The very idea of 'professionalism' which demands that we separate ourselves from our emotions and personal concerns at work was invented in order to make mass production possible.To produce systematically, repeatedly and at large scale required people to behave as predictably as possible. And so we equated a machine-like, rule-based way of being with 'work', and did our best to fit ourselves and others into it.We're still doing this, insisting that we leave our lives and our emotions out, even in many organisations whose premise and purpose is nothing like the industrial-revolution production machines whose needs gave it birth.There are many difficulties in this, of course, and much suffering. But what I want to draw attention to here is how much trouble it causes us in learning from what we've done and developing our capacity to respond differently in the future.Because learning and reflection - particularly the kinds that support us in questioning our premises, undoing our rigidity and seeing what we're blind to - always involve emotions.In order to question ourselves we have to be able to feel and face and talk about our hopes and dreams, our longing and wishes (which sometimes have us doing the same thing again and again even when it's patently not helping), our shame and our fear (which keep us from admitting we ever did anything wrong, or seeing what we did that was right), our anger (when something we care for is violated), and our joy (at our successes, at the successes of those who matter to us).We have to be able to give our own inner-critical voices some ventilation and expose them to the insights of others (lest they hold us in small tight circles, or puff us up and have us fight off anything that might be troubling). And we have to be able to find and feel those emotions that show us when we're doing something that matters to us, that has integrity, and that we care about.And perhaps most importantly we have to be able to talk about our wish not to feel certain things - mostly shame, fear, embarrassment, uncertainty - and how it leads us to take actions that we dress up as 'reasonable' but which can be manifestly unhelpful.In a world where we can't talk about emotions, it's difficult to learn about and from any of these.And that gets us into no end of trouble.
Most true
The moment you say "I'm sure" is the moment you close off the future, turning away from the unknown that is always coming."I'm sure" is a claim to understand fully how things are.And how often, if ever, can you know life well enough, particularly how things will turn out, for this to be true?You could even say that you're at your most truthful, your most sure, when you let go of the thin veneer of certainty with which you prop yourself up: when you admit first to yourself, and then to others, that you don't know the whole truth, you don't fully know who you are, and, like all of us, you really don't know nearly as much as you say you do about what's going to happen.When we hear that from you, we can own up to our own lostness too. And then maybe, together, we can get up to something that matters rather than trying to make ourselves feel safe all the time.
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The difficulty of being present
Mindfulness, the art of paying attention to what's here and to what's happening now, has become a fashionable topic in recent years. Perhaps this is a way in which we acknowledge that there's a limit to the back-to-back scheduling of our lives, and the way that everything is always interrupting everything else.When our culture has us skate over life at a breakneck pace, when the only response we seem to muster to our busyness is more busyness, the idea of some peace - some respite - seems understandably appealing.But we misunderstand the practice of mindfulness, and the possibility of being present, if we see it as a technique to quell and soothe our restlessness.Because being present means we actually have to face our lives rather than run from them.When we quieten ourselves enough to really listen, we come to feel our own pain and our own anxiety - as well as our love and our joy and our deep unfulfilled longing . And if we stay still for long enough, we also begin to see all of this in others. And we are called to respond.Most of us, I think, don't want to experience that feeling, or that responsibility, for too long. We're happy to toy with the idea of being more present in our lives, without wanting to commit to it, at least not too much.And in this way being present in our lives becomes another fad, a passing phase, rather than something we'll dedicate ourselves to for its own sake.
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Muted
Because we are story-telling beings, we humans have a million ways of avoiding being present to what is right in front of us - people, projects, possibilities, suffering - and what is within us - thoughts, feelings, and the sensations and wisdom arising in our bodies.We so easily spin stories, throw ourselves into guilt and reminiscence about the past, worry about and try to anticipate the future. And while each of these have their place, they so easily distract us from what we're most directly in the midst of.Missing what and who is here robs us of the opportunity to experience life in its richness as we go.More importantly for everyone else, it denies us the opportunity to bring ourselves at our fullest. Because in our distraction, we respond not to the needs of the moment, but to the needs of our fear, or to our wish to not have to face the world as it is.Our deepest possibilities for connection and contribution are muted - whenever here is not where we are, and now is not what we're responding to.
Claims to truth
So many claims to truth.So many kinds of truth.The truth of science. The truth of the narratives we live in. The truth of our bodies. The truth of our feelings. The truth of our ideas.The truth of our commitments.The truth of our vows.What if truth is not something we have, a fixed entity or property, but an event, always in progress, always in the midst of being brought about in and by the way in which we live and how we work?And what if truth is not so much something we know, as much as it is something we do?
Necessary but not sufficient
We have to stop imagining that every difficulty we face has a technical solution.For ourselves - if I just learned a new technique I'd have riches, fulfilment, love, power, or happiness. If I just followed the right steps my hollowness, longing, sadness or fear would go away.In our families - there must be a book that will tell me how to avoid conflict, resolve it, have my partner meet my needs, get my children in line or save them from difficulty.In our work - we'll bring in a new process, organisation chart, reporting line, software solution, feedback system, leadership model, competency framework, list of values, behaviour chart, compensation scheme, training course. Then our difficulties will go away - our misunderstanding, confusion, and anxiety. We'll know just what to do. Nothing will trouble us.The set of difficulties resolvable by technical solutions when there are other people involved is small. We've been blinded to this by our insistence that work and life can be reduced to science alone, or that people are like machines, or that logic is the sole source of truth, or that what worked well in one place (what we call best practice) can be transferred to another without regard to the particular people involved.No - when it comes to people, technical solutions alone will rarely do.Instead we have to do the difficult, exciting, principled, confusing, uncertain work of talking together: inquiring, wondering, relating, trusting, asking, promising, learning, committing, resolving, declaring, listening and understanding. None of which are easy, because they call on our courage and sincerity, our integrity and our willingness to make ourselves vulnerable.Which is why we'd rather convince ourselves that technology or technique will save us. Necessary though they are, and sufficient though they are not.
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The moods we deny ourselves
Every mood opens us to the world in its own particular way, and every mood closes something off to us.But we come to privilege certain moods and dismiss others as inconsequential, or intolerable. And this is not simply a personal choice - we are taught by our culture to value a few moods over many others.I think it's time we reconsidered, and allowed ourselves to discover, in our workplaces and wider lives, the particular gifts and wisdom of our boredom, confusion, uncertainty, anxiety, love and longing.
Because boredom reveals to us what we most care about (by its very absence).
Anxiety shows us when we're stepping into new territory, leaving familiar ground behind us, or when something that really matters needs attention we are not giving.
Love brings to our attention what's shining, life-giving, and meaningful.
And confusion can tell us when we've lost our way, or are on the brink of finding a new one.
We can discover all this by giving up our efforts to push away, deny, numb ourselves, or otherwise pretend these moods don't show up for us.This means turning towards one another in conversation, being prepared to name for one another the experiences in which we find ourselves. It requires widening our sense of what is true far beyond what we'd call narrowly 'rational'. And it calls on us to wonder together, at where our moods arise from and what they might be showing us that has, until now, been invisible.
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Obsessed by youth
We've allowed ourselves to become obsessed by youth.The way this has shaped our public lives is quite easy to see, from the relentless focus on youthful beauty in our media to the cruelty of causal ageism in the workplace.What's harder to see is how it is affecting the narratives we have about ourselves.We see all the ways that growing old is a falling apart, an endless series of losses, a disintegration. And so we try to stave it off, denying what is happening to us. As we grow older and as the time remaining to us diminishes, we become diminished in our own eyes. In this way we rob ourselves and others of our dignity.But here is an account of ageing from the Jewish mystical work, the Zohar, which points to a different possibility:
All the days of a person's life are laid out above,one by one they come soaring into this world...If a person leaving the world merits,he comes into those days of his life,they become a luminous garment.
Such a different way of looking, this - our inevitable, inescapable ageing as a gathering and weaving of the days of our lives into a single luminous garment. We wear the sum of all we have been and done in our bodies, on our faces, in our entire way of being in the world.This gives us growing older as an integration, a chance to unify ourselves, turning towards the shadow parts that we pushed away when we were younger.And it invites us to give up our dependence upon looking good or being liked, so that we can have our ageing usher us into the fullness of our humanity.
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Not so sure
It can be incredibly helpful to learn to distinguish between what happens and your assessment of it.
What happens:She didn't return my call
Your assessments:I must have done something wrongShe's angry with meShe hates meShe'll never forgive meI'm such a loserThis relationship is over
What happens can be observed and agreed upon by others, if they were there to witness it - even people who don't know you, or who have very different opinions to you.Your assessments are what you make of what happens. They are interpretations, arising from your particular perspective, experience, history, values, and commitments.Assessments can be more, or less, grounded. Sometime they're based upon a careful study of people and events. And sometimes they are wild flights of speculation and imagination. Or projections of a past situation into the future. Or an extrapolation: based upon an initial impression of someone we fill in all the details of who and how they must be.Making assessments is necessary, of course, if we are ever to make any sense of a world in which things keep on happening in a way that matters to us. But they can land us and others in deep difficulty when we fail to distinguish them from the events upon which they are based.When we take our assessments to be the unquestionable truth - and they can easily seem this way to us - we are in all likelihood heading for trouble.This is why we all need people around us who respect us enough to point out when what we're most convinced about is in fact shaky, and who can remind us not to be as sure of ourselves as we think we are. In the end, our truest friendship and deepest support comes from those who are willing to tell us that our assessments are assessments. And it's a huge step forward when we learn from them how to do this for ourselves.
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A five-fold symmetry
You step off the train, in a hurry. So much to do.Will you get it all done? What will other people think? Will you keep your job? Where will you be in a year, five years? Can you pay the bills? Will you get what you want? When will you get to rest? Will you find fulfilment? Satisfaction? Will you have to keep on pushing, putting in such huge effort? Can you stay in control of it all?So many things to worry about.And, as always, the platform meets your foot with exactly the right amount of resistance so that you can stand. Gravity holds you. Generations of human invention and discovery make possible the lighting, the locomotive pull of the train, the sliding doors, the clothes you are wearing. The air composed of just the balance of oxygen and other gases that you can breathe. And the lives of your billions of ancestors in oceans and on land, together with the extraordinary creativity of evolution, give you your eyes, mind, heart, body - the five-fold symmetry of your hands and feet.All so that this, you, and your life, are possible.So what if, as well as your fear and worry, you oriented to the day with the sense of wonder invited by this extraordinarily unlikely confluence of circumstances?