The more I look, the more it seems to me that among the most personally damaging acts each of us can take is that of turning away from truth.I’m not talking grand universal truths here – the kind that people claim apply across time and space and across people. It’s quite easy to see that establishing truth in this way is fraught with difficulty.No, I’m talking about something more basic and immediate: what’s true about this moment, this experience, from the place in which you stand.If you pay attention, it’s not so difficult to tell when you’re turning away from truth in this way. The truth that you are sad, or joyful, or angry, or despondent, touched or numb, feeling whole or split apart. The truth that this is difficult or painful for you. Or the truth that this is bringing you to life.The truth that these thoughts you are thinking, whatever they are, are what you are thinking. The truth that what you’re feeling in your body is what you’re feeling. The truth that this place is where you are, and that what you are doing is what you are doing.When we deny these simple, basic truths to ourselves and others – when we speak of ourselves inwardly or publicly with deliberate inaccuracy – we assault our own integrity. And we cause ourselves tangible harm, in our minds and in our bodies, by putting ourselves at odds with ourselves, fuelling the inner battles that pull us apart.And then being whole again requires a kind of return, a turning back to the part of ourselves that understands how things really are. A turning back to something simple, and straightforward, the heart of which we’ve known all along.
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Sometimes I remember that my days are numbered.My days for working are numbered.My days for seeing a cloudless sky are numbered.My days are numbered for sitting beneath tall trees.And my days are numbered for learning.My days for holding the ones I love are numbered,As are my days of kisses.My days of anguish, fear, and longing - they too are numbered.And my days of walking the crests of high hills.My days of deep conversation with friends and colleagues are numberedAnd the days on which I can make a dent on the world.My days for inventing, creating, demolishing, undoing, subverting, contributing.My days for mending and tearing apart.My days of confusion.My days of spreadsheets, keyboards, pens, paperclips.My days for travelling by train, bus, boat, plane.My days for reading, music, turning my face towards the stars, and washing the dishes.My days of getting to know myself.My days for understanding what life is.My days for loving.My days for knowing.All of these, too.I don't think I can remember this all the time.I am too forgetful for that.Too easily absorbed in the work of the day.But when I do remember, life shines with new depth and wonder.And I find it much more straightforwardTo do what I am here to do.
I'm on the way in to central London this morning, a short journey from home to meet someone. I've left in good time, and as I step out of the door the autumn sun, reflected from the windows on the other side of the street, catches me with its warmth.I'm already heading for the bus. Quick, quick, my inner-critic says, so much to do. If you rush you'll have a few more minutes to get everything under control. My chest tightens, and my jaw clenches just a little, and my shoulders turn inwards and upwards. I become something of a getting-there machine.But this morning I'm fortunate that I spot what's happening and question it. Yes, there's a long list of things to do... isn't there always? But I did not set out early in order to go faster. I set out early in order to go slow.The bus journey to the station will save me five minutes, and I'll arrive for the train squashed-in, ruminating on things done and not done, body more clenched than before, another step into a machine-like understanding of myself.Instead, this morning, I walk.The sky is exceptionally crisp and clear today, orange-tinted clouds against a striking, high blue. And the leaves are turning to match the sky. Deep green outlines early-autumn red. I slow my pace so I can feel my body and my breath, and allow myself to open to the beauty around me.And I reclaim myself. I remember that I am human - not a machine. That productivity and efficiency are but one part of a fully-lived life. That beauty, and the sky, and the rhythmic pace of walking and breath, and the deepening stillness of my mind are all foundations upon which I thrive.The critic is, for now, silent. And my sense of time is greatly expanded. I see again how long the world has been here before me, and how long it will be here after me, and that now is but but one tiny aspect of a vast world of which I am a part.We live deeply embedded in a narrative of efficiency and productivity, in which we measure our own worth and that of others by what gets done. In this understanding we understand ourselves as units of production, forgetting ourselves and our humanity so very quickly.And we forget the simple practices, invisible from our narratives of busyness, that can restore ourselves to a fuller life.
I'm sitting at my desk, opening the mail. It's been a long day. It still feels to me that there's much to do.The phone rings. I answer. It's Sam. He's calling to ask my advice on something that matters to him. Actually, it's something that really matters to me too.A part of me, deep inside, whispers too much to do, too much to do. It has quite a grip, this part. It twists itself around the inside of my chest, squeezing and pushing. And as I acquiesce and reach for the pile of unopened mail, it loosens, but only just as much as it has to. Ah, that feels better.For the first few minutes of the call with Sam I'm trying to speak with him while opening the mail. Keep it quiet, the squeezing part says, so that he doesn't know what you're doing. I open the envelopes as carefully as I can - which even then is not so quiet - and hope that he won't notice. At least the gripping has relaxed a little so I can breathe.The thing is, we're talking about something that really matters to both of us but, caught up as I am in a narrative of productivity (demanded) and deficiency (mine) I'm hardly present at all.I feel flat, a bit shaky, urgent.And I'm not listening. Just pretending to listen.I feel small, shallow, hollow.And then I remember myself. I remember all the times I've called someone I trusted for help and advice and found, quite astonishingly, someone willing to set aside whatever else they were doing to be, fully, with me.I put down my envelopes, and I set aside the demands of the critic-part, and I surrender myself to the conversation we're having.And all at once I'm in contact with Sam, and in contact with myself, and I find myself deeply touched by the conversation we're in the midst of, which itself moves from irritating to mattering.And I am reminded that things mattering is what makes us most human.
That hollowness you feel.Are you sure that running from it – into work, busyness, emails, surfing the web, eating – is such a good idea?What you’re experiencing is at the heart of the human condition. Not an error, but an understanding. An insight that there really is nothing to stand on.We’re thrown, without our permission, into a world that is bigger, more complex, and more mysterious than we can understand. And we have to find a way to live, knowing that we know so little, and that everything is shifting all the time. That at any moment it call all be taken away from us.In that way hollowness is not a mistake, but is instead a sign of your deep sensing of the way of things. By fleeing from it again and again into shallow distractions, you’re deepening your suffering. You’re fleeing from life. And whole industries exist to help you to do this.Today, perhaps, it’s time to turn fully, with courage and openness, into the hollow heart so it can give up its gifts.Let it become your home.Let it support you in standing, rather than fleeing, in the storms, uncertainty and huge possibility of a life that you did not ask for, but nevertheless have this one glorious opportunity to live.
We're all unfinished.We're all a bundle of contradictions, confusions, momentary glimpses, endless forgetting and unmeasurable possibility.We're all sadness, joy, brokenness, longing.And yet we pretend to be anything but.We're prepared to visit exquisite harshness on ourselves just for being who we find ourselves to be.What a kindness it would be to give up our attempts to impress ourselves and others with our togetherness and instead stand in wonder at the marvellous, incomplete, ragged and exquisitely beautiful mystery that we are.
I can see few clearer examples of the consequences of confusing 
An invitation is not an invitation unless the person invited is able to say no.And, in addition, in the face of the no, everyone remains whole.You remain whole.They remain whole.The relationship between you remains whole.Without those conditions being met, it's not an invitation at all. It's a demand. A condition. A bribe. A form of coercion dressed up as a gift. And, like many forms of looking-good we can get into, it's a way of being in control while pretending, perhaps to ourselves more than to anyone else, that it's nothing of the sort.
The image you carry around with you of each person you know is not that person.And the image you carry around with you of yourself is not you.So often, when you relate to others, you’re relating only to the image – a story, a narrative thread woven from glimpses, half-truths, and your own habitual way of accounting for things. You can hardly call it them. If anything, what you’re relating to is more properly part of you.How huge the distance there is still to cross to have any real sense of the other.And yet… this capacity to relax your certainty about other people so you can reach them and be reached is one of the great human qualities, if you’re prepared to allow for it. And if you’re ready to find out that, up close, other people are quite different from what you were sure they would be.