Of course, your feeling of unique loneliness and separation from others is precisely what connects you with everyone else in the world.In allowing yourself to feel your aloneness you join everyone who, behind our busy activity and even in our most intimate relationships, feels the same from time to time.In this way, and in so many others, none of us is ever separate from other human beings, even when we're most convinced we are.
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When you complain about the way somebody else behaves around you, here's a thought:Perhaps the way they're behaving is one you've been inviting through your own way of relating to them.The downside of discovering this? You'll no longer be able to get yourself off the hook with your complaints and the certainty of your judgements.The upside? By starting with yourself you'll have a chance, at last, of actually changing the situation so what's important to you can start to happen.
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When you're irritated or annoyed with someone for the way they're being, you may think "I would never be like that".But the intensity of your irritation could be a sign that you're experiencing a shadow side of yourself - a part of you, seen reflected in them, that you deny and which you do your best to keep out of view.Pushing the other person away is an attempt to push away the part of yourself you'd rather not see.And instead of believing all your judgements, you could start to recognise that what you're seeing in them is, indeed, just like you. And then you have the possibility of reaching out to them with compassion rather than hostility, learning more about yourself, and healing what's pushing the two of you apart.
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What would happen if you gave up being in a battle with life all the time?Instead of being so sure that what's happening is not meant to be happening, and certainly isn't meant to be happening to you, can you allow yourself to accept that what's happening is, actually, exactly what is happening?Then, instead of responding from resentment or resignation or frustration, you have a chance of finding out what's really called for, and responding instead with that.
What's your understanding of the source of your actions and other people's actions?Mostly we've been taught to think that it's something within that produces what we do. We talk about motivation, or goals, or drive, or inspiration. We think of ourselves as separate from the world and that our actions and relationship to everything comes from inside us out into the world. And, of course, there's some truth in that.But I don't think it's the whole story.One of the important contributions of the work of Martin Heidegger last century was to show that we're not as separate from the world as all that. Much of the time what's happening is that we're being drawn towards situations, equipment, or possibilities that we meet.So, when there's a chair in the room we're drawn to sit down when we're tired. Or when it's time to go out of the room we're drawn towards the door and reach for the handle, which draws us too.This is different from the way you might think you relate to doors and chairs.It's not so much that before we act there's a thinking process by which we first decide to find a door and then reach for the handle in a series of discrete steps. In the middle of everyday human life all of this just flows out of us, from the everyday familiarity and skilfulness in being in the world that we've embodied over a long time.Heidegger called such features of the world that draw us out in particular ways affordances.Being around different kinds of affordance draws us out of ourselves in different ways. Perhaps you'll see this most clearly if you start to watch for a while what you're drawn into - what you find yourself automatically doing, before you've even thought about it - in particular places.What do the affordances of the kitchen draw you towards?The lounge or sitting room with sofas and perhaps a TV?A meeting room at work with a big boardroom table?The bus-stop or the inside of a train?A cathedral?The waiting room for a doctor's surgery?If you watch for a while you'll see that each place draws from you not just actions but a particular style of engaging with and relating to what's around you that includes how you relate to others. It's all happening long before you've even thought about how to respond in this or that place.This is an important topic because it shows us quickly how much place affects us.There'll be more to say about this over the coming days because equipment (whether paintbrushes, books, teacups or smartphones) and people are affordances too. And there are huge practical consequences of this for all of us, that mostly we're not paying attention to.
Organisations are not machines that can be programmed.Because people are not machines either.People are human beings. A radical perspective, I know, in a world where we've spent the last 150 years doing our best to have people fit in as if they were cogs or crankshafts in a huge mechanism.Our insistence on seeing ourselves as machines makes organising ourselves look easier, but comes at a huge cost. Either we ignore what's spontaneous, mysterious and creative about people in order to see only what fits the narrow way we've committed ourselves to seeing. Or we corral people into leaving parts of themselves out so they can appear to be the tightly defined machine part we've insisted they be.Wouldn't understanding ourselves as human, and our organisations as living, bring us a more truthful, challenging, possibility-laden, and creative way to respond to the urgency of organising ourselves so that good work can happen?
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We all have those moments when, perhaps even before we've thought about it, we've wounded others - with a well-chosen barb, a dose of sarcastic humour, by locking them out or turning away, by yelling or insulting, by shaming.
Perhaps it happens for you often.Maybe it's worth checking what the source of this is.So often we're wounding other people because we just got wounded ourselves, sometimes by a thought or a memory rising quietly inside that nobody else can even see. We deal with our own pain by swinging it out onto somebody else.And sometimes we wound others because, to put it simply, it's what happened to us repeatedly along the way and now it's their turn for a share of it.Whatever the cause, if you're regularly wounding your colleagues, your team, or the people close to you as a way of handling your own suffering, it might be time to consider an alternative.You can't avoid having been wounded. It's an inescapable part of reaching adulthood. And just as this is true for you, it's true for everyone around you.Knowing this, perhaps you can catch on to what you're really up to each time you lash out. And then, by cultivating ongoing tenderness and kindness - first to yourself - you can work more and more on having your wounds become a gift of understanding to others and not an excuse to act out.
Over time, we mostly develop a quite strong sense of our own identity. We understand ourselves as this or that kind of person, with certain kinds of cares and commitments, certain kinds of likes and dislikes, certain kinds of tastes and values. And we also know ourselves from the way our relationships go, as someone who is loved or not, gets close to people or not, can speak up or stay quiet.What we don't often see so strongly is how our daily practices - the repeated way we go about things - are an active force in maintaing the particular identity we've got used to. And how they can be an equally active force in changing it.How you get up, how you get dressed, how you eat, how you speak with people, how you listen, how you move your body, how you care for yourself, how you apportion your time, what you choose to pay attention to, your habitual patterns of thinking, when you shrink or come forward, how you stop (if you stop) - are all shaping you every time you do them.Our unconscious practices quickly form a self-sealing circle, or a self-fulfilling prophecy, making possible certain experiences and actions, and keeping others far away from us.So, if you want to shift your sense of yourself, and the way others know you, consider consciously and purposefully finding practices that can take you in a new direction.The more comfortable and familiar they are, the less possibility they'll have to change you. The more they take you into new territory (into a new world), the more they stir up, the more they call on you to learn a new way of being that's unfamiliar and uncomfortable, the more powerful they can be.New practices interrupt the way we've gone about constructing ourselves.An example from my own experience: after a lifetime of knowing myself as thoughtful and considered, as one around whom people feel safe, a bringer of peace in the midst of conflict, I've taken up kick-boxing.And now, I'm starting to know myself also as fierce, super-disciplined, sharp, graceful and expressive. I'm learning how rage can be part of me - integrated - rather than forever denied or kept in the shadows. And I more and more have a body that can do all of this. As a result new conversations, new relationships, and new ways of working with other people are becoming apparent to me.And all of this is so important any time we find that the identity we've taken up holds us back from contributing, or leads to suffering for ourselves or those around us.
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I've written before about my sense that what we're doing, in our incessant and habitual checking of our devices, is looking for reassurance.For many of us, it's a way of settling the restless, anxious, fearful longing that arises from a world that's always shifting and from the sense that there's nowhere solid to stand.Rather than turn towards the longing, to explore it and know it and be changed by it, we numb it by turning away into our devices. Perhaps, we think, we'll see the message or news item or tweet that will show us everything is alright, that we don't need to feel so afraid or uncertain any more.And, of course, such a message can never come. The momentary soothing of our jitteriness is soon over, and we reach impulsively again for a glowing screen that we hope can save us.I saw this short film for the first time this week. It shows us clearly what we're doing, and some of the consequences.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=OINa46HeWg8]
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"The language of objects catches only one corner of human life"Martin Buber
If we want to survive in the world we need to know how to relate to everything around us as an object (an 'it') - something that is of use, that can be formed, or shaped, or measured in some way, that can serve our needs. Without this, we would soon die. Or, at the very least, all our intentions to have anything happen in the world would be thwarted.
But just because the past 200 years of science and technology have given us an explosion of new ways to objectify the world so we can shape it, please don't be misled into thinking that's all there is to human life.
If we don't pay attention, pretty soon we can reduce everything - including people - to objects. And then we miss the possibility of encountering anything of substance. All we get is surface.
So, by all means, do the necessary work to measure what people around you are up to. Assign scores, gradings, personality types, psychometrics. Rate people by their performance, their ROI, their bonus, their job title. Do all this in whichever way helps you to have what matters to you actually happen.
But, please, don't mislead yourself that what you've created is all there is about them, or that you've 'got them nailed' in some essential way.
Because behind your measures - indeed all around them - people are worlds of immense complexity and depth. And, however efficient we're getting, we need to remember this if we're going to go beyond surviving and do work in which people can actually thrive.
