I was reminded yesterday that, on the eve of the destruction wrought on the Jewish communities of Europe in the first part of the last century, my great-grandfather and his brother sat down to talk. They could see how desperate their situation was likely to become, and they had no idea how they could secure the future of their families against the gathering storm. And so they made a bargain, and a gamble with fate. They would toss a coin, they agreed. Whoever called correctly would take their family to England. The other would stay in mainland Europe.Between them, they hoped, some part of the family would manage to survive.As a result of this decision, my great-grandfather's family came across a sea of stars to England. His brother, his brother's family, and all their children passed through Poland and Paris and eventually to the death-camps at Auschwitz, where as far as we can tell all of them perished.On the throw of a coin the chain of life that came down to me and now on to my own children was secured. Who knows how many generations, how many lives, how much that has since and yet will be brought to the world, rested on that fateful moment?Remembering all of this is a huge call back into gratitude and wonder in my darkest, most self-obsessed, most resigned, resentful, and most narcissistic moments. It cuts through confusion and despair, awakening me again to what life is calling for, to my unique responsibility to act and take care of life - my own and others and everyone's.And it strikes me that the moment at the heart of this story is one of countless billions of chance moments and near misses, stretching back and back over time, that make it possible to be here.That any one of those moments could have called an end to the great chain of which I am the inheritor.And that this is true for all of us, whether or not we have stories in our families of desperate decisions made in terrifying times.And that if perhaps we made efforts to remember this, somehow, in our daily lives, we'd go to sleep less often to the unfathomable privilege and enormous responsibility of simply, gloriously being alive, in this place and at this time.
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Every moment - each second, each breath - is both an end and a beginning.At each moment what is done is done. The present dies into the past, never to return.And at each moment something new is born. The future, born into the present. A moment, like every moment, in which anything could happen.Perhaps you wait until a new year, an anniversary, or a birthday before you recognise this, before you wake up to the endless cycle of death and birth, ending and beginning in your life.Or perhaps you catch a glimpse, sometimes, that every moment is such a moment, filled with the possibility of choice and responsibility, of waking up to life or of going to sleep to yourself again.What kind of moment will you make this moment? One of turning back into your life, or one of turning away?And what will you do, what regular practices or habits or reminders could you take up, that will wake you up to the endless aliveness of your one and only life?
We seem to live in uniquely difficult times.We face multiple, simultaneous, almost intractable difficulties. The widening inequality of our societies. Economic uncertainty, and the undoing of many of the assumptions upon which we have built our economy. The effect we're having on our climate. Billions living in slums. The rise of violent religious and political fundamentalism. An uncertain energy future. Rapid population growth.It's understandable in such times that we should feel afraid. That in the face of all of this difficulty we should get caught up in protecting ourselves, before anyone else. That we sooth ourselves and numb ourselves with glowing screens, with our busyness. That we distract ourselves from the buzzing, whirling sensations in our bodies and emotions that try to show us that something is wrong. That we amass whatever we can for ourselves as we try to cling on. That we wait until we feel better before we step forward and make the contribution we're here to make.But as we do this, as we pretend we're fine while all the while feeling very afraid, we forget that the world has always been this way. Human life has always been perilous. We have always been faced by crises and by threats to our very existence. We have, most probably, always told ourselves that our own times are particularly troubled ones.Seeing this opens up two new paths.The first is that we stop adding to our very real difficulties with our stories about the uniqueness of our troubles. Those stories make us mute, frozen, self-obsessed. When we know that we human beings have, for millennia, found ways of responding creatively and with great resourcefulness to what life brought us, we can begin to trust our own faculties more. We can begin to turn towards one another and the world again, and ask ourselves what's needed, and what we can do.The second is that we remember that it's right in the middle of difficulty, when we are most uncertain, that our most noble and life-giving qualities can emerge. When there's trouble and we find ourselves turning towards our neighbours, towards people we hardly know, towards community, and towards the society in which we live, we remember that compassion, care for others and being in relationship are powerfully life-giving and meaningful activities.Which way we turn - towards defensive self-centredness or towards relationship and compassion - is not just a matter of choice but a matter of ongoing practice. In other words, we live lives in which through our actions we cultivate one path or another.Let's not wait until we feel safe and settled before we start to cultivate the second path, one that can bring great meaning - and great healing - to ourselves and those around us.
When you start to see that your organisational dramas (
There's a myth in many places of work that emotions aren't part of it."We're professional," you might say, "no place for feelings here".And in saying that, you've bought wholly into an enormously unhelpful misunderstanding: mood as an essentially corrupting, messy, distracting element of human life - better left alone than faced, better ignored than talked about, better suppressed than felt.But moods didn't go away just because you're pretending they don't have a place, and they didn't stop shaping the world of possibility available to you just because you don't want to look at them.Somehow, we're going to have to start talking to each other, in even the most 'rational' of organisations, about personal and organisational mood, and about the way gratitude, resentment, anxiety, resignation, love, shame and cynicism shape what's possible for us and those around us.And that's going to entail widening our understanding of what human beings are, and what it is to engage in work together.
It's so easy to tear things apart...... to use critical thinking, objection, cynicism, resignation - or even a call for freedom - as a way of dismantling what others have built. It's easy to think that this way of thinking itself - dismissing, critiquing, undoing - is a mark of a sophisticated mind.And it takes a quite different faculty - perhaps best called love - to weave things together into coherence, to form enduring bonds that can support us.Superficially it can look like tearing apart - of ideas, concepts, commitments, relationships - is liberation. But while dismantling is often a satisfying activity at least while we're in the midst of it, and while it frees us for a while, it frequently just frees us into the ruins of what we once relied on.Often what we're most called to do is weave the kind of strong net that frees us up even as it constrains and holds fast.
So many of us, going through life with such interior harshness, gnawing inner-criticism and attendant shame, fear, resentment, and anger.So many of us, blind to this force within us, unaware that this is the water in which we're swimming, the air which we are breathing.And because of this, so many of us projecting our own inner-criticism towards others as judgement, shaming, name-calling.Perhaps we don't even understand we're doing it, but it settles us to have the outer world reflect our inner world. That way we can say "it's the world that is this way", rather than anything to do with us.And how it spreads, our inner acidity evoking and provoking the acidity of others.Could today be the day to call a moratorium on this inner battle we're fighting? To discover how much more there is to ourselves, and to others, than a constant barrage of comparison, belittling, and 'not-good-enough'.And to find out that there is another kind of contribution we can make - wiser, kinder, more transformative and not a jot less powerful - if we start by searching for and bringing out basic goodness rather than the basic failings we are convinced are the heart everyone, including ourselves.
Two worth a read.Robert Poynton on 