You may know the story of the Tower of Babel. A whole generation of people, those who have grown up after a world-devastating flood, conspire together to build a sky-tower like none ever seen before and are punished and dispersed across the world for their hubris and arrogance.Our hubris, problematic? Yes, when it dislocates us from the rich biological and social world of which we are an indivisible part, when we over-extend ourselves in pursuit of our wants with no heed to the consequence and impact.But the story itself is problematic if taken as a caution against human boldness and creativity, because these are the very qualities we most need in order to bring about a world in which we can all live.It is our capacity to imagine, to invent, and then to act in cooperation with others that have brought about medical, technological, social and political advances that have transformed the quality of life for billions. Confidence in our ability, acted upon with due consideration of the wider world, is no compromise of our humanity but a dignified and important expression of it.In an imaginative retelling from the 1st century work of Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, there are no stones available to build the tower, and so thousands of people are marshalled to bake bricks until the construction is some miles high. Those with new bricks climb the tower on the eastern side, and those who descend go down on the western side.Sometimes a person climbing up or down falls. When a person drops to their death, nobody notices. But when a person falls with a brick the workers sit down and weep, not for the life lost but because they do not know when another brick will come in its place.In this interpretation the compromise to our humanity comes not through building itself, but through the way in which we build. Or, said another way, our projects can bring about great changes in the material world at the same time as they bring about great changes in our social and inner worlds. We are inevitably shaped both by what we do and by the manner in which we do it.The danger here is not that we hope and dream and build and make and create. The danger that Eliezer is so keen to point out to us is that we easily do so without paying sufficient attention to the kind of people we are becoming through the doing. We become means-to-an-end, objects, 'it' instead of 'I', 'it' instead of 'you'.In this reading the story of Babel is a reminder of our endless capacity to forget ourselves and others as human beings even as we pursue our most human of goals.
Seeing Systems
When you start to see that your organisational dramas (see this recent post) repeat themselves in organisation after organisation you can also start to see that your difficulties are often not so much personal as they are systemic.Another way to say this is that what you might think is the problem with Dave or Jill or Aggrey or Sue (or with yourself) is often being brought about by the wider system in which everyone is participating and not simply by the person themselves.We are not used to looking in this way.We blame Jill, who is in a senior position, for being aloof, distant, and unresponsive to our needs. But all the while Jill is experiencing her own position as overwhelming - caught between her personal accountability for the organisation and all the problems others keep on bringing her.We blame Aggrey, who is in a middle position, for being unable to respond to our reasonable requests for information or support or action. But in order to respond to you he needs the cooperation and response of others. All the while his experience is that of being pulled in opposite directions by the demands of his bosses and the demands of the people on his team.We blame Dave, who is a team member, for complaining that he is under-resourced, while missing that Dave is experiencing the vulnerability and uncertainty that comes from others deciding what work he will do, or even if he will have any work at all.Jill, Aggrey and Dave are experiencing the archetypal difficulties that come with being in a hierarchically 'top', 'middle' or 'bottom' position. And we judge them, mistakenly, with archetypal and personal judgements, which misunderstand their situation.We come to believe that for anything to happen they must change and that until they do we must wait and put up with it. While we wait for them to change, or demand that they change, we reserve the right to complain. We don't see the particular difficulty their positions bring, and we don't see that our very complaints are part of the problem.Our complaints assume the difficulties we experience at their hands are personal, and that the solutions to them are personal too (which is to say that Jill, Aggrey and Dave simply need to get their act together, buckle up, and do what we need of them). But much of what we're experiencing - and much of what Jill, Aggrey and Dave are experiencing -is systemic, which is to say it's being brought about by all of us. Until we see that, we're trapped in a cycle of judgement and blame which asks the impossible of our colleagues.The first step required to get out of this drama is compassion - which includes finding out what the world is really like for those whom we find troublesome.The second step is seeing that we keep these systemic difficulties going through the stories we tell about others, and that there are many alternatives to the stories that are most familiar to us.When we find and act upon stories that account for people's actions more accurately than our usual blame and judgement stories, many possibilities for connection, responsiveness and partnership open to us.For a wonderful, articulate and very practical exploration of all this, I can't recommend Barry Oshry's book Seeing Systems highly enough.
Dramas
Dramas - the stories you spin into being, which although perhaps painful and frustrating and fearful, place you right in the centre of the action.Dramas - all your stories of how people are not paying you due attention, seeing you in the way you want to be seen; all the ways you are left out, overlooked, your needs and wishes unnoticed and unmet; all the ways in which others are conspiring against you or, at least, taking care only of themselves; how the world seems organised to particularly frustrate your personal hopes, your longings.Dramas - perhaps unsurprisingly - are a powerful way of generating some sense of self-esteem in the midst of a world that's confusing, contradictory, and chaotic; a world far beyond our understanding which does not obviously attend to our particular needs and wishes as quickly or as completely as we would wish.Once we start to see that our dramas are not the way the world 'is' but a purposeful activity on our part to make ourselves feel better, or to get seen, or to manipulate others to get our needs met, perhaps we can begin to loosen our grip on them a little.Because by placing ourselves in the centre of the world, our dramas seriously reduce our capacity to respond to the needs and longings of others. And in this way our collective commitment to keeping our dramas going brings about exactly the self-centred world we fear is excluding us in the first place.
Difficult times
We seem to live in uniquely difficult times.We face multiple, simultaneous, almost intractable difficulties. The widening inequality of our societies. Economic uncertainty, and the undoing of many of the assumptions upon which we have built our economy. The effect we're having on our climate. Billions living in slums. The rise of violent religious and political fundamentalism and populism. An uncertain energy future. Rapid population growth.It's understandable in such times that we should feel afraid. That in the face of all of this difficulty we should get caught up in protecting ourselves, before anyone else. That we sooth ourselves and numb ourselves with glowing screens, with our busyness. That we distract ourselves from the buzzing, whirling sensations in our bodies and emotions that try to show us that something is wrong. That we amass whatever we can for ourselves as we try to cling on. That we wait until we feel better before we step forward and make the contribution we're here to make.But as we do this, as we pretend we're fine while all the while feeling very afraid, we forget that the world has always been this way. Human life has always been perilous. We have always been faced by crises and by threats to our very existence. We have, most probably, always told ourselves that our own times are particularly troubled ones.Seeing this opens up two new paths.The first is that we stop adding to our very real difficulties with our stories about the uniqueness of our troubles. Those stories make us mute, frozen, self-obsessed. When we know that we human beings have, for millennia, found ways of responding creatively and with great resourcefulness to what life brought us, we can begin to trust our own faculties more. We can begin to turn towards one another and the world again, and ask ourselves what's needed, and what we can do.The second is that we remember that it's right in the middle of difficulty, when we are most uncertain, that our most noble and life-giving qualities can emerge. When there's trouble and we find ourselves turning towards our neighbours, towards people we hardly know, towards community, and towards the society in which we live, we remember that compassion, care for others and being in relationship are powerfully life-giving and meaningful activities.Which way we turn - towards defensive self-centredness or towards relationship and compassion - is not just a matter of choice but a matter of ongoing practice. In other words, we live lives in which through our actions we cultivate one path or another.Let's not wait until we feel safe and settled before we start to cultivate the second path, one that can bring great meaning - and great healing - to ourselves and those around us.
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A lifetime's work
Automatic:
ClicheSaying the same thing to the same person in the same wayAll the ways we use jargon or business-speakPredictable reactions to what you're feeling (lashing out, withdrawing, self-criticising)Tuning out from what's really happeningMost of our habitsAlways knowing, always being sureExcluding certain emotionsKeeping conversation within predictable, narrow boundsSaying "I am this way"
Responsive:
Asking "What's needed now, here?"Tuning in to the wholeness of the situation - with mind, emotions, bodily sensationRelaxing your need to know what to doLetting go of feeling safe, so that what's needed can ariseAllowing yourself to be surprised - at yourself, at othersFeeling it allGiving up defending, clinging on, controlling what's happeningDoing what's called for, rather than what 'one does'
We easily become masterful at automatic. And although responsive is our human heritage, for most of us mastering it takes ongoing practice because so much of what we've learned - at school, in work, in our families - gets in the way.We could do well to remember that responsive - much needed in our lives - is a lifetime's work.
Automatic or alive
Two paths available to all of us, that are an inherent part of being human.(1) The automatic path
Our bodies and minds have an exquisite ability to learn something new and then reproduce it without our having to pay much attention to it. It's what we rely on to get us around in the world. Navigating doors, cooking utensils, cars, speaking, phones, cities, social niceties, and paying for things would all be practically impossible were it not for this capacity. Without our automaticity we would have to learn and relearn how to interact with just about everything in the worlds we have invented. Indeed, without our capacity to automatically respond to the vast and rich background of culture and tools in which we live, culture itself and tools themselves would be impossible.
(2) The responsive path
We also have an exquisite ability to make sense of and respond to the particular needs of the current moment. In any given situation we can find ourselves doing or saying something we've never done or said before. Sometimes our creative response can be surprising, sometimes clumsy, and sometimes we find ourselves able to respond with beautiful appropriateness to what's happening. From this comes our capacity to invent, to respond with empathy and compassion to others, and to change the course of a conversation or meeting or conflict mid-flow. Without this capacity we'd hardly be human at all. We'd be machines.
But here's a problem. We so often call on or demand the automatic path when what's called for is the responsive path:
We fall into habits shaped by the strong feelings that arise in our emotions and bodies.
We tell ourselves 'I don't like that' (and so don't do it).
We say 'I am this way' (meaning I won't countenance being any other way).
We insist other people stay the same as we know them, and put pressure on them to remain predictable in all kinds of overt and subtle ways.
We institutionalise or systematise basic, alive human interactions in our organisations, insisting on frameworks and codes and processes and procedures so that we won't get surprised.
We repeat ourselves again and again - saying the same things, the same jokes, the same ideas, the same cliches.
We think rules, tools, tips and techniques will save us.
We form fixed judgements of ourselves and others which we can fall back upon when we're in difficulty.
We turn away from anything that causes us anxiety or confusion. We prefer to know rather than not know. We're hesitant to step beyond the bounds of what's familiar, and comfortable.
We would often rather settle into the predicability and sense of safety that our automaticity allows. Sometimes we even call this professional or businesslike.And all the while what's most often called for in our dealings with others, in our businesses, in our work and in our organisations is the responsive path - our capacity to respond appropriately to the particular situation and its wider context; to be unpredictable, creative, exciting, unsettling, sensitive, nuanced and, above all, alive.
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The horizon that is visible is not the whole sky
When we take the automatic path (see this post, and this), we try to resolve our difficulties by doing more of what we're already in the habit of doing already.
We try to deal with our overwhelm by getting busier. We think that if we can just go a bit faster we'll soon get on top of things.
We can't see that it's not a question of faster but more often a question of priority, of deciding what's important and saying no to everything else.
We try to deal with other people's apparent lack of commitment by speaking more loudly, being more insistent, yelling. We think that if we're just more forceful then people will do what we want.
But we can't see that involving others is not usually a question of force but a question of enrolment - that we'd be better turning our attention to inviting a genuine relationship that supports commitment in arising.
We try to deal with our anxiety by turning away from it, numbing ourselves, only to find out that anxiety forced underground is just as painful and, in many ways, causes us much more difficulty.
We can't see that feelings are there to be felt. That our anxiety can educate us, have us reach out for support, teach us about what's most genuinely important for us.
In each of these cases, and in many more, we'd do well to remember Martin Buber when he tells us
"The horizon visible from one's station is not the whole sky"
Or, in other words, the resolution to many of our difficulties is not to continue on automatic but to turn towards what we're not currently paying attention to.It's to find out that what we've taken to be the 'horizon' - the way the world is, the way we are, and what we have to do - is only a part of the picture. That the resolution to our difficulties, or at least the lessening of them, is often in finding out that the world of possible relationships, explanations and actions is way bigger than we'd imagined.This, then, is the path of responsiveness, and the path of development. And it's worth working on with everything we can bring to it.
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Being witness
Many times
the biggest help you can be
is to turn a listening ear towards another
to hear everything they have to say
no matter how troubling how painful how confusing
to give up for a while
being another judge, another critic, another fixer of troubles
to be a welcome to all of it
all of it
and in your seeing and hearing embrace
find out how healing
being witness can be
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What endures
Time and again, we human beings have had to find out that what we took to be most secure and most solid, was nothing of the sort.We put down roots, build houses of bricks and mortar, make plans for ourselves. And then, perhaps, we find them swept away in a storm or flood, in a war or earthquake, in political or economic upheaval, in illness or accident, in the ever surprising turns of life.And sometimes we realise this is how things are for long enough that we remember to turn towards the people around us, our travelling companions on this most audacious and risky of journeys, and appreciate their beauty and magnificence, their sadness and their love, and are able to just be with them for a while.
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The four of you
When you're talking with another person, remember that there are always more than two of you present.At the very least there's you, and them, and your inner-critic and their inner-critic.Whatever the two of you are visibly up to, there's an often hidden dynamic between the two inner-critics (who work hard to keep themselves invisible) as they jostle to keep you in line, watch out for attacks or supposed attacks from the other, spur you into defending yourself (often times when no defence is called for), have you be insistent or rigid or judging or withdrawn.And each critic spurs the other on, inventing slights and hurts, and anticipating what's it imagines is yet to come.All of this is one reason why you can sometimes look back on a conversation with bemusement and confusion. 'What on earth happened there?' you ask yourself. 'I thought we were only talking about this morning's meeting, but now I feel hurt and uncertain, and so does she'.One way to help yourself and others is to spot all of this and give name to it, at first to yourself. Learn the ways it shows up and what it gets up to when your attention is elsewhere.And then, over time, bring the existence of the critic and all its manifestations into conversation. This takes courage and openness. But bringing the inner critic out of its hiding place allows it to be seen and talked about, and responded to, and lessens its power to manipulate behind the scenes.Your inner world is always making itself known in the outer world, whether you like it or not, and it's true for everyone else too. The more you can give name to, and the more you can bring it forward from its otherwise invisible background, the more chance you'll have of working with it in service of you and everyone around you.