everyone around you in a tight circle of safe, predictable reliability?
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Frustration
Frustration: a yearning for something that seems always just out of reach. It's one part desire, and another part despair.Intense, maddening, and in turns deflating, frustration brings the object of your desire to the centre of your attention. It shapes thoughts, tightens body. It has you thrash and complain. And it narrows your focus so that while it's in full swing, the rest of life is registered only dimly.Most surprising about frustration is its capacity to have you destroy the very thing you want so much:
The relationship in which you're longing for respect and trust, undone by your judgments, accusations and harsh words.
The project you want to bring to the world derailed by your insistence and unreasonableness.
The art you're creating undone by distraction and procrastination.
... which might not be as illogical as it sounds, at least at the moment of action, when destruction looks preferable to the despair of continual failure.But, like all moods, frustration is an angle on the world, not the world itself. It conceals much, even as it reveals powerfully what you care about.If you're able to tell that you're in it, you may be able to open yourself to the insight that it brings, and also to its narrowness. And from there, the possibility of seeing things from a wider perspective arises - the perspective that other moods such as gratitude, kindness, simple anger or hope could bring to the self-same situation.
Conversations are like crossroads
Every conversation you have with others is a crossroad.Which direction you take matters because, over time, the choices add up to something - a something we often call relationship.Are you paying attention to the path you're forging with your colleagues, friends, family?And are you sure that, if you continue as you are, you're prepared to live with the consequences?
On difficulty and understanding
As we encounter each of life's difficulties, we get to choose:Consider ourselves cursed or mistreated, as if we are owed freedom from hurt, pain or confusion. As if life owes us happiness. As if we are meant to be in control of everything. This is, essentially, a fight against life as it is.Or draw on difficulty as part of life's path, an opportunity to turn more deeply into life rather than away from it.And while, with each successive difficulty or joy, we find that we understand life's movement less and less, perhaps this way we learn to live it more and more.
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[after Jules Renard - "As I grow to understand life less and less, I learn to live it more and more"]
The current age
The story you tell about this time in your life isn't the only story. And the vantage point from which you're looking is not the only vantage point.Looking forwards, it might seem clear that you're on the way to a great success, or an inevitable defeat. Maybe it looks like life is all sorted: you've arrived and there is not much more for you to do. Or perhaps, from the depths of your confusion, it appears that you're lost and can never find your way back.Life is so much bigger than each of us, and so much more mysterious, that any story you have is at best partial. Looking back, what feels now like inevitable defeat may turn out to be a time of building strength: the strength you'll need to break out of the constraints that have been holding you back. What feels like being crushed by life could be the birth pangs of a new beginning. Maybe the solidity of your success so far turns out to be everything that will be taken from you.As Cheryl Strayed writes to her despairing younger self in Tiny Beautiful Things, it can turn out that "the useless days will add up to something", that "these things are your becoming."Everything changes. Nothing is ever just what it seems. And though you may feel sure you've understood your life, remember that it's very difficult to see which are the important parts, and quite why they're important, while you're still in them.
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