What do you imagine brings forth our most generous creativity, commitment and attentiveness? Would you say fear, or care?And, yet, we seem determined to construct our companies, and our schools, around making people afraid.It may not look this way. We cover it up with a veneer of respectability, process, and 'best practice'. But, still, we try to bring about so much of what needs to happen by generating fear - about the future, about prospects, about promotion, about opportunity.Perhaps we do this because we have not yet become skilful enough at working with, or being present to, our own fear. Because we're had by our fear, we imagine we'll bring about something that lasts by stirring it in others.But while fear can be a powerful force for immediate action, it quickly leaves us resourceless, frozen, diminished and disconnected both from others and from the source of our own creativity and aliveness.Could we instead take the bold move of cultivating and welcoming the care that is equally inherent in being human?
Photo Credit: Chiara Cremaschi via Compfight cc
You probably have no idea of the actual scale of your presence in the world.Under-sizing:
You know me. I'm not the kind of person who:
Myths we live by...... it happens to them, but it could never happen to me... there's really no cost to my overworking... and what I do won't really affect my body (I'm invincible)... it (doing what deadens me, sacrificing my integrity, twisting myself out of shape) is only for now... I don't need any help... other people get old, not me... none of this is, really, happening... there's something wrong with me... there are people who live without pain, grief or suffering (just not me)... if I wait long enough (am good enough, liked enough, smart enough), someone or something will save me... I'll be happy when (I get the car, the lottery win, partnership, I retire)... everyone's looking at meDo you live by any of these?And have you ever stopped to wonder about the cost?
I was reminded this week of a beautiful quote from Anaïs Nin about what it takes for people to develop:
I am finding out how often I experience protective anticipatory moods.There's a part of me that makes sure I feel disappointment, long before the events about which I might feel disappointed have taken place. I can feel anticipatory disappointment - a kind of flatness and emptiness - before spending time with people I care about, before a special experience which I've been looking forward to, before teaching, before travelling. I've been feeling a special kind of anticipatory disappointment in the run up to the elections on Thursday here in the UK.And there's a part of me that can make sure I feel anticipatory shame. Before speaking in public, before sharing my deepest inner experience with others, before asking for something that I want or desire, before making a stand for something that matters to me.The more I care about something - the more significant it is to me - the more often I'll feel one of these. And the more often they'll have me tune out or hold myself back.It has been revelatory to spot this process at work - to disentangle how I'm feeling from how the world is. Because while these anticipatory moods are related to the world, they're not so much of the world. They are, more accurately said, an attempt by protective inner parts of me to shield me from the more potentially public kind of disappointment or shame that comes from engagement with the world or with others.Let us do the shaming or disappointment first, these parts say, to spare you a much worse kind of shame or emptiness.As is so often the case, simply seeing these parts for what they are (and honouring their ultimately unhelpful attempts to protect me) has them relax, giving me a much better chance of bringing myself fully and courageously to the world.
We just need more communication round here...... as if communication were a thing, not a living activity... as if communication were something that you wait for... as if communication is an object that can be given to you by others... as if communication were not something you participate inWe partly treat communication as if it were a thing because we're in thrall to the idea of work as machine more than work as a living process. But we do it also because we know that really communicating with one another exposes us to risk - the risk that comes from connection with others, the risk that comes from revealing ourselves, the risk that comes from people disagreeing or saying 'no' to our ideas and hopes, the risk of disappointment, the risk of not feeling things are moving quickly enough, the risk of feeling ashamed.Yes, invent processes, restructure meetings, install technology, reorganise your organisation. All of them can help. But don't for a minute imagine that any of that will resolve your wish for better communication unless you're also prepared to take the simple but radical step of listening and talking more, and learning to do so more and more skilfully.
It's 
When we find out how much of the world is made up - by us - it's tempting to pull everything apart. We pull apart institutions - because we see how groundless their authority is. We pull apart politics - because as we see more into the ordinary lives of our politicians we discover that they are ordinary and flawed like us, and we no longer have reason to simplistically trust either their intentions or their abilities. We pull apart relationships - because we don't feel any reason to commit, beyond our moment-to-moment likes and dislikes. And we pull apart beliefs and practices that can bind us together.This step - using reason to see through what we'd taken to be unquestionably true is in so many ways a necessary developmental step for each of us and for our society. Indeed, it's the step that allowed us to discover science and its methods of rigorous, grounded inquiry. And it made it possible to undo the divine right of kings to rule over us, and to bring about democracy.But it's also so easily the route to nihilism: the move to render everything meaningless, everything pointless, everything disposable as we discover that the structures and stories and roles we used to trust were made up by other people. And, as the philosophers Kierkegaard and Nietzsche warned us, this ends up with us tearing meaning apart too, as we find out that what meaning we encountered in the world was only there because other people declared it anyway.And so the next step important after undoing it all is to find out that it's also within our power to put things back together, to declare meaning for ourselves. To find out that there are many kinds of truth, including those that take into account goodness and beauty as well as just reason. That out of the fragments of what we have taken apart, we can still choose practices, people, relationships, stories, commitments and vows to live by that invest life with purposefulness, care, and dignity. And that this is possible, and necessary, in every sphere of life - in work, home, community and politics - specifically because we've found out that without it there is so little for us to stand on.