So many of us live life as if it is a mountain to be climbed: a struggle to reach the place where everything will be settled, where happiness, fulfilment and meaning are at last enduring and secure."No time to stop", we cry, "I'm too busy climbing". It's the narrative of many organisations as well as individual lives. And in the frantic ascent we rarely get to feel the rock beneath our fingers, breathe the air, or notice our travelling companions in their struggles beside us. We suspend our lives.If you live this way, particularly if you have some influence over other people, you'll draw them into the story with you. Before long, everyone's joining the scramble to the top in the hope that life's questions will at last be resolved. And being bound to the mountain becomes its own form of slavery with its own profound suffering.Because there is no place where everything comes good as in a fairytale or as promised in 'The Secret'. At what we took to be the top of the mountain, even if the view is breathtaking, are the same human questions of belonging, meaning, and contribution, and the same fears of isolation, death, freedom and meaninglessness. Life at the 'top' continues to be life, in which everything is provisional and changing, full of joys and sorrows, pain and healing, delights and sadnesses, light and shadow.Giving up the struggle to the top that was never there is difficult. But perhaps it can free you, at last, to be up to something bigger than securing for yourself the fairytale promise of our times. And, crucially, it frees the people around you to join you in doing the same.
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We've believed that somewhere, at the top of the mountain we feel like we're climbing, everything will be alright at last. We'll be fulfilled, at peace, happy.And so everybody's climbing the mountain, and everybody else seems to be trying to sell us something that will get us there more quickly. 'Buy this product', the advertisements scream, 'and at last you'll be ok. At last you'll be able to rest'.So we climb, faster and faster, harder and harder, exhausting ourselves along the way. We're sure the answer is at the top. We tell ourselves, 'When I have that job, that house, a beautiful lover, children, money, fame, the right car, or body shape, or clothes, an advanced degree, my name on a book, when I retire, I'll be there'.And the climb becomes more frantic, more determined, because it seems that other people have reached the top of the mountain already. Film stars, celebrities, billionaires, models, TV presenters, novelist, the people in the next street with the nicer houses, your friends - many of them look like they have it together, that they at last have reached life's destination.There are books, and courses, and coaches and products that promise you all of this - that there's some secret to the climb that's right in front of you if only you'll buy it, some magical way to accelerate you to the top.And all the while, you're hardly in life at all. Always postponing, always deferring, and piling suffering upon suffering as you compare yourself with others who seem to be further ahead, living the life you should be having.But the mountain has no top.Each crest simply hides another, and the genuine, heartfelt relief that comes from reaching it is soon replaced by the understanding that you didn't arrive yet, that you have further to go. Gradually you realise that staking your life on reaching a peak that never existed isn't what you'd bargained for.Or - alternatively - you discover that you're already at the top of the mountain. And that you always have been.
Shame is a powerful, primal human emotion, stirring up for us as it does the overwhelming sense that 'I shouldn't be here... I cannot be here...'. It has us contract, freeze, mute ourselves, and make ourselves acceptable at the price of our aliveness and creativity.It is the perfect mood for forcing us to fit in, to withhold anything that might cause others trouble, to keep us in line. Which is why it's used so powerfully and effectively in the life of organisations.And because owning up to shame is, for most of us, itself shameful, we hide it from others and deny it to ourselves, living quietly with the suffering and wounding that it brings. We pretend we are not feeling shame even as we experience it most acutely.And we pretend not to see how our leadership and organisational structures actively promote it - how shame is often the unspoken currency of organisational life.
Sometimes, in the midst of all our striving, longing, and reaching, our building of towers and the making of names for ourselves, it's important to remember that one day we will, with certainty, lose it all.Some of this will happen piece by piece. We'll gradually say goodbye to people as they leave life. We'll realise, perhaps suddenly, that their presence in the world touched our hearts and lit up our eyes. We'll find out that their worth is beyond words.And for all of us, the loss will also come entirely at once - maybe at a time when we least expect it, before we can even know it's happening - when it is 'I' who is leaving and it is others who have to say goodbye.Some of us take a long time to find all this out, holding our inner gifts back from the world until we're sure the time is just right - a time that may never come.But others seem to live with this understanding so fully in their hearts it's as if nothing is withheld. They've discovered that the point of life is life itself, and that each of us is simply another expression of life's beauty and wonder. And from this understanding flows their kindness, their generosity and their wisdom, so that they shine brighter than the sun.
What if, just in the way that rainstorms, traffic jams and computer crashes are 
When was the last time you felt fiery and fierce about what you're up to? Whole-heartedly and bodily swept up in work that matters deeply to you? Left feeling alive by your efforts?When did you last find that your work diminished you? Left you feeling less than whole, and less than fully human?And what, if anything, are you doing about what you're concluding?
I wrote yesterday about the pitfalls inherent in