Escape

When I stop and look, quietly and patiently for a while, I come to see how often what I'm trying to do is get away.

Get away from this experience - so that I can have another one that promises to be better, more soothing, less troubling.

Get away from this conversation - that's stirring up my familiar sense of not having done enough, not having been responsible enough, not having taken care enough.

Get away from this moment so that I have a chance of being at peace.

How pervasive 'get away' is for me! My habitual orientation, unless I take care of it, is away-from-here. It's predicated upon an interpretation of life in which there is, in some way, always somewhere or somewhen better to be.And that is an interpretation riddled with difficulties and troubles, not least of all because of the dissatisfaction it produces, and the small space it offers in which to act. My attempts to escape life turn out to be a prison of my own making.So I'm working on deeper in to this experience, this conversation, this moment.Truth is, I've been working on this for a long time already. Because it's tricky - there are so many opportunities and reasons to fall back into trying to get away.But work on it I must - we all must, I think - in order to be present to, and to contribute to, this crazy and breathtaking life into which I did not choose to be born, but in which I nonetheless keep on finding myself. And from which there is nowhere better, truth be told, to escape to.

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Waiting

I'm waiting for some friends to pick me up in their car.All around me, people are coming and going on errands, on their way to meet friends or loved ones or business acquaintances. Some are hurrying, others earnest, some struggling with the pain of simple movement. Seagulls are calling. There's a distinctive fresh salty tang to the air. The sun is low, soft-edged, orange-yellow in the late afternoon sky.But I miss all of it. Because a small device in my pocket, bevel-edged and glassy, has grabbed my attention. I'm enchanted, responding to emails, checking for news that I'm wanted and needed, feeling the weight and promise of everything I've offered to do for myself and for others.And I'm at least a little afraid of what I'll feel if I put this down.Wherever I am I always have something to do. I'm defined by my doing, my to-do, my not-yet-done. I become, always, some form of producer or some form of consumer.And, because of this, I no longer know so much about the art of waiting.I am rarely freed, rarely cut loose to fall into the depths of my own longing, my confusion, my boredom, or my simple capacity to wonder at all that is around me.

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When promises break

We'll never talk behind one another's backsWe'll take our concerns directly to the people who concern usWe'll always give feedback with care

When you have made agreements about behaviour in your team, in your organisation, in your family, it's unhelpful - and unrealistic - to expect them to always be upheld. Such expectations, in the face of the many breaches and breakdowns that will occur, can quickly lead you and others to assume your agreements were meaningless and insincere. And from such a position comes despair and cynicism - nothing can ever change around here. In such a light, our promises soon come to mean nothing.Far more powerful is to treat the original agreements as sincere and genuine, but inevitably in conflict with other equally sincere competing commitments which we all hold, for example our commitment

to not feel ashamedto look and feel supportive to others in their difficultyto be liked and respectedto be helpful to the person who's with us right now

In the light of this, you can use your own and others' inevitable breaches not as an source of resignation but as an opportunity to understand and respond more skilfully to inner contradictions. And as an opportunity to look together, with curiosity, at the very real difficulties and challenges of being in relationship with others.When we discover and talk about our inner complexity, and correct our actions from there, we create the possibility of responding to difficulty not with recrimination (towards self or others) but with learning. And in the light of this our promises, shaky and incomplete as they are, can come to take on a new authority shaped less by our expectation that they'll be perfect, and more by our understanding of what to do - together - when they break.

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Make good art - inspiration for the start of the week

If you have time to watch one talk this week, I can't recommend highly enough Neil Gaiman's talk on the human imperative to make good art.Though he's talking to arts graduates (at the University of Philadelphia) his advice - a passionate plea that we not hold back our creative faculties - is a powerful invitation to all of us, whether we consider ourselves 'artists' or not, to live our lives themselves, as Abraham Joshua Heschel recommended, as art.His is a vital voice in a world where we'll all too quickly reduce ourselves and those around us to 'behaviours', to units of production, to the product of neurons firing or genes expressing themselves, or to passive consumers - and in the process forget to make the contribution that's really possible for us.[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikAb-NYkseI[/embed]

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A genuine treasure

Every complaint has at its heart a genuine treasure: a something that the complainer values and cares about.It’s so easy to miss this when we dismiss people as moaners, whiners, or nuisances.When our complaints are disregarded the hurt and resentment comes not so much from you not doing what we asked of you, but that you didn’t see us first and foremost as human beings with cares and concerns that matter.Instead of seeing complaining colleagues, customers, family as irritants, can you allow yourself to see the committed person behind the complaint? It’s a far more powerful, relationship-building, trust-developing place from which to respond.

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Towards or away?

Watching Julianne Moore's sensitive and touching portrayal of a women with early-onset Alzheimer's disease in Still Alice, I'm struck by how much each of us stand to lose. Whether it occurs for us as the loss of our selves first, as it does for Alice, or in some other configuration, we'll one day lose all of our relationships, all of our possessions, all of our stories.We'll lose trees and buses, boring train journeys, washing the dishes, music, kisses, worrying about money, sun-filled afternoons, drawing, gazing into the eyes of another, learning, the saltiness of the ocean, tax returns, earache, job titles, paperclips, mountains.It's the knowing that Alice's departure awaits all of us, though in wildly varying forms, that makes watching it so tender and so affecting.And it raises a question for all of us - what to do with this knowledge?Surrender and despair because nothing ever works out anyway?Open ever more widely to the wonder of the life that is here already?Make ourselves feel strong, impenetrable, holding rigidly onto our ideas and fighting away what scares us?Retreat into a world of banal distraction, turning into what's trivial because it soothes us?Build towers and edifices - real or symbolic - so that our names are never forgotten?Damage and destroy others, using our destructive power to give us the feel of conquering death?Open ever more to the knowledge that we're all - all of us - in this together and act from there?It seems to me that we're always in the midst of choosing one of these responses, or others like them, whether we're paying attention to our choices or not. And the kind of life we lead will flow, in significant part, from the way in which we choose to run from life and death, and from the way we choose to turn towards them.

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Easy to say, difficult to do

Of course sincerity is often difficult, because we're afraid of its consequences. We're frightened that if we speak truthfully we'll fall short of other people's standards,

or we're afraid they won't love us any more.

We're afraid it'll get in the way of our looking good,

or we're afraid people won't understand us.

We're afraid it will open a can of worms,

or we're afraid our words, once spoken, will box us in to a future we do not want.

We're afraid that owning up to what we really mean will make us look weak,

or that it will cause conflict we'd much rather avoid.

And because of all these fears we twist ourselves, distort ourselves, so that what comes out of our mouths no longer chimes with the wishes, longing, and intention of our hearts and conscience. Perhaps, as I know I do, you struggle with this daily, finding yourself looking sincere but knowing all the ways you've fallen short, again. Perhaps you know this is only human. Perhaps you're starting to see the cost to yourself, and to others. Because there's only so much twisting a human heart can take, I think. At some point we each have to start teaching ourselves that the price of our insincerity is far greater than we had imagined, and the consequences of our fears, far less.

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Sincerity

A useful, simple, pragmatic definition of sincerity:

"Saying on the outside what's happening on the inside"

... so that when you ask, promise, declare or inquire those who are listening are offered the possibility of trusting what you have to say... so that when you speak you are also offered the possibility of trusting what you have to say... and so we don't have to spend so much of our time and energy playing games - trying to figure out what each other want, and need, and are really committed to.

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Monster or angel?

Pick someone important in your life - a lover, friend, colleague. Your boss. A team member. Brother or sister. Mother or father.Now look - who are you having them be to you? What image are you projecting their way?Are you expecting them to take your pain away, to hold you in a perfect embrace (physical or metaphorical) in which you do not have to feel any worry or address any trouble?Are they an object for your resentment or your hate - propping up your self-esteem each time you belittle them in thought or deed?Do you have them elevated, on a pedestal, a constant reminder of your own inadequacy (and hence an excuse for the way you over-extend yourself or hold back)?Are they there to show you that you're loved and respected always? And when they fall short, to be the target of your frustration and woundedness?Are you expecting them to parent you? To excuse you? To soothe you? To excite you? To rescue you? To provide for you? To be an object of your scorn? To be a monster or an angel?And because of all of this, are you relating to them as them, or as an image?All of this matters because too often we find we're not in relationship with a person, but with a story. And as stories are smaller and more rigid than people are, it turns out that's not much of a relationship at all.

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Something missing

Behind all our activity, all our busyness, we live with the constant, gnawing sense that there's something missing.Often we try to hide it:From others. From ourselves. This is the root of much of our rushing and many of our addictions (shopping, email, browsing the web, eating). But numbing ourselves in this way numbs us to the rest of life too.Or we try to fill it:We imagine the perfect relationship, house, holiday or job title will have the feeling go away. We pursue power, money, sex, recognition, fame. We imagine there's a mythical island somewhere where we won't have to feel this way. And we imagine that others - upon whom we project the image of a perfect untroubled life - live there already. All of this fuels our suffering, our desperation, and our feeling that somehow we didn't work out how to live a properly successful life, while others did.The feeling that there is something missing is, to our surprise, not solved by having more. See Lynne Twist's book The Soul of Money for a first-hand account of the anguish even billionaires - those who want for nothing material - so often seem to have that their billions did nothing to assuage.No, to live with the sense that something is missing is an essential aspect of being human. It arises from our capacity to see possibility in every person, every thing, every situation. We know, always, some sense of that which is not yet here. And it is this very capacity that affords us our creativity, our compassion, and our ability to act to improve things both for ourselves and for others.Trying to rescue ourselves from the queasy hollow feeling of 'missing' fuels our obsessions and our distraction. Let's, instead, learn to do the difficult work of turning into it, towards it, living in it and with it and from it. And then, maybe, we can respond to the situations we find ourselves in rather than reacting mindlessly, blindly, and madly to banish what cannot be made to go away.

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