Part of the path

There's no doubt that I wish it hadn't happened this way.I wish we hadn't voted to leave the European Union; that the public debate had not been so filled with fear, and lies, and near-lies, and evasions; that we did not live in a society sliding into such deep and despairing inequality. I wish that there were less mistrust, suspicion, and denigration of the other in others, and of the other in ourselves. I wish we were not stepping out of institutions and structures that keep us in relationship with others, that require mutuality and compromise and, most of all, talking together. I wish we'd found a way of working out what to do that was more generous and expressed bigger commitments than only trying to get what we want.I wish I felt more confident and less afraid than I do today.But I'm also discovering that the part of me that is afraid doesn't only become so about political upheaval and all of its unknown consequences. It's afraid when projects I initiate don't go so well, when others get angry or bring conflict my way, when it looks like I'm not getting loved in the way it expects, and when there's a risk I may get shamed or embarrassed. It's afraid when I lose my umbrella, when I forget an appointment, when I'm running late, and when I've sent an email that might upset someone. It wishes, beyond anything else, to be able to control the world so that nothing bad can ever happen.When I engage with the world by trying to control it, my fear so easily becomes terror because it's a patently impossible project. I lose contact with my own resourcefulness. I lose contact with the support and generosity of others. I quickly forget myself and my capacity to contribute. I feel alone and helpless. I spin. I know many people feel like this today however they voted in yesterday's referendum.I also know that when I give up trying to control that which can't be controlled, so much more becomes possible. My fear right-sizes itself. I get to see that while there are things to be afraid of there are also reasons for hope - in our own capacity, in the capacity of others, in the relationships we make - that are quite distinct from how things turn out. I see that there are things to be done. Listening and speaking, holding and thinking and inventing and contributing. And I see the possibility that this situation, however it turns out to be, and however tricky, has the possibility of bringing out from us the generosity and compassion and wisdom that's always possible for us human beings.And for all these reasons, while I am afraid I am also hopeful, and seeing what I can do to treat the many obstacles ahead as part of the path.

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Messiness

We like to think we're over messiness. Done with it.That the world - our families, the organisations we work in, found, lead - can be ordered by the sharpness of our reason, by the power of our technology, by our sophistication, categorisation, and strength.That all disorderliness will be excised. That the world will bend to meet our will. That change - in ourselves, in others - will happen on our schedule, to our specifications. Like the world is a machine. Like we are too.And when it does not happen - when the mess of it all seeps between the lines, bulges out around the edges of our spreadsheets and to-do lists, whips the corners of our carefully planned timetables and calendars, unravels our hard-planned goals - we think someone must be to blame.We blame others, fuelling our frustration that they don't get it, won't get with the programme, won't make themselves into the image we have for them.We blame ourselves, turning the blade of self-doubt and of self-criticism. If the world can't be kept to order then we must not be trying hard enough. So we redouble our efforts - the inner wheel of perfectionism, the outer wheel of agitation. We tighten the armour across our hearts another notch. And we feel our bodies grip as the mess spills out behind us, just when we're not looking.And what we've missed in all this is that messiness is inevitable. Messiness is the underpinning of the world. Messiness is life's sacred heart. Messiness is the only way this crazy mix of quarks and protons, atoms and molecules, people and conversations, firing neurons and imagination, poetry, pulsing blood, falling rain, money, children being born, ethernets, tumbling rising markets, music, dust, pencils, love and egg-shells can be.

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Stepping In Podcast

I'm excited to announce that my friends and colleagues at New Ventures West have launched a new podcast today.

"Stepping In is an inquiry into life’s biggest challenges with one of the oldest and most distinguished coaching schools in the world. In a spirit of curiosity, compassion, and honesty, we delve into how Integral Development Coaching can address some of the most pressing issues we face as individuals, as communities, and as stewards of our planet. We’ll explore what it takes to develop the sensitivity and capacity required to live and thrive in an increasingly complex world."

The first episode, 'The Importance of the Body' with Ken Kirby, is available today on the New Ventures West website and on iTunes.More episodes will follow, and will in all likelihood include my own which addresses how our early origins shape us, and how philosophy can be a vital, living force in helping us to work productively with our own and others' development.

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On Aliveness

Important questions for any of us who care about our work:

  • Do the daily practices and rituals of my workplace cultivate aliveness and soul in me? In others? Or do they stifle life and squash the soul? (hint: it's often our attempts to control that squash the very aliveness we need).
  • If they stifle, am I really prepared to live with the consequences of work that's forgotten how to live? Really?
  • If I'm not willing to live with this, what am I going to do about it? What will I stop? What will I ask others to stop? What practices will I invent and initiate - even as an experiment - that could have things be different?
  • And am I ready to take the risky and vital step of leading... of being someone who treats this as with at least as much dedication as I show to our productivity, or to how much money we make?

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Leaving

I've been in Majorca this week with my family. As I walk down the cool stairs of our villa for the last time, that familiar feeling comes. A twist in my gut, a pain and a longing, a knowing that I may well never visit here again. It's quite possibly another in life's inevitable series of goodbyes.It's tempting to resolve the feeling by booking, right away, to come back. And it's possible that we'll choose to do that. But let me not act out of a wish to avoid losses and leavings. Let me at least have this be part of the continued practice of learning to let go - with dignity and humility.Because, in the end, it's letting go gracefully when I most want to hold on - to places, experiences, the people I love - that I am most going to need. And it's letting go that life will unquestioningly, with no malice, before long and repeatedly, call on all of us to do.

Organisational Ritual

Of course, our organisations are filled with rituals, though they can easily serve to split us apart from ourselves rather than connecting us up with one another and with our more courageous, contributory parts.There's the ritual of annual performance appraisal, which so often puts us in contact with our inner critic and our fear, inviting us in a defensive relationship with whoever we're appraising or who is appraising us.There's the ritual of the meeting that everyone said 'yes' to but nobody wanted to attend, in which we gain access to the part of ourselves that denies what we're really feeling and puts on a brave face.There's the ritual of the project presentation, with its deck of powerpoint slides that can be designed to inspire questions and curiosity but are often designed to dampen down life and keep everybody safe.And there's the ritual of goal-setting, which we can use to cover up how anxious we feel about how little control we really have, and which puts us in contact with the parts of us that reassure ourselves and others about what we don't believe to be true.I wonder at what we could we create if we were to more often and more purposefully invent enlivening organisational rituals rather than sleepwalking into ones which deaden. And if we designed our rituals to reconnect us daily with a sense of truthfulness, wonder, responsibility and connectedness to one another, and to remind us of the part we could yet play in this vast and unpredictable world.

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On Ritual

"As an archaeologist, my father always used to talk about the origins of language, of communication, being around a fire. When you think of that in relation to a theatre you realise that the audience is exactly the same scale as a sustainable human community from prehistory onwards, whether of 100 people or of 10,000. We become part of a collective imagining, we laugh at the same things, we find we are not alone. It's why religion and theatre are so closely entwined. Priests know how to put on a good show. They understand that we all need rituals, patterns."Simon McBurney, Playwright and Theatre Director

We've largely forgotten the power and importance of ritual. Perhaps because we've conflated ritual with religion, and taken religion to be superstition, something we ought to be over by now in a society founded on science and reason. Or maybe we have a hard time seeing what ritual can do in a cause-and-effect way. If we can't make a straight line from the doing of a ritual to a measurable improvement in something, we dismiss it as a distraction from the important work of getting things done.Maybe. I think these are our public stories, the stories of so many organisations and the story of so much marketing (where buying and consuming products and services becomes the new ritual to replace all others). But in our private spaces and in our quieter moments I think many of us long for the redemptive, grounding, relationship-shifting power of ritual. I agree with Simon McBurney that we need ritual to help us rediscover an orientation to life and to one another that can be more nourishing and more whole than the spun-apart, face-it-alone, get-ahead narrative that undergirds so much of our lives.Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh make the point eloquently when they describe how rituals allow us to rehearse a different relationship with life and with other people. In one example they outline the ritual qualities of hide-and-seek, which switches the usual order around, allowing the hiding adult to play at being vulnerable and small and the seeking child to rehearse being commanding, giant-sized, and powerful. Everyone knows that it is a game - games and play themselves are powerful rituals - and this is the very point. It's the 'constructed' nature of the ritual that gives it its power to upend things and give us a first-hand experience of parts of ourselves that we might not usually encounter so easily. Vulnerability in the commanding adult. Power in the vulnerable child. And a reconfigured relationship between both.I've long related to the rituals of my own Jewish tradition in this way, less as a matter of 'belief' but as practices honed and deepened over generations which, if carried out with intent, are very powerful invitations into a new standing with life. I know that when I pause with my family on a Friday night to say shabbat blessings over candle flames and sweet wine, I'm momentarily put back in contact with the part of myself that marvels at the existence of others, at the wonder of light, and at the good fortune of having food to eat and somewhere warm and dry that can shelter us. For a short while we share together in that aspect of us that can be grateful for all this, that knows that many people go short of their basic needs, that understands how small we are in a vast universe that we did not create, and that sees how little direct control we have over any of it coming our way.Of course, once the ritual is ended, we return to the messiness and complexity of our lives. We find ourselves feeling separate from one another again, perhaps a little afraid at the state of the world rather than grateful, and maybe overwhelmed by the minutiae of daily life rather than awash with wonder and awe. To expect anything different would be to misunderstand the nature of ritual. Because rituals are not talismans or magic spells, capable of changing reality in an instant, or shifting our bodies and minds in a simplistic way. When understood this way, they inevitably appear shaky and ultimately a disappointment. Rather they are practices. And if done with the right intention and sufficient attention they teach us, as we enact them repetitively over time, what it is to be in the world and be with one another in a deeper and more attuned way.Good rituals, so sorely missing in our culture, reintroduce us to that which is out of view, and that which we have left out, and in this way they can be profoundly transformative, deeply healing, and powerfully developmental.

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Habit and flexibility

Once we see that it’s our everyday practices, and the stories that accompany them, that shape who we are (through the gradual bodily formation of habit and familiarity) many new paths can open up.You can start to see how the inner and outer sigh you make when you see the sister who frustrates you reinforces your very sense that no progress can be made in your relationship. You’re an audience to your own sigh - the world shows up in a particular way in the light of it - and so is she. Each sigh sets out a narrow path for a particular kind of repetitive interaction that is reassuringly familiar even as it’s reassuringly frustrating. And once you see this, you can perhaps start to practice something else - a smile, or an embrace, or a simple and true expression of how you’re actually feeling which invites an equally truthful response from her.Perhaps you can see that your repeated practice of criticising people (yourself, those close to you) invites a world in which nobody is ever enough, and there’s always something to fix. And that along with this practice comes a kind of vigilance in you and others, a way of constantly scanning the world to see what’s missing or what might be criticised, which has you on edge, and afraid, and pessimistic about what’s possible. And once you see this, perhaps you can start to practice something other than a judgement. A welcome, for example, or a breath that relaxes the tightness in your chest and the clenching of your jaw. Or a spoken appreciation of what’s good, and of value, and to be cherished here.When we get too convinced by the familiarity produced by our existing practices, when we misunderstand the momentum of our habits as proof that we are such and such a way, we close off profound possibilities for ourselves and others - possibilities that come from our enormous capacity for flexibility, for attunement to the world, for generosity and compassion, and for creative and nuanced response.

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The Path

I'm reading, and loving, Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh's 'The Path', a book about how ancient Chinese philosophy can help us understand ourselves and live our lives more fully. It's concise, clear, and beautifully written. And, at the heart of it, is an important and wonderful idea from Confucius (echoed in the contemporary world by Martin Heidegger among others): that we largely become who we are through our everyday actions.This apparently simple claim has some extraordinary consequences.The first is that there is not so much of a fixed way that each of us is. When I say 'you know me, I hate being around company, I don't know what to do in a crowd' and then repeatedly take myself off to be on my own, I'm actively building myself into someone who is more skilful being with myself than being with others. I'm also becoming someone who knows myself in a particularly narrow way. I get to be the kind of person I am through the accretion of thousands upon thousands of actions, both internal and external, and the stories I tell about those actions, bringing some parts of me into view and pushing other parts towards the margins.For Confucius this is an important ethical issue. My story about myself - that I am a particular way - is much too small, leaving out as it does all those aspects of me (less known, and perhaps less tolerated by me) that can be quite skilful at social relating and which, with purposeful cultivation, could help me live a life which has more connection with people and a greater possibility of moment-to-moment care for others around me.The second consequence is that there is a profound and quite pragmatic developmental path to follow, one which can open up wide possibility, and that is the path of practice. Repeated, well-chosen practice - in my example above, the practice of being with and being attuned to others - not only builds skilfulness but allows me to rehearse a different kind of relationship to myself and to life than the one I'm used to. By choosing practice carefully I can gradually find out what it is like to be a social person as well as a solitary person, and cultivate those parts of me which (simply by being human) are quite able to be present with and take care of others.The point made so beautifully by 'The Path' is that in a culture dominated by the detached world-view of Cartesianism, which privileges thinking and theorising about things over the day-to-day doing of things, we've largely forgotten the value of simple, everyday practices and rituals as a support for living well. And we've forgotten how they can widen our horizons, build our capacity to respond more fully to life's inevitable unpredictability, and help us take care more skilfully of life's needs.