It's not kindness

Sometimes, a commitment to everyone around you being ok can cause more suffering than you know.You might think you’re just being kind, principled – a person committed to harmony, peace, and the wellbeing of others.But it’s not kindness if your habit of saving others from their difficulty:

denies them their dignity or freedomhurts the people around themhas them become dependent upon youacts so that you, principally, can feel better about yourself.

It’s not kindness to insist all is well, that everyone look on the bright side, and in doing so ignore others’ difficulty or judge it as moaning or whining.And it’s not kindness to turn away from important conversations that can liberate people from their suffering, simply because you fear that you or others might get upset.Kindness like this might still feel like kindness to you. It might feed the story that you’re really there to help. But what you’re doing each time is covering up the difficulty. And in each case there’s some significant suffering that calls for a much bigger contribution from you.Kindness that makes a genuine difference to others requires enormous courage, because it can never just be about fulfilling your story about yourself, or making you feel better that you did the right thing.This kindness knows when to wait as well as when to act. It knows that cutting the bonds that hold others in their difficulty can require fierceness and sharpness as well as softness. It has a much bigger perspective than just this moment, just this incident, just what you’re feeling right now.And this sort of kindness – which looks long into the future to assess the consequences of its actions, and which casts a broad net to include many others in its care – has so much more possibility for bringing about the peace and freedom you really long to bring into the world.

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The antidote to resentment

Resentment is a mood that has, at its heart, the judgment that you have been wronged and there's nothing you can do about it. It casts you in the role of the righteous injured party - the one who must get even in order to have any self-esteem, but is denied any route to do so - and the other person in the role of villain. It's no wonder then, where resentment leads - either to a cold, aloof distance or to silently but subversively trying to get even. And when resentment shows up in relationships that matter (can it ever meaningfully show up anywhere else?) it quickly has a powerfully corrosive effect by perpetually casting you as the victim to the other's persecution.The antidote? Learning how to make requests. Because requests bring us in close, back into relationship, into contact - even if the other person says no to what's being asked of them. Making requests of another accords the other person dignity, elevating them from mere object of your scorn into a full human being.And sincere requests accord you the dignity of once again being human too - being one who has the power to make your needs and wishes heard. So learning to ask when you're resentful, rather than distancing yourself, might be the most counter-intuitive and the most healing move you can make.

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It can only be love

 When you find out about death...And when you yet feel your own aliveness coursing through your body, heart pumping, breath breathing without your having to do anything, thoughts thinking themselves into existence...When you see and feel how much is alive around you, in you, with you...When you look into the eyes of another...What else can it be, all this life, but a boundless expression of love of which you are, indivisibly, a part?

The humanity of the other

The enabling step, David Broza said, in bringing together Jewish and Palestinian musicians in such a tense, fraught, risky situation was to eat together. The evening feasts organised around the recording involved up to a hundred people talking, eating, and singing with one another - catered for by Israeli and Palestinian chefs - a series of encounters that laid the possibility for everything else, an extended conversation for relationship. This, he said, is how things really happen in middle eastern cultures. But it's also the way of humanity.The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas makes a similar point. Discovering the human world of others, he says, is a primary moral obligation. And once you see that another person is a human being, as you are, once you enter into an I-You relationship with them, other moral obligations necessarily follow. In the face of the other you are obliged to listen, to enter into dialogue, to say what is true, to extend yourself as far as you can to understand the other's world, and to respond with both compassion and wisdom.Perhaps it's this very fact that leads us to avoid the intimacy of genuine human to human contact in so many situations between communities and in our organisations (where it's quickly dismissed as 'touchy feely', as if that itself seals the matter). Because when we encounter the other as human, we discover that we have responsibility towards them.Without attending to this, anyone - lover, friend, colleague, child, neighbour, visitor, customer, a whole people - easily becomes an object; an 'it', a means to an end, a supply for our own need to be loved, to be right, to rage, to hate, to earn, to judge, to feel superior. When you have eaten with someone and, more significantly, when you have allowed yourself to feel what it is really like to be with them it is much harder to see them this way. When you have heard them talk about the longing of their heart, when you have shared a meal, when you have understood the feel and detail of their ordinary domestic life with its concerns and struggles, when you have looked into their eyes, when you have been in contact with their humanity it's more difficult to see them as an object: the enemy, the boss, the subordinate, the supplier of my needs, the one to mistrust, the one placed on a pedestal, the Palestinian, the Jew.

East Jerusalem, West Jerusalem

Yesterday evening singer-songwriter David Broza was in London. I was fortunate enough to be at an event where he spoke, and sang, and showed his film East Jerusalem, West Jerusalem, which documents the recording, over eight days in an East Jerusalem studio, of an album featuring Palestinian and Jewish Israeli musicians.The music itself is really quite something, but what struck me even more was the deep longing and humanity expressed in the film by each of the musicians participating, both Jews and Palestinians. The longing to be seen, the longing to be in I-You relationship with others and the longing to express hope and despair and love and sadness. And what happens when that longing can be met with sincerity by the longing and humanity of others, however apparently different their culture and background.In his talk about the project David spoke about how important hope is. Once hope is replaced by the cynicism and despair so familiar in our times, he said, nothing is really possible any more. Cynicism closes off so many avenues that hope keeps open. And so hope, or a faith in our capacity to improve things, becomes a moral imperative, a necessary condition for the resolution of suffering and the solving of our most complex and confusing difficulties.He also said something deep and important about time. Peace, he said, like so much that is important to us, requires a multi-generational commitment. We misunderstand it, as we do so much else, by insisting on immediacy, too quickly concluding that it is impossible because we're not personally seeing the fruit of our labours. There is a significant kind of peace and understanding between people that can only be brought about by the diligent commitment of many over long periods. It requires persistence, and patience (surely in great decline in our current age), as well as the hope I described above. How many of us, I wonder, are willing to dedicate ourselves to anything big enough, and difficult enough, that it takes more than the span of our own short lives?And he spoke, as did Du at our event last month about what it is to respond to a vocational call (though he did not use this word). The East Jerusalem, West Jerusalem project, he said, is but the latest expression of the one and only contribution he finds he can uniquely make, given who he is, when in history he is living, and what he loves. It's clear from being with him and listening to him play that this is not so much a choice he is making as a call that life is making on him - where his heart's particular longing and gladness meets the particular troubles of the world in which he lives. And in responding to life's call his part is not to make grand political gestures, but to be in close, in intimate relationship with others, making music and inviting the humanity of close-in relationship and singing about what he uniquely sees and what uniquely moves him.And what beauty it brings about, as you'll see if you have an opportunity some day to watch the full film, which as yet does not have a distributor.There's a film of David Broza speaking recently at a TEDx conference in Jerusalem which you can see here. I strongly recommend watching at least the first few minutes in which he plays and sings one of the central songs of the project. And if you're prepared to dedicate a few more minutes of your time, you might find something of what I'm saying above in what he has to say.Here's a video of the title track from the album, recorded with Wyclef Jean.[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSU5YxIkyko[/embed]

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We see others as we are, not as they are

Even before we've really studied ourselves and developed some kind of understanding of the vast contours of our inner worlds, we're presented with a difficulty in relating to other people, because in so many ways the personhood of others is mostly invisible to us.We see our own commitments, cares, and intentions - and interpret our actions in the light of that knowledge. But when it comes to others we can only see their actions, which we most readily interpret in the light of our way of knowing the world.Or, said another way, we see others not as they are, but as we are.And how much difficulty, trouble, and suffering can come from that simple, basic, misunderstanding. Until, in due course, we find out how to soften the certainty of our own interpretations and open, with curiosity, to the very otherness of even the closest of others.

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Wisdom that comes with age

We live in a culture that prioritises youth over genuine wisdom, the speediness of the moment over what takes time to mature and grow, and obviousness and immediacy over the deep understanding of complex, interrelated systems. Given all of this it’s wonderful to see serious coverage in the mainstream UK press given to the possibilities of development - and all that it brings - as we grow older.

The capacity to be powerful in the midst of the super-complex systems and organisations upon which we rely does not come easily. It requires a significant set of interrelated skills in sensing, understanding, speaking and listening, self-care, self-awareness, request making, and acting into the unknown. These skills do not come immediately to us and require years of practice, diligent self-observation, commitment, and a genuine capacity to let go of what seems certain so that what’s less obvious can be encountered. So it should be no surprise to us, as reported in this week’s Guardian newspaper, that such capacity is more often found in those who have had longer to live so far (as long as they have remained sufficiently open to the developmental opportunities that have come their way).

The Guardian article draws on a paper published by consultants PwC, itself drawn from research carried out at Harthill, that shows that people who have reached this skilful strategist stage of their development are more frequently found among women over the age of 55 than among any other group. This is important for us to see - because we don’t take adult development nearly seriously enough (it’s vital if we are to be able to effectively manage and run contemporary systems and organisations for the benefit of everyone), and because we don’t see that there is a kind of systemic wisdom we need that is rare, necessary, and most widely found in those people we quickly write off as ‘past it’.

David Rooke and his colleagues at Harthill are among a number of people who have done excellent work in describing what development is - descriptions which make it easier for us to talk about and identify the kind of wisdom we most sorely need, as well as what can make it possible for people to bring it about.

For a clear introduction which goes far beyond what’s included in either the Guardian or the PwC paper, you could read Rooke & Torbert’s paper ‘The Seven Transformations of Leadership’ published originally in the Harvard Business Review, summarised here, and available from Harthill's Leadership Development Framework website.

And for a deeper understanding of what development can be, and the consequences of our blindness to it, read Robert Kegan’s book ‘In Over Our Heads’ or his more recent (and more straightforward) book with Lisa Laskow Lahey ‘Immunity to Change’.

You can read more about what I’ve had to say about this topic here and here.

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Knowing yourself

And so any of us who leads, or wishes to lead others, could do well to study ourselves closely through taking up (1) some kind of mindfulness meditation practice which brings us into repeated and sustained contact with our inner world, and (2) through taking up a reflective journalling or writing practice.It's simple, really. Until we start to know ourselves we're mostly on automatic pilot, hardly a way to powerfully and responsively bring ourselves to what matters.To be clear about what I am saying here: developing self-knowledge is really very different from using mindfulness or reflective practices as a way of tuning out, numbing ourselves, staying calm, trying to have a transcendent experience, or training ourselves to put up with the status quo without complaining too much - all of which seem to be fuelling the current hype around mindfulness at work.Getting to know ourselves well is not easy to do, mostly because when we stop our busyness we quickly come into contact with our own inner turmoil which we'd rather get away from. But it's necessary if we are to know our reactions and responses well enough to have them rather than be had by them.And we also need to do this because it's only by knowing the contours of our own inner worlds that we can get a glimpse of what others' inner worlds are like. Until then, we just see others' behaviour without any real idea of what they might be experiencing. In this way developing self-knowledge builds the foundations for the compassion and deep understanding that any of us need in order to work well with, cooperate with, take care of, and stay in productive and creative relationship with other people.

Making visible

So much of what it is to be a person is invisible to us.Yes, we can see outward behaviour, but we can't see the thoughts, intentions, vows, commitments, bodily sensations, meaning, love, joy, grief, sadness, hope or pain of others.In order to see and understand other people as people and not as objects we need to be able to understand the contours of their inner worlds. And in order to do that, we need to know our own inner worlds: we need the language and discernment to notice and distinguish what's happening inside us. But we have abandoned the practices that can support us in this.We've abandoned reflection and replaced it with busyness.We've abandoned sitting quietly with ourselves and replaced it with consuming.We've abandoned patient and disciplined self-observation and replaced it with entertainment.We've judged the contemplative practices of those peoples and traditions that came before us to be irrelevant, spooky, or superstitious - at odds with our apparently sophisticated, rational way of being.Our capacity to understand ourselves, and to understand others, has been flattened out, rendered shallow and inconsequential as a result. We barely know ourselves, and we barely know how to respond to the suffering and difficulty of those we work with, and those we live with.If we want to build families, communities and organisations in which people have a genuine chance to thrive, we need to take care of this.It's time we took back what we've so comprehensively abandoned, so we can learn to treat what's invisible about others and, first, about ourselves, with the seriousness and wonder it deserves.