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 people and their actions - an understanding we use to make sense of much of what happens in organisational life. 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 they find themselves in the midst of.And as long as we concentrate only on getting individual people to change, or firing or changing our leaders until we get the 'perfect' right one, we miss the opportunity to work together to change or lay out the new paths which could help everyone.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.
Heaven and Hell
In the The Barefoot Book of Jewish Tales written by my friend Shoshana Boyd Gelfand is "Heaven and Hell", a gorgeous story for children and adults about how our interpretations and practices are constantly shaping the world around us.
And of course the worlds we bring into being in turn change us. The narcissistic, individualistic, cynical world brought about by the residents of hell keeps their meanness and their resentment going, and their starvation. And the world brought about by the residents of heaven amplifies their kindness.
When we head off the possibility of change by claiming the world is, simply, "the way it is", or when we say "but in the real world this could never happen", we need to understand that we are active participants in having the world stay fixed in its current configuration. The world is never only the way it appears. And that ought to be a reason for great hope for our families, organisations and society. And a call for our vigorous action on behalf of an improved future for all of us.
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Welcoming Ourselves and Others
[embed]https://youtu.be/dehBZzUlQk8[/embed]In this episode Lizzie and I talk about the radical possibility of welcoming ourselves, and others, just as we are.To those of us with a more action-oriented stance or a commitment to improving things, welcoming in this way can look like an act of irresponsibility. After all, doesn't making things better in some way entail rejecting how things are?We explore this tension together, looking at how our surrounding culture of keeping up and comparison with others turns us away from ourselves. We consider the possibility of both welcoming and working to repair the world. And in the midst of things Lizzie's niece joins us for a surprise visit.The source is written by our friend and colleague Steve March:
Letting Be - A Poem to Welcome a Fellow Journeyer
Dear journeyer, you are welcome here exactly as you are.No one here will try to change you according to their ideas or ideals.No one here wants you to be otherwise.We will let you be, just as you are.Only then can we celebrate your perfect uniqueness.
Letting be is a gift of love that we give to you.Love of your Truth.Love of your Beauty.Love of your Goodness.Only then can we relish your luminous brilliance.
Letting be is a gift of love that you can give yourself too.Letting be, your heart will melt, your mind will open, your body will release.Letting be, your creativity will rocket forth.Letting be, your innate resourcefulness will amaze you.Only then can you behold your true magnificence.
The sun beams just for you.The mountain salutes your majesty.The river of life guides you within its currents.The universe is your playground.Welcome home, dear journeyer.
We’re live every Sunday morning at 9am UK time. You can join our facebook group to watch live, view archives, and join in the growing community and conversation that’s happening around this project.
Fuel for Your Fire
In just a month over 350 people have joined our new Turning Towards Life project on FaceBook. It's been thrilling to find a new way to talk about many of the concerns, ideas and possibilities that are still an inspiration for the On Living and Working blog, and I think it's likely that our conversations will in turn be the inspiration for more writing over the coming months.I was particularly touched by our latest conversation on Sunday morning, which took John Neméth's song 'Fuel for Your Fire' as its starting point. The question we wanted to address is both simple and central to many people - how can we have our difficulties be a source of life for us, rather than a reason to turn away in shame, fear, or avoidance?It's certainly a profound question for me. It's easy for me when I'm in some kind of trouble to imagine that I am somehow special, the only one experiencing life in this particularly challenging kind of way. And when I take on this relationship to my troubles what I notice most is my separateness from everyone and everything - as if I am uniquely cursed, isolated from others and from the possibilities of care and help.All of this, it turns out, is a profound misunderstanding. If anything, it's our troubles that show us how human we are, how essentially alike we are. None of us are free from disappointments, mistakes, changes to our circumstances both within and beyond our control. None of us is free from loss. And when we know this to be an essential truth of our human condition, perhaps we can give up self-pity and instead take on the dignifying work of contribution. This - that contribution is often the most dignified and life-giving path for working with our difficulties - has in recent months, and when I remember it, been such a blessing in my own life.We'd be really delighted if you'd join us in the 30 minute conversation below, which takes up all these themes and asks 'How can our troubles be part of the path?'.And if you'd like to join in with the growing community that's forming around this project, and the lively conversation that's taking part in the comments, you can do so here.[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkpF3C2kTz0[/embed]
Ritual and culture
Our rituals give us an opportunity to rehearse a different kind of relationship to ourselves and to others than those in which we ordinarily find ourselves.This is exactly what we're doing with the ritual of a formal meeting where we take up assigned positions (chair, participants, etc) and give ourselves new ways of speaking with one another that are distinct from everyday conversation. It's what we're up to with the ritual of work appraisal conversations, which are intended to usher in a new kind of frankness and attentiveness than is usually present. It's in the ritual of the restaurant, where the form and setting gives us, from the moment we enter, a set of understandings, commitments and actions shared with both other diners and with the staff. And it is, of course, present in all religious rituals when performed with due attention, which call us for a moment into a fresh relationship with the universe, or creation, or the rest of the living world.The more we practice a ritual - especially if it's one practiced with others - the more we develop the imagination and skilfulness to live in this new relationship in the midst of our ordinary lives.It is for this reason that among the most powerful ways we have available to shift a culture - in a relationship, in a family, in an organisation - is to imagine and then diligently practice new rituals.And by naming them as such, by declaring that they are ritual, we can help ourselves step in and be less overcome our inevitable resistance, our anxiety, at trying on new, unfamiliar and much needed ways of being together.
Left Out
Conversations frequently left out of the discourse of professional life:
What you’re feeling – a potential source of enormous insight and connection to others
What you care about – especially if different from those around you
Your history – the story of everything and everyone that brought you to this moment, the discoveries and losses and experiences that have shaped you
Your weirdness – the unique artfulness and way of seeing that comes from you being you
Your imagination – your capacity to invent beyond the bounds of convention, the energy for life which stirs you to break out of the ways you’re held in
Your longing – the life and world you’re in the midst of bringing forth
We shut them out with excuses. They’re ‘soft’ subjects, while business is ‘hard’. They’ll open a pandora’s box or a can of worms. This is a work-place, not a therapy session.We lose so much when we continue to exclude the passions and possibility of the human heart from so many of our endeavours. And it damages us too, because before long we reduce ourselves and others to shadows of ourselves, inoculated by our cynicism against demonstrating care for much that is of genuinely enduring value to human life. Is this really the way you and your colleagues began your journey into the life of work? Can you even remember?That work should be this way was sold to us by the early industrialists who needed scores of people in their factories to button down, fit themselves in, and stay in line. They appropriated the language of rationalism and science to fashion people into tools, cogs, and components so they could build their great money making machines. And we bought it, continuing a pernicious myth that shallows our relationships and possibility.The world faces many difficulties right now, and addressing them is going to take all the generosity, wisdom and heartfelt commitment we can muster. Do we really intend to keep on working to shut that out from the world?
Humanities
It's not just that fear is easy, that it makes us feel important, and that it sells.When it's unaddressed it also turns us away from our humanity.When our society turns to fear as the background mood, the humanities themselves come under such assault. We're turning away from the study of literature and poetry, art and philosophy, music, language and culture as ends in themselves. When we're afraid and in denial about our fear, as so many of us are, we want just that which will demonstrably help us go faster, complete more, make the money, hit the targets, beat the competition, keep out the outsider, make us feel safe.The humanities do none of those, at least not in obvious ways. They won't settle, or soothe, or rush us into action. They'll take their time. They'll trouble us, stir us, have us ask bigger and deeper questions than we're asking. They'll open the horizon and the wide sky, connecting us with the wisdom and humanity of those who have come before (who may have a thing or two to teach us about our current circumstances), making us feel our vulnerability and possibility, opening us to others, inspiring us, and reminding us what a store of depth and capacity we human beings have to respond to life. This is the very depth and capacity which, as Marilynne Robinson writes in her latest book, might well be 'the most wonderful thing in the world, very probably the most wonderful thing in the universe'.When we turn away from the humanities as a serious path, and allow ourselves to be possessed by our fear, we reduce ourselves in profound ways. And, when our democracies and our organisations turn this way, we lose the very thing that makes both democracy and organising together work: our trust in the capacity and dignity of the other human beings with whom we share the places in which we live.The humanities teach us how vital, how possible, it is to live and work with other people even when we disagree - and how much we must be prepared to learn from others, both those living now and those long gone, if the world is to be bigger, and better, than that tiny and narrowing patch of land we each defend at all costs simply because it's the only remaining patch of land on which we don't feel afraid.
Learning again how to trust ourselves
Rene Descartes' method for discovering what's true starts with a bold and radical move - distrust everything until it can be proven. It's not hard to see how powerful a way this is to cut through superstition and confusion. By starting from first principles, and using step-by-step logic, he gives us a way to prove things for ourselves, doing away with our need to rely on anyone else's claims.In order to make the method work, it's necessary to start with one thing that can be assumed to be true without proof - and for Descartes it was that he was thinking. Hence cogito ergo sum, 'I think therefore I am'. The one thing I can be sure of is that I'm thinking, because here I am, thinking it! And in this move, he both makes his method possible and sets up the condition of our society ever since.Without this we may never have lifted ourselves beyond the confusion of Descartes' times. But when we take Cartesianism to be the only way to relate to the world (a project at which our education system is very effective) we quickly become estranged from ourselves. Our bodies, emotions, our subjective experience, and the experience of others are all to be doubted, or considered irrelevant. Even the existence of others is something we can no longer take for granted without proof (and conclusively proving this everyday, common-sense aspect of our experience turns out to be extraordinarily difficult in the Cartesian paradigm). Though we often don't know it, we're deeply educated in and profoundly conditioned by the Cartesian principle that thinking is paramount and that everything else is to be distrusted.The consequence? We've forgotten how to trust ourselves.We don't know how to trust what's true in the senses of our bodies (we've often barely learned how to pay attention to this at all). We don't trust the felt-sense of situations, and we don't know how to tell what action to action take when we feel distorted, disjointed, incongruent, afraid. We don't trust what we love. And we don't know how to listen deeply to the longing and song of our hearts.We've become experts at distancing ourselves from ourselves. And because we can't feel what's happening to us we launch ourselves into many projects - in our work and in our private lives - that harm us, and harm others, and harm the planet. We justify our actions, if we're prepared to justify them at all, as 'reason' or 'business' or 'productivity' or 'best practice' or 'getting ahead'.We need the cold, sharp blade of the Cartesian method as much as we ever did. But if we want to create lives and a world in which we can thrive, a world which brings about wisdom and beauty as well as truth, it's time to learn how to feel things again. And it's time to teach ourselves and our children once more about the discernment and understanding of the world that comes not just from the sharpness of our minds, but from the intelligence of our bodies and the sensitivity of our hearts.
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Over-reaching
A very dedicated and successful swimmer once told me that the way to extend your reach in strokes such as the crawl is first to over-reach. To add 5cm, practice extending by 10cm for a while. The over-stretch, she told me, teaches the body to settle into a new configuration so that, on relaxing again, your established stroke lands somewhere between where you started and what you reached for.Over the coming days I want to see if I can point out some ways in which we've over-reached with the project that René Descartes started, and how we might restore to ourselves some measure of balance in which reason, with its power to cut through and generate truth, takes up its place alongside the no less important virtues of goodness and beauty in our organisations, our institutions, and our society.I think this is important not only because we've used the sharp-sword of detached reason in places where it destroys rather than nurtures (I started to lay some of those out in this post), but because we've done ourselves a huge disservice in worshipping the cartesian method to the exclusion of all else. Whenever we've used it inappropriately - forcing it into places where it cannot help us, such as in our attempts to scientifically measure love, or meaning, or care, or art, or ethics - we've blunted it, confused it and diminished its power.I can't help but think that our misuse and misunderstanding of the methods of objective reason contribute to the spread of quack cures that look convincing because of their scientific-sounding language, to the many failed projects to measure and produce 'engagement' in our organisations, to our all-too-easy trust in the explanations given by our politicians, and to our obsession with education systems that train our children to score well in exams (and in easily measurable subjects) rather than develop wisdom and skilfulness in living.Perhaps by being clearer about where objectivity helps us, and where it does not, we can cut through our confusion about reason itself. And this is important because just as we can't flourish without goodness and beauty, we certainly can't flourish without reason either.
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Subjective, Objective
René Descartes' method gave us a way to find truth by making a clear distinction between subjectivity and objectivity.Subjectivity, the particular way of looking at the world that is unique to each of us, is to be roundly distrusted because of the way it distorts understanding: introducing errors of judgement, errors of perspective, and the errors that come from being confused by our emotions, bodily sensations, commitments and desires.Objectivity, the way of looking at the world that comes from dispassionately observing and measuring the properties of things, can be trusted - as long as careful observations are made and conclusions formed by the step-by-step application of tried and tested methods of reason and logic.By restricting what we take to be true to that which can be found in the objective and logical realm, Descartes gave us a powerful way of establishing truths that had previously eluded us. No longer did we have to believe that flames go upwards because it is of the essential nature of fire to rise above other kinds of matter, and no longer did we have to believe that the sun and stars went around the earth because it is the essential nature of human beings to be the centre of things. We could observe, and test, and reason and conclude, establishing cause and effect relationships free from superstition and free from prejudice.It was a world-changing shift of perspective that moved reason to the centre after centuries during which it had been in the margins. At the same time, it established mathematics and physics as the central sciences. Mathematics took up a particular specialness because of its power to explain and predict without recourse to any subjectivity or, indeed, any need to rely even upon the physical, objective world in order to do its work.It's hard for those of us who have grown up in the world ushered in by Descartes and his enlightenment contemporaries to see what a radical change this was, so schooled have we been in its assumptions and its way of looking at things. But we can see it in the way we go about science and proof, in the way we look for particular kinds of facts or measurements before we'll take something as true, in the way we make 'objective' more important or valid than 'subjective', and in the explosion of science and technology in our era. There's no doubt that our world would be radically different, and in so many ways vastly impoverished, without our having taken up reason as the central project of the last few hundred years.But I think it's worth asking questions about where we have taken Descartes' project too far. We routinely rely on it to produce truth in fields where its methods and its insistence on discarding the subjective lead us to look in a narrow way and can direct us into all kinds of confusion. How we educate our children and ourselves, and about what, working together in organisations, pursuing what's meaningful rather than what's simply useful, being in relationship, loving others, community, art - each of these are among the fields where the subjective, where our experience of things, is central, and no recourse to a subjectivity-free objectivity can hope to show us much. And reason, while vital in establishing truth (I would not want to do without it!) cannot help us alone with two other important human projects - beauty and goodness - both of which are vital if we are to have flourishing and ethical institutions, politics, education and organisations.
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