Perhaps uniquely among living creatures, we have the capacity to sense beyond the particular details of the situation in which we're living. We can see its limits, and perhaps more importantly we can see our limits. We can understand that there's a ceiling to our power and capacity, that our time is finite, that the future is unknowable, that our understanding is small, and that much of what we depend upon is way more fragile than we'll ever admit.There's a special word for the feeling this evokes - angst.We mostly experience angst as a feeling of absence, because in coming up against the limits of our world, and the limits of our understanding, we quickly conclude that something is missing and that we must be responsible for it. We feel that we ought to change things, make them better, fix them up. We feel our inadequacy in doing so.And so we build cultures, organisations and lives in such a way as to shore us up against experiencing angst. We imagine that if we don't have to feel this way - perhaps if we don't feel too much at all - then we can assure ourselves that everything will be just fine.Of course, in the end this doesn't work out, because behind all our busy activity, our habitual routines, and our constant affirmations that we're doing ok, angst is still making itself felt. In a way our efforts make it more apparent, because living in such a way as to avoid angst means making our world small and tightly sealed. The feeling that we're deceiving ourselves and imprisoning ourselves and that there is some bigger way of living becomes even more present, even as we try to hide it.Running away from angst, it turns out, amplifies it and robs it of its biggest possibilities.The way through this?Firstly, giving up the idealised notion of an angst-free future. Angst is, it seems, built in to the human condition and comes as a consequence of our capacity to see beyond ourselves. And so there can be no world in which angst is fully absent.Secondly seeing angst not as a terrible something to be avoided, but as an invitation, a reminder of the truth of our situation, which is that the world is much bigger, more mysterious, and more possibility-filled than we can usually imagine. And that even though there's really nothing to stand on, there's much that we can trust.Angst is then not a signal to hide away, but a reminder of the uniqueness of our human situation. And a call to step more fully into life.
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We human beings are profoundly shaped by, and drawn out from ourselves, by the things that are around us. And the smartphones that most of us carry are purposefully designed with this in mind.It's no accident that we find ourselves checking and re-checking email, messages and social media, before we even know quite why. We're drawn in by the promise of a brief, welcome surge of expectation and hope. This is going to be the moment when we'll find out that everything is OK, or that we're wanted, or that we're loved. This is the moment that we'll be saved from our anxiety.But shortly afterwards, we feel a familiar hollowness and emptiness. The hit was but for a moment. Our devices call to us, wink at us, and buzz us with the promise. And we willingly succumb, knowing it will not satisfy us but feeling unsure about whether we can do anything about it.We have, as Seth Godin writes, a 
We have to find a way to love our brokennessNo, not loving ourselves in spite of our failingsBut loving the brokenness itselfWe have to love all the ways we're lateAnd all the ways we missed the pointWe have to love that we were scaredAnd that we were ashamed to say itWe have to love that we didn't get it all doneAnd love that we imagined it was doable in the first placeWe have to love that we're such a glorious messAnd how we struggle to meet our own standardsWe have to learn to love, in short,all the ways we fall shortBecause our grace, courage and capacity to standOur care of what's broken in the world around usIs strongest when we're carriedby that which we've learned to cherishAnd not when we're miredin that which we've chosen to hate.
Today, the final day of 2016, is both the seventh day of Christmas and the seventh day of the Jewish festival of Chanukah. The two festivals coincide only about every 30 years or so, when a combination of factors pushes the Jewish year - in which the months turn by the cycles of the moon - later into the Gregorian calendar than usual.Chanukah always falls in the week with the longest, darkest nights of the year, straddling the new moon that falls close to the winter solstice. As with winter festivals marked by many traditions, it's concerned with our capacity and responsibility to bring light to the dark.And so, after starting with one candle last Saturday and adding a candle each night, people all over the world will tonight be lighting eight candles to mark the final night of Chanukah and, coincidentally, the final night of this calendar year.As the rabbis who shaped Chanukah some 1600 years ago said, it's our responsibility to gather light, to increase light, and to be light. It's harder to see this in those times when the world itself seems shining with hope and possibility. But in the darker hours, when the sun is down and even the moon is obscured from view, we see the darkness itself more clearly. And we see how easy it is, when we're gripped by fear or self-righteousness, to wittingly or unwittingly contribute to its spread.As we end a calendar year that has seen an upsurge in the politics of division and fear, a new legitimacy given to voices - in Western democracies at least - of prejudice and rage and suspicion of the 'other', and the election in the US of a powerful, narcissistic leader with a fragile ego, let's remember our human responsibility to increase the light around us and between us.Let's increase it with art and poetry.Let's bring light by being fierce advocates for reason, critical thinking, and science. By learning, ceaselessly. By feeling, fully and truly. By reading, widely. By overcoming our self-diminishment enough to say what's called for.Let's bring light by giving up treating ourselves and others as objects, or commodities, or means-to-an-end. By opening to one another.Let's bring light by giving up using language as a way to cover up truth in our organisations, our institutions, our schools, our families. And let's do it by giving up the cover of 'it's only business', or 'that's just the way politics goes', or 'it's my truth' as a way to gain power over others or to silence them.Let's bring light by finding out how to be ones around whom others' hearts soar, around whom others can find out what's uniquely theirs to bring and then bring it without shame, or self-reproach.Let's do it with song.Let's bring light by getting over our self-pity, our resentment, our sense of how unfair it is that our lives are whatever way they are.Let's bring light by learning how to listen to, and speak with, ever wider circles of people who have lives, commitments, and beliefs very different to our own. And by standing for kindness, and dignity, being a force for the elevation of life rather than the diminishment of it.Let's bring light by dedicating ourselves to projects and commitments that are bigger than our own comfort, and bigger than our own personal gain.Let's remember that we can only do this hard and necessary work by being committed to our ongoing development. And that we can be at our most wise and compassionate only when we do all this with the help of one another.
Those of us who have any kind of privilege, who don't have to scrabble in the dirt to make a living or to find food, who don't have to run from bombs and missiles, who aren't being beaten down by oppressive systems of government or prejudice... we had better start taking seriously our duty to care for ourselves, as an act of dignity, as a responsibility, as an act of honour towards those whose circumstances prevent them from doing so, and just because we can.As Parker Palmer writes, 
When we measure effort by results alone - return on investment, percentage growth, money made, units shipped - we easily forget that it's the nature of human beings to be shaped by what we do. We're profoundly affected by the actions we take, even if we choose to pretend that's not the case. We become what we do.And there are real consequences to our wilful blindness. Pushing ourselves ever harder to hit targets with no consideration of the bodily and emotional costs leaves us drained, anxious, depleted, and unwell. People die emotionally this way. Or our relationships shrivel. Or, frighteningly often, we lose our lives because we've attended so little to our own genuine care (in Japanese there is a special word, 
There are enough people afraid, yelling, paralysed, spinning, panicked in the world already, and it's not helping us. Right now what's called for is the capacity to be grounded, to see with as much clarity as we can muster, to take the world and its changes with the equanimity that comes from knowing that change is the way of the world, and to bring as much virtue to the world as we can.It's always been the case that the world, and everyone in it, benefits when we can find courage, truthfulness, compassion, kindness, service, justice, mercy, creativity, gratitude, patience, integrity, fierceness of purpose, commitment and the like. Let's please, do what we can to cultivate that in one another and in ourselves, rather than those qualities that dehumanise us or isolate us from one another.Right now I'm taking up the practice of reading less news and more poetry*. I'm finding in this a deeply renewed capacity to engage. So much of what's passing for news at the moment is in any case fevered speculation, and reading more of it numbs me (with fear or denial). Exercise is helping enormously. Meditation. Long hugs with people I love. Giving up the fantasy that I can control what happens. And doing the thing I'm here to do - writing and teaching.It seems to me that if ever there was a time to start committing ourselves to what we're really here to do (rather than what someone else told us to do, or what we imagined would get us liked or give us status) it's now. With as much sincerity and integrity as we can find.Let's get to it.*I found this suggestion in the wonderful work of 
His name was Tahar, and he drove me from home to the station with such generosity and joyfulness of spirit. And all the while he taught me how to live. I asked him if the dark brooding storm-clouds of the economy and of politics worried him at all. And he looked at me with wondrous, wide, shining eyes.'Life is so precious,' he told me, 'but we forget. We forget that any of us could die any day, at any moment. And that it's always been that way.''We have to get real about the human condition,' he said. 'We're fooling ourselves if we think it could be otherwise.''And so there isn't much for us to do', he continued, 'apart from taking care of one another, fixing what's in our power to fix in our own lives and around us, and doing as much good for one another as we can, while we can. And, while doing all of that, to be joyful. Because, before long, and when we least expect it, it will be over.'Tahar told me about his history of chasing status and possessions, of worrying about what's beyond his power to influence, and the illness of body and spirit that all of this had brought him. And he told me how he'd realised that this was no way to live. That the choice, in a way, was simple - to live the life we have available and to bring as much goodness as we can to it, or to die in life. And I sat, touched profoundly by his delight and wonder at the world, and illuminated by his capacity to see so deeply into what ails us and what we might do about it.And for the first time in days I felt truly joyful - at the wonder of my own life, of the stunning coincidence that brings me to the people I love, and at my capacity to contribute no matter what awfulness is in the world.What a delight to meet someone so deeply committed to blessing others.Thank you, Tahar.
So many of our troubles come from our insistence that there is an us and a them. 'Us' - the people who share something important with us. 'Them' - the ones who don't.Us - the managers of this organisation. Them - everyone else.Us - my company. Them - the competition.Us - the people already living in my country. Them - everyone else.Us - those who agree with me. Them - those that don't.Once we have an us and a them, we have reasons to be fearful, distrustful, suspicious, defensive. After all they might try to take what we have.Where we draw the boundary between us and them is, in many ways, arbitrary. It depends entirely upon what we take ourselves to hold in common with others, and what not. At its smallest, us is a category of one, the person who inhabits my own body. Now everyone else is them, potentially out to get me. Many people live this way. We could draw the boundary at family, at community, at nationhood. But us could also be as big as all of humanity (all that shares a human body) - or indeed all life (all that shares the mysterious quality we call life) - and then there is nobody and nothing to be them.The smaller us is, the bigger our fear, mistrust, and apprehension of others. The bigger us is, the more of the world we feel bound to take care of.It's ironic that at a time in history when there is more material abundance available than ever before, we seem so committed to shrinking us in a way that shrinks our care for the world.The last 200 years have given us unprecedented technology, science, and understanding of what it is to be a human being. We are more and more appreciating the interconnectedness and interdependence of all things. I wonder what would happen if instead of shrinking the world we used that understanding to grow our sense of us, and in doing so grew our capacity and responsibility to take care of things.
Today, I can think of nothing better than to simply share