On Living and Working is 3 years old today.Although the boundary between the end of year three and the start of year four is in some ways entirely arbitrary, it reminds me that we always find ourselves standing at a frontier of some sort. Whether we call it an anniversary, or a birthday, or just 'today', we're deep in a conversation between what has come before and what comes next, between the known and the unknown. It's what it is to be human.At any frontier we have a profound choice, as Ursula K. Le Guin points out in her wonderful book of essays The Wave in the Mind. We can try to colonise the far side of the frontier with what's known to us, imposing our already familiar way of being in the world onto it, forcing it to take on our own shape. Or we can be softer, more curious, allowing ourselves to be informed by the unknown, shaped by it, letting it be our teacher.The colonising path seems so necessary and holds out the promise of freeing us from our fear. But it most often prolongs our anxiety, as it can never bring us what we ask of it. After a while it leaves us hardened and narrowed because it can only be achieved by shielding ourselves progressively from life's influence, by insisting more and more that we have life our way and on our terms. At some point we find out that we can only appropriate the future in this way by doing violence to ourselves and others, as colonisers the world over have done to the cultures they destroyed or bent to their will.The other path invites us to become students of the far side of the frontier, apprentices to its mystery. If we'll allow the unknown to reach us, if we'll inhabit our uncertainty and anxiety without running, if we'll allow our love and our difficulty, our wonder and our confusion to touch us, and if we'll let ourselves be porous and available to the events of our lives, we can start to find out that we are inevitably of life. And who knows what possibilities for a compassionate, wise participation in all of it that might bring?In this liminal space between three years and four, between now and next, I can see that the second path is the necessary path. That it takes a lot of letting go of things held very tightly. A great deal of courage. And much, much kindness.
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This morning, simple gratitude.For friendship. For brushing my teeth, for cups of tea, for sunlight on the slanting roof. For a body that can feel love, and joy, and sadness. For music. And for the uncountable generations who came before whose whose very lives bequeathed all of this exquisite ordinariness to us.
It's becoming more clear to me, as I go about my work in the world of organisations, that so many of us have never learned how to learn.We know how to find out about facts, yes, and models - we know how to do that. But knowing how to do the learning that changes us, up-ends us, opens up new possibilities for understanding, action and relationship? Or working with the many emotions and difficulties that come when we step into something new? What about understanding our inner worlds with enough discernment that we can catch on to the hidden commitments (to stay safe, to look good) that compete with our stated wishes? We're generally not so skilled at that.I've started to lay out over recent days how our societal commitment to detached understanding (the 
A recipe for learning not to trust ourselves:Step 1 - Kindergarten: Play! Encourage freedom, creativity, feeling, and its expression. Explore the world through the immediacy of the body and senses. Make a mess. Hop and jump. Listen to stories. Tell them.Step 2 - Infant school: Start to leave parts out. Sit down on the rug, or on your chair. Learn not to fidget, to pay attention, to respect others - necessary skills for life in our culture. Play, yes, but not too much now. Big school is coming.Step 3 - Junior school: Keep still for many hours. Stop talking. The movement of bodies - an interruption. Play is only for prescribed times - not while we're learning. It's your job to pay attention always, regardless of how you feel, or what you care about. The adult world is coming.Step 4 - Senior school: Learning is knowing facts or models in a way that's increasingly detached from my first-hand experience. Do I care deeply about this subject? Does it move me? Can I connect it with my life? This, and other matters of the heart, are no longer so relevant, and rarely addressed in the classroom. The heart and the body - subjugated to the world of the analytical mind. The highest mark of educational achievement - that I learned to pass the exam, that I can produce what's measurable.When we follow a path that progressively leaves out parts of ourselves, it should come as no surprise that we have a hard time trusting the parts we've abandoned. Our hearts: how we tell what matters to us. And our bodies: the means by which we relate, create, explore, encounter, move the world. And it might explain how we've convinced ourselves that models, frameworks, and techniques are a substitute for a real, live, scary, exhilarating, fierce, risky and life-giving engagement with ourselves in the pursuit of the work that matters to us.
Given that we are the only creatures (that we know of) that can tell stories about ourselves;and given that we live bound up in the stories we tell;and given that stories of any kind can be more or less truthful, more or less kind, more or less generous, more or less creative, more or less freeing of our enormous potential…… given all of this, don’t we have a profound responsibility to question the stories we were handed? To not just take things ‘as they are’?And to actively find – and consciously live by – the most truthful, kind, generous, creative, possibility-freeing stories about ourselves, about others, and about life that we can?
Rene Descartes' 
Three opportunities coming up in London in coming months, for those of you nearby or those who can travel here.On Sunday April 17th, the latest 
When we rely on events to change things in our organisations - an executive residential, a training day on relationships, a session on 'difficult conversations' - we're treating ourselves as if we're machines. A new part, some oil in the right place, installing a patch to the operating system - that'll do it.When we imagine ourselves this way, we set ourselves up for such disappointment. We pour our hearts and our good intentions into the event, thinking that this time it will do the trick, this time the upgrade will work. And we wonder why things the next day seem pretty much the way they were before.We'd be so much more effective, and so much kinder to ourselves, if we understood that we are living processes, shaped all the time by the practices we take up and by the relationships that surround us. We'd know then that events can help us, for sure, but that it's not the events themselves that bring about the change we seek as much as our relationship to them. We'd see that unless we're prepared to use events as an invitation to practice - with all of the uncertainty, all the learning that's involved, all the letting go that practice entails, and all of the times that our practice goes awry and we have to commit to begin again once more - we can rightly expect our events to do very little at all.And this point - that practice goes awry - is probably the most important. We know, intuitively, that a two-day event exploring the piano doesn't make any of us a competent pianist. We'd expect to have many subsequent days of struggle and difficulty, with steps forward and setbacks, before we'd feel proficient. Before real music would be possible we'd expect days when our practice sounded disjointed or discordant, and to play many wrong notes from which we'd gradually learn the right ones. We'd expect to need help, and time to reflect on what's happening. And we'd expect to experiment and practice again and again for many weeks.It's the same for the work of building trust between colleagues, for learning how to get out of our endless busyness and rushing so we can think, and for finding how to work together effectively, and skilfully, and joyfully.If we understood this, I think we'd expect a lot less of events and see a lot more possibility in ourselves and in each other. And we'd know that our very difficulties are the path, not a reason to be discouraged, not proof that we're getting it wrong, and certainly not a reason nor an excuse to avoid the difficult, life giving and essential work of practicing together what we say we most want to bring about.
Between June 2011 and the following July I had three close encounters with death. Three life punctuating events brought about by sudden and unexpected changes within my body, each shocking and frightening, each a reminder of how fragile and unpredictable life can be.As I recovered from each episode I expected - hoped - that I would in some way be profoundly different. I wanted so much to find myself more grateful, more accepting, more joyful of life's many small blessings, less judgmental, less afraid, less irritated by small things, more kind, and more dedicated to being present and welcoming and loving with the people who matter to me.But it didn't work out so simply. I emerged from each experience blinking and shaken and grateful, and soon settled back into many of my familiar patterns.Over time I've found myself thinking about this differently. What happens if I allow these experiences to inform the way I live rather than expecting them to change me? How can I, having encountered the possibility of death so closely, use my experience to commit fully and wisely and generously to life?In taking on this question I'm finding out that the change I seek is a question of practice rather than of events. And that I am an ongoing process much more than I am a thing with enduring properties, an object that is a particular way. I live myself into being, day after day. I am always living myself into being by the very ways in which I live.How I move, how much I take care of myself, how I express curiosity and interest in the world, how I speak and listen, how I sleep, how I sing and laugh, how I play and create, how I bind myself up in community, how I practice compassion and stillness, how I love, how I work - all these shape the life I am living and who I become, far more than the punctuating events themselves.And this tells me so much about the mistaken ways in which I look for change in myself and in my relationships with others. When I mistake life for a thing I imagine an event of sufficient power will do it. An affecting conversation, a kiss, a show of force, a book with a revelatory idea in it, an illness, a windfall, a conference, an argument, the right gift, or a brush with death will fix things, in the same way that I might fix a dented metal bowl by attempting to knock it into shape. But when I know myself as a living, unfolding process, events take up their proper place as teachers rather than fixers, educating me about the ongoing practices by which I can take care of this one precious life.The more I imagine events alone will do it, the more I set myself up for the despair and frustration that comes from relying on something that cannot help.And the more I commit to the ongoing, long-term, diligent and patient practice of living in a way that brings life, the more genuine reason I have to hope.
"My manager (or partner, child, colleague, best friend, client, customer) should know what to do. She should. And because of this, I’m not going to ask. I’m not going to tell her what I need, what I want, or what I see. I’m going to stay quiet. Why should I say anything? Because she should just know."Where does this get you - even if it’s true?Can you think of any move more sure to rob you of your power, distance you, and deny you the very thing you want or need most - except, perhaps, your wish to remain frustrated, bitter, resentful and endlessly disappointed?