I wrote the first words of 'On Living and Working' six years ago today, drinking tea and sitting on a high stool in the cafe window of London's Wellcome Collection, a museum exploring the intersection of life, the body, science, and culture.As I finished the first post a call came in to say that my father-in-law had died.We drove to his home that evening, curving our way through the rush-hour traffic, and sat in the kitchen drinking more tea and preparing ourselves to enter the small ante-room where he had spent the last weeks of his life.The dead are so incredibly, shockingly still.In the absence of the ongoing micro-movements that animate even someone who is sleeping, in the absence of breath, there is a perfect, uncanny silence. And it is the absence that reveals just how alive it is to be living. No flutter of the eyelids, no flexing of fingers or toes, no gentle rise and fall of the chest, none of the tiny cues that a person is present that I find my own eyes searching for. Just silence, and an absolute stillness like the stillness of stone, but strange and unsettling and sacred and exquisite and perfectly, unarguably real.In the jarring realness of absence, in this space where his warmth and movement and presence had been only hours before, I am brought into a fresh encounter with life's unlikeliness, its strangeness, its fierce beauty, its transience. I am thrown back into life by my contact with not-life.And I see how often I forget that I am actually alive. How readily I act as if I am not fully here: deadening myself and numbing myself and absenting myself and distracting myself. As if finding myself living in this brief shining flash of consciousness is too much to bear. Or as if I will always be alive.But here in this quiet room I see that one day I too will be this still, as will everyone else I love, and everyone else they love, and everyone else they know. And another day, in the unimaginably far-off future that will still come too soon, everything will fall into stillness and this grand experiment that we call life will itself be over.Somewhere I always know this. But when it fades into the background, when I am 'had by' this knowledge, its shadowy presence can easily act as an encouragement to go to sleep, to exist as if some of me or all of me is already dead. It's simpler that way, quieter. Apparently. And though living this way actually scares the hell out of me, the fear loops back on itself, fuelling and feeding the addictive numbness with its guileful promise of safety.So it's better to know the truth directly, I think. To keep reminding ourselves how different we are, even in our most humdrum everydayness, from absence.To be human is to live in this dance between remembering and forgetting ourselves, being awake and asleep, being present-in-life and dead-to-life. At least, that's how my life seems to be. But there are practices of presence, and remembering, and truthfulness that we can take up if we so choose - practices of art and body, movement and song, contact and attention that can help us return to the intense realness of life when we have lost our way. We can choose to stare directly into the unbearably bright light of our own ending so that we have a chance of being here, right here, while we are actually here. To be like fierce angels, heralding the sunrise. To be alive, before it's too late.On this 6th anniversary I'm grateful for words and language, for writing and speaking and those of you who read and listen to the many forms this project has taken since it began. And I'm feeling grateful for Sidney, my father-in-law, for all that his way of being showed me, his way of singing and hoping his way through, and for all that he taught me in his leaving.
Photo by Andraz Lazic on Unsplash
We human beings are both path-makers and path-followers. Both are important, but it's our innate capacity to follow paths that makes possible so much of what we are able to do, and gives it its character.Notice this in your own home. How the door handle draws you to open the door, how the kitchen table is an invitation to sit, how the half-full fridge calls you to open its doors and find something to eat. Notice how a library is a place you find yourself hushed and reverential, how you push and shove to take up your place on a crowded train even though you would do this nowhere else, how you rise in unison to shout at a football game, how the words on the page guide you through the speech you are giving even when you're not concentrating closely on them, how you quicken your step in a darkened alley, how you find yourself having driven for hours on a busy motorway without remembering what actions and choice any of the minutes entailed.Our capacity to follow the paths laid out for us is no deficiency. That the paths support us in the background, and that we do not have to think about them, is what frees us for so much of what is creative and inventive in human life - including our capacity to design entirely new paths for ourselves and others.To be human, then, is always in a large part to find ourselves shaped by what we find ourselves in the midst of.It is all of this that exposes the limits of our individualistic understanding of ourselves and others - an understanding we use to make sense of so much of what happens in our lives. For when we are sure that it is the individual who is the source of all actions and behaviour, we are blind to the paths that we find ourselves in the midst of, and the possibility that we might lay out other paths as a way of supporting ourselves. And we tend to over-emphasise the role of individual will-power as a way to resolve things or change things.And as long as we concentrate only on getting ourselves to change, or to muster up more 'will', we miss the opportunity to work together to change or lay out the new paths which could help us.Indeed, working to change the paths that lend themselves to whatever difficulty we wish to address may be the most important work we can do. And this always includes our developing - together - the skills and qualities that support us in being purposeful path-makers in the first place.
Waiting until you know for sure what's going to happen - where people are involved - means waiting for ever.With machines, it's easy. With sufficient understanding of mechanics you can often predict exactly what's going to happen. Cause and effect, straightforward to establish.But human situations are nothing like that, even though we pretend to ourselves that they might be.Take a meeting, for example.Should you speak up about what's on your mind? Now? Later? What effect will it have on your colleagues? On the decision to be made?You cannot know for sure.Whatever insight you have about the situation can only ever be partial. You can't know what's going on for others. You can't know what they are thinking of saying. And you can't know - even if you know them well - how they will respond to your speaking.You have to act knowing that you're speaking into an unknowable situation. And that speaking up will, in all likelihood, change something, at the very least for you.But staying quiet is an act too, changing things no less than speaking up. So you have no choice but to be an actor, whatever you do, and however much you pretend it is not the case.We get ourselves into trouble when we forget all of this. We imagine that we can only act when we are able to predict the outcomes of our actions. Or we blame and judge ourselves and others when things don't turn out the way we expected.And all the while we're holding back our contribution, our insight, our knowledge, our creativity, our unique perspective because we've set ourselves standards of understanding that were never - could never be - reached.
Because we are story-telling beings, we humans have a million ways of avoiding being present to what is right in front of us - people, projects, possibilities, suffering - and what is within us - thoughts, feelings, and the sensations and wisdom arising in our bodies.We so easily spin stories, throw ourselves into guilt and reminiscence about the past, worry about and try to anticipate the future. And while each of these have their place, they so easily distract us from what we're most directly in the midst of.Missing what and who is here robs us of the opportunity to experience life in its richness as we go.More importantly for everyone else, it denies us the opportunity to bring ourselves at our fullest. Because in our distraction, we respond not to the needs of the moment, but to the needs of our fear, or to our wish to not have to face the world as it is.Our deepest possibilities for connection and contribution are muted - whenever here is not where we are, and now is not what we're responding to.
I wrote this post in December 2016 when, unusually, Christmas and the Jewish winter festival of Chanukah exactly coincided. This year Chanukah was over in early December, but the rest of the content seems just as relevant today as it did two years ago. I hope you'll enjoy it, and that it will be useful to you in the coming year, and that 2019 brings many forms of goodness and opportunities to contribute, to everyone.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.
I know, you’re stuck on a crowded bus, in a boring meeting, in a traffic jam, washing the dishes, doing your expenses, waiting for the cashier.I know, from here, life seems pretty boring, mundane, lifeless even. I know, it seems like what matters is happening somewhere, to other people right now.I know how often I am caught in seeing life that way.But perhaps that’s mostly because we imagine, or at least feel like, we’re going to live forever.But if you were dead, if you were no longer around, if you were offered just one minute more of life, and it had to be this moment in the queue, in the bus, in the meeting, with the dishes, would you take it?I’m sure I would.Then you might see this humdrum moment for the absolute wonder that it is – filled with enormous possibilities for curiosity, discovery, and purposeful action. Or for just looking in amazement.And if your answer was yes, is there any chance you might start seeing things this way, at least occasionally, in the life you already have?
I remember the moment with gratitude, though it was tough at the time."You have no idea how self-judgemental you are", Andy had said to me. And it had cut like a knife. But he was right. I was thirty-five years old and had over many years become seasoned to the harshness of the world.I didn't know it as harshness to be so filled with self-doubt and such worry about how I was doing all the time. It was just the way the world was. Unquestionable. Invisible. And I had no idea that it wasn't so much the world that was harsh but my own inner experience.Andy's carefully timed observation was one of those moments when what had been in the background for so long came crashing into the foreground - when what I had been swimming in for so long was made apparent to me.It was a doorway into a profoundly new world in which I began to see that most of what I thought others were thinking about me was actually what I was thinking about myself. And that I no longer had to believe everything I thought so completely.Eleven years later, I'm still sometimes out-foxed by the shape-shifting cleverness of my inner critic. But I am more often, and more quickly, able to spot it and see through its ways of holding me back and of pulling me apart.And, more and more, in the space that envelops me when it steps aside, I'm able to feel a quiet and genuine kind of joy.
Behind any life, and any society, are numerous background narratives that give us a sense of who we are, who other people are, and what’s possible for us. They tell us how we can live, what’s of value, and how to relate to one another. And they tell us what’s important to pay attention to, and what’s marginal.Sometimes the background narratives are visible and explicit in a family or community, such as the way in which biblical narratives give a sense of belonging and orientation to people who are part of some religious communities. But most often – even when there are visible and explicit narratives available – the narratives we actually live by are invisible, and we see them clearly only as an outsider entering a society for the first time, or when the narrative runs into trouble and starts producing unintended consequences.For the last century or so in the West, we’ve lived in a background narrative that’s directed our attention most strongly towards what’s measurable, particularly what’s financially measurable, and has discounted almost everything else. The bottom line, financial return on investment, this quarter’s results – all have been taken for what’s ‘real’.And at the same time, we’ve considered what’s not measurable largely ‘unreal’ – the quality of our inner lives, our relationships with others, supportive and close-knit communities, the care we give and receive, our capacity to nurture and appreciate beauty. We can’t pay much attention to these, we say, because in the ‘real world’ there are tough business decisions to make. There are profits to be made.I’m not arguing that profit is somehow unreal, while beauty and care are real. That would be an equally narrow way of looking at the world. But it’s becoming clearer and clearer how our narrowness – our failure to appreciate and include all dimensions of human life in our businesses, institutions, and in our public discourse – is wreaking havoc in our present and seriously limiting our capacity to respond to the complexity of the future we’re creating. The shocking rise of inequality in even the richest of the worlds societies, the shaking of our financial systems, our seeming inability to respond creatively to climate change – all ought to have ourselves asking whether what we take to be unquestionably true about how to live is, really, deeply questionable.We urgently need to expand our horizons – to start to take seriously that which we’ve marginalised in the relentless colonisation of all aspects of human life by the narrative of economics.
We are systematically schooled away from gratitude.It begins as soon as we start comparing ourselves with each other. We learn to do this at school (there's always a better grade we should be getting). And, later, our workplaces often draw on our comparisons with others as a way of having us push harder (forced-distribution performance ratings set this up in particular, see 
There is a part of me that is tender, hurt, grieving and super-sensitive. He feels like something very young. Of all the parts that make up this mysterious something that I call ‘I’, he is among the smallest.Deeply loving, filled with emotion, he easily gets caught up in a story of abandonment. His fears are specific, and strongly predictive. ‘You’ll leave me’, he says. By ‘you’ he means just about anyone - friends, lovers, family, teachers - and bigger entities too - community, this country in which I live, life itself. And by ‘you’ he also means ‘me’ - the one of whom he is a part, the one who is his home.‘You will abandon me’, he says, ‘and I will not be able to tolerate the loss itself, nor my grief at the loss. And what’s more, I know when I get abandoned it will be my fault. I’ll cause it by my actions, or by my inaction. Or because I was not able to prevent it’.He’s onto something, of course. Loss is a given of any human life. He - as I, as you - will eventually lose everything and everyone that we love. And his grief and tenderness is real, and appropriate to the scale of the coming bereavement. But this part, so young and with such a small horizon, is scared to live in the world because the loss feels like it is now. The abandonment he fears, ever present.He has some quite sophisticated strategies to try to head off the losses that terrify him. He wants me to feel his fear, always, so that we won’t make a mis-step. He’ll do his best for me not to feel, nor let on to feeling, the grief that he holds, nor any feelings that might make me vulnerable. He holds on very tight, and sometimes as a result I hold on very tight too. And he’s a master at getting his abandonment in first, finding ways I can get resentful and abandon other people before they can abandon me. He’s done this many many times - I have done this many times in his name. In a way, he feels vindicated when people do actually leave, because it shows that his world view, and his deep fear, are justified.He wants us to live in a very narrow space of possibilities. He’s only open for being seen by others in a very particular way (only with love and appreciation, never with judgement) and if he doesn’t get seen this way he’s quickly wounded, withdrawn, sullen, quietly rageful or doing his best to manipulate others so that the world is back to the way he wants it.Because this part is in such difficulty, he grabs my attention frequently. And when he does I identify with him. I take him to be me, and me to be him. And this is the big mistake. When he is in the driver’s seat I forget that there are things to feel that are different to what he is feeling, ways of seeing that are different to what he’s seeing, and different ways to act. When I think I am him, I am at my smallest and most afraid.Over time I have come to see that my work is one of self-remembering. Remembering that I am vast. That I contain multitudes. That as well as this part, there are others. And that my work is not to turn away, not to run from this tiny scared part of me - it is so easy to push him away, to visit upon him the very abandonment that he fears - but to hold him close, to cradle him, to honour him and his gifts. It is my work to welcome him home. To say to him, “Yes, I see you. I have you. You are safe here. You cannot fall”.And my work too is to know that, just as I know he is held in the vast something called ‘I’, I too am held in and am part of something vast that has no given name but might best be called ‘life’. When I know myself this way, as one expression of a phenomenon which brings me into being and out of which I cannot fall, I am freed from being a prisoner of my fear and available. I am freed to love in the way I want to love, to create, speak out, be vulnerable and intimate and angry and truthful and real and to risk the risks that are required to be fully alive, the very risks that he is too afraid for me to take.