Do you think it’s possible that your daily commitment to respond to all your emails simply invites other people to send more to you?And that what you’re doing is adding to the email madness that many people’s lives have become?What would happen if you put some of this down and became a stand for talking to people instead?
Eaten up
You won’t address the vicious cycle of busyness that you’re in simply by getting more efficient, or going faster, or keeping going for longer.It looks like that’s the way to salvation, but in fact you’re just digging yourself in deeper.Because it’s likely that there’s an endless list of things for you to do. Going faster completes more of them, more quickly. But it also reveals to you just how much more there is that still needs your attention.No, efficiency and speed and longer hours on their own simply feed the cycle. And while you may feel heroic, or important, or that your endless effort is unquestionably needed by everyone, you’re on a path which becomes ever more vicious in its capacity to consume you.It’s time to step out of the more and faster story. Give up wearing your busyness as a badge of honour, so that you can discover a new way of doing what matters.Here’s a risky, brave and life-changing alternative, one that’s going to call on you to know yourself in a whole new way:a) Decide what’s genuinely important and what’s not.
Saying no is the single biggest liberation here.
b) Give up on the story that it’s all down to you.
Asking for help from others and being prepared to tolerate the uncertainty and risk this involves is the key (which means giving up your insistence on control, because you cannot control when and how another will take up what you’re asking of them).
c) Start to take caring for yourself very seriously indeed
Because your capacity to do (a) and (b) is directly proportional to your energy, clarity and courage, none of which are helped by being exhausted, frazzled and overwrought.
Radical? It may seem so from in the midst of the stress or excitement of being always on the go.But it is, perhaps, at last a chance to rescue yourself and your life from being eaten up whole.
Any day now
Last Monday, Sir John Tavener was on BBC Radio 4's 'Start the Week', talking about illness, mortality, and the power of music and poetry to touch us, to awaken us to life's beauty, and to remind us to live fully. Because death is always around the corner.Life, he said, is a creeping tragedy, and for this reason there was no better orientation to it than learning to be cheerful, and nothing more important to attend to than love.He died the very next day.It's easy to forget that sudden illness and sudden leaving is an ever present possibility for all of us, and in our forgetfulness to live as if the hassles and hurdles we face each day are somehow separate from life, a burden we have to overcome before we can really start living at last.But of course, if you're reading this that's what you're already doing - really living. How could it be any other way?Perhaps it's time you put down your story about how things are meant to be so that you can wake up to life and live it, just for a while, as it is.
Colonisers
One of the sources of profound difficulty in human relationships: trying to colonise other people's worlds.... by being blind to their difference from you:
Assuming they see (or ought to see) and understand in the same way you do.Expecting them to respond as you do: be excited about the same things, irritated by the same things, upset by the same things, and committed to the same things.
.. or by attempting to knock them into (your) shape:
Consciously or unconsciously applying pressure to have them fit the shape of your own world. Using shame, promises, withdrawal, forcefulness, sulking, rejection, or reward to corral them.
This kind of colonising is an everyday oppression of others that we so easily get into, without even knowing it's what we are doing.Can you see it in your attempts to have the people you work with all be the same (same values, same behaviour, same personality, same opinions)?Or in the way you parent your children to have them turn out like you?Or in what you demand from friends or lovers?Perhaps it's time to give up colonising and start to be an explorer instead. What other people's worlds have to teach you, if you'll let go of your grip enough to allow it, might just change everything.
Photo Credit: Paulo Brandão via Compfight cc
The New World
Terence Malick is one of my favourite film-makers - an accomplished director and story-teller with a deep understanding of philosophy. Underneath the narrative current of his movies are explorations of profound questions about human life and living.In 2005 he released The New World, which centres on the founding of the settlement of Jamestown, Virginia in the early 1600s.As you might be able to tell from the title, it's a film about worlds.Not world simply as in 'place', but world as in the whole style of relating to everything that we're each in from moment to moment, but which we often can't see. World as in the invisible way our language and practices shape what we can see, what we can imagine, and what we can do. World meant as when we say 'the art world', or 'the world of science', or 'Anna's world'.Early on in the film, the European settlers, newly arrived in America, run into terrible difficulty. They're unable to understand that the world with which they're familiar and the new world in which they're living are not the same. They can see and act only in the habitual ways handed to them by their European heritage. And they're blind to their own blindness.When winter comes, they freeze, starve and get sick behind the high wooden walls of their compound, unable to work the land to produce what they need. They have neither the experience, nor the appetite, to genuinely open their eyes or shift their practices to account for what's around them. They don't have the distinctions in language allow them to discern what's needed. And they treat the local Algonquian people - the very people who could teach them how to survive by inviting them into a new world of understanding - with disdain, violence and suspicion. The Algonquian become resources to be utilised rather than people who could show them how to see.The film's heart explores the relationship between John Smith, a settler, and Pocahontas, a princess of the Algonquian people. Both are, uniquely to their people, travellers between worlds. They alone appreciate the mystery and beauty of the otherness of the other, the possibilities that the other's world and language and way of seeing can bring. And both are chastised, judged, and cast out for stepping outside the horizons of their own communities.The whole film is a reminder of the choices we make whenever we find ourselves in a situation, or with people, that we cannot at first understand. The decision to colonise, forcing our world and understanding onto theirs, or to be a traveller between worlds, opening in curiosity and wonder to the other, lead to very different places.And the choice is not just for grand historical situations such as settlers arriving in a new land. It's there for us in the most ordinary and everyday of situations as we navigate the simultaneously familiar but always strange and unknowable worlds of our co-workers, our families, and our communities.
Photo Credit: Silenceofnight via Compfight cc
Seasons
There are seasons in all of our lives.It's easy to imagine that the circumstances you're in, or the experience you're having, will continue just this way always.But the limbo summer, in which nothing felt stable, or the autumn full of rushing self-confidence, or the winter of quiet sadness, each turn out to be a way-station, a transition time between this and that.Sometimes our transitions unfold slowly enough that we cannot detect them from within, until we turn back and see just how far we have come.And then we realise that however certain we were that we were stuck, or that we had it made, everything is really changing all the time - neither blessing nor curse, but just life's way of doing what life does.
Photo Credit: overgraeme via Compfight cc
Forgiven
Forgiveness.Among the most healing of all human possibilities.Today, can you start by forgiving yourself?.. for your forgetfulness, your anger, your irritability, your desire to please, your frustration, your resentment, your boredom, your rushing, your waiting, your confusion?
Can you forgive yourself, please, for everything you judge so harshly about yourself? And for everything that makes you, simply, human?
Three rings
Downstream: the 'hard' measures through which you track what you're up to.Upstream: what makes it all possible - the intentions, commitments and relationships from which everything flows.If you commit to changing a downstream measure without doing the upstream work that supports it, you could easily end up having a very different effect to that which you're intending.An example. You commit to answer the phone every time within three rings (a downstream measure). And then you discover that everyone feels so much pressure to perform that they're abruptly cutting off conversations with customers, frantically interrupting them as they speak, and failing to listen deeply to their concerns.If the downstream change is going to have a chance of meaning something, you're going to have to attend to the upstream source that gives it a home in which it can flourish. In this case that's the genuineness of your intention to serve your customers, and everyone's capacity to stay receptive, grounded and in relationship to others as they learn new ways to act.Without this attention the shiny little fish you're throwing in the downstream waters will survive only for a short while. And when people see them wither once again, you'll be adding to their cynicism and resignation rather than doing something that could have your intentions flourish.
Irritated
Next time you're super-irritated by someone else, consider this: perhaps it's something in yourself that you can't stand, rather than them.The inner critic can play games like this, disguising self-judgement and turning it into judgement of others.And then what you're really doing is projecting a part of you onto them, where it's more comfortable and where you can pretend it's nothing to do with you.Your irritation won't resolve by insisting they change. But it might when you start to welcome all the shadow parts of you that, in the end, make you human.
Photo Credit: blinkingidiot via Compfight cc
Not of service
It's not being of service to say 'yes' to everything you're asked by the people you consider to be your customers. Especially if you have any discernment, expertise or wisdom to offer them.'Yes' to everything turns you into an automaton, with no capacity to choose.Soon you'll be overwhelmed with requests that you can't fulfil without running yourself into the ground.And you'll be left with no capacity to bring what only you can see, that they could never have asked you for.