On being afraid, March 2020

Highgate Men's Bathing Pond, February 2020. Photo by Justin Wise

The world is, for all of us, a very narrow bridge, that we did not choose to walk.
And the most important thing is not to amplify our fear.
NACHMAN OF BRATSLAV

I've written about fear before, but as we enter into a very uncertain March 2020 all around the world, it seems it's time to write about it again. I'm still very much working all of this out. It's not all easy, by any means, and I don't have answers to most of the questions I have about how to be in the world right now. But here's where I am.

I'm deeply grateful to Norman Fischer, whose talk on this subject inspired what follows. In many places below I've drawn directly from Norman's words, especially in the quoted sections, which have been so helpful to me. I hope they will be for you too.

-

On Being Afraid

We were already afraid before this began to happen. Fear itself is already endemic in our culture.

It's here already because it sells things. It's here already because, by it, we keep ourselves in our habitual patterns of distraction and avoidance. But it comes at a huge cost. It has us undermine ourselves again and again. When we're had by our fear, when we're caught up in it and the certainty of it, we live at odds with ourselves. We pretend that what we've become so afraid of isn't happening, even when it is. Or we become certain that our fear is the world and turn away from our own wisdom, feeling further and further from ourselves and from one another.

Of course, indulging our fear seems so sensible. You don't have to read very far into the statistics of the coronavirus situation [more on this below] to see that a vast tragedy is unfolding around us, that isn't likely to go away before it's had its fierce way with us, however much we wish it wouldn't happen... at least not now... at least not to us.

I know what it's like to be gripped by my fear, to be feel unable to get any distance from it. When the house is quiet and dark, and my children are sleeping, and I imagine how the world might be over the coming weeks and afterwards - indeed even as I write these words - feeding my fear seems the obvious things to do. And when I wake in the morning - if I have even slept - a night of amplifying my fear leaves me shaken and depleted, exhausted and tiny, and convinced more than anything of my loneliness and separateness and smallness.

But I don't think we need to be afraid all the time. I don't think we should be afraid all the time. There's another way to practice in the midst of things. A way that starts with us admitting to our fear and confusion rather than denying it or being caught up in it. A way that isn't distracting ourselves from the gravity of our situation, nor taking our fear so seriously that we exhaust ourselves and find ourselves in a despair that we can't get out of. Neither of those extremes is going to help us.

Instead, we can begin by letting ourselves actually feel our fear for a while - properly making contact with it - even if it's the last thing we want to do. We might have to stop rushing around if we want to make this possible. And in the quiet, truthful space in which we let ourselves feel our fear most fully, and in we feel our grief at how far the world is right now from how we want it to be, we can start to say:

I see you.
But I am not you.
You feel like the future, but you're not actually the future.
You're an experience, that I am having in my body, right now.

This way we neither run from our fear, nor indulge it. We take up the practice of speaking with ourselves in new ways - in the ways a wise, kind and truthful friend would do. However strong our fear, however convincing, this clear-seeing part of us is also here if we look for it.

And it helps greatly to be able to speak from this part, to say to ourselves:

Yes, I am anxious.
Yes, I am fearful.
And right now, I feel completely desolate.
And that is, indeed the truth.

and

I know that I will feel this way for a while. But it will last only a certain amount of time. It will not slow the spread of disease. It will not help my loved ones. It will not help me take good care of myself or other people. It will not improve anything at all about the situation.

and

In fact, if I keep on with this feeling longer than is absolutely necessary it will make things worse. The feeling of desolation is natural. I do not need to disrespect myself for feeling it. But it is extra.

And then, gradually, some space... and some contact with our willingness to meet life - fiercely, lovingly - just as it is. We start to be less convinced by the trance that fear has had us in, and remember that we can be of service. We remember that to be a human is to be a blessing.

But I cannot be this if I keep indulging my fear.

So I am just going to have to stop.
And then turn back towards the world.

And when the future comes, with everything that it brings, it isn't even the future. It always turns out to be the present when it happens, and we often discover that we can, indeed, meet it - however difficult or painful it is - in ways we did not imagine.

Background reading on COVID-19
I have spent a lot of time reading, seeing if could find a way through the voluminous news reporting, sound bites, political promises, and data, to find sources I trust which will help me understand what's going on and where it might lead us.

Here's what I've found, and what I've understood.
I hope it will be of help.

1. Seth Godin on the statistics, how viruses spread, what it means for what's likely to happen, and how we might relate to it
2. Bill Gates, who has been thinking about this for a long time, on the same
3. A very clear New York Times article, referenced by Seth, that explains why, at the stage we're at with this virus (3rd March 2020) things can look very normal now but change very quickly
4. Bruce Aylward from the WHO, on how rapid spread can yet be averted, if countries take appropriate action
5. Statistics, updated frequently, from Worldometer, that show what's happening

The hidden cost of hiding

I am reposting this today, because two very dear friends - fiercely loving people - took the care to point out to me some ways I've been hiding what I can bring to the world. Most of us are hiding, at least some of the time, and although there are necessary protective and restorative gifts in hiding until it is our turn, it's easy to hide when it is actually our turn to step up, to speak out, to see something or someone that nobody else is seeing, and to respond with all the humanity and care we can muster.So this is my offering to all of us who are still hiding when we shouldn't be, and my encouragement - to all of us - to do what's called for in these changing, shifting times when we need, so very much, everyone to make their gifts available.It's easy for us to hide in plain sight.We hide in our busyness and in our distraction.We hide by saying only part of what's true, and withholding the rest.We hide by leaving parts of us out - our courage, our vulnerability, our truthfulness.We hide by throwing ourselves into our work,and thereby saving ourselves from showing up outside it.And we hide by throwing ourselves away from our work,and saving ourselves from showing up within it.We hide in our addictions, in numbing ourselves, in scrolling the facebook feed.We hide in pretending to be happy, when inside we're crying.We hide in our self-importance, and in overdoing our smallness.We hide behind rules and regulation, policy and procedure.And we hide in meetings through our silence and compliance.We hide by shutting down our hearts in the face of the suffering of others.We hide by stifling our ideas and holding back what only we can say.We hide in our pursuit of money and status.We hide ourselves in looking good and avoiding shame.And we hide by refusing to ask for help when we need it.And every moment of our hiding robs us, and the world,of wonders that only we can bring,from seeing that only we can see,and from words,perhaps the most necessary words,that only we can say.

Photo Credit: donnierayjones Flickr via Compfight cc

The view from here isn't the only view

The story you tell about this time in your life isn't the only story. And the vantage point from which you're looking is not the only vantage point.Looking forwards, it might seem clear that you're on the way to a great success, or an inevitable defeat. Maybe it looks like life is all sorted: you've arrived and there is not much more for you to do. Or perhaps, from the depths of your confusion, it appears that you're lost and can never find your way back.Life is so much bigger than each of us, and so much more mysterious, that any story you have is at best partial. Looking back, what feels now like inevitable defeat may turn out to be a time of building strength: the strength you'll need to break out of the constraints that have been holding you back. What feels like being crushed by life could be the birth pangs of a new beginning. Maybe the solidity of your success so far turns out to be everything that will be taken from you.As Cheryl Strayed writes to her despairing younger self in Tiny Beautiful Things, it can turn out that "the useless days will add up to something", that "these things are your becoming."Everything changes. Nothing is ever just what it seems. And though you may feel sure you've understood your life, remember that it's very difficult to see which are the important parts, and quite why they're important, while you're still in them.

Photograph by Justin Wise

Famous

I sit in the darkness, watching my daughter and her friends singing, dancing and performing with such joy and exuberance in a local musical production, and right when I could release myself into joy and wonder a dark, coiled-upon itself part of me claws repeatedly - 'You should be able to do that', it says.On a gloriously sunny May Thursday, I'm hosting a conversation about leadership with a group of thoughtful, principled people who run a large hospital. Right when I could be at my most curious, open and available, there's a part of me that tells tugs, hard - 'You should be better at this', it says, 'You should be like them.'In my living room, a long afternoon of freedom available to me, I'm reading Robert McFarlane's beautiful book 'Underland', and I find myself checking the time again and again. 'You shouldn't be here', it says and, more perniciously, its tendrils of shame that I haven't published a book, that I don't know what to say, that I'm not famous, slip through the gaps in my thoughts and wrap themselves around my heart.On the tube, in the shower, watching a film, holding my loved ones and, more than anywhere else, in the dark of the night, the endless voice of comparison keeps speaking its poison. Its promise is alluring enough - salvation. If I'm equal to or better than the ideas it has about me, or the people it measures me against, I'll be saved. Once I'm well known enough, or have made a world-changing contribution, I'll be safe. If I make sure never to annoy anyone else, or disappoint them, if I keep up an image of gentleness or responsibility, everything will be OK.As my dear friend and colleague Lizzie Winn says, all of this has us 'pretzel ourselves' into ever more distortions. And as the poet Naomi Shihab Nye reminds us in her poem Famous, there's a more straightforward way to be in the world, one filled with dignity and aliveness which recognises the uniqueness of the being we already are,

... famous in the way a pulley is famous,or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,but because it never forgot what it could do

It may seem like a paradox, but it's often when we give up our crazed attempts to be what we're not that we have the greatest chance of flourishing and unfolding fully into what we are. It's when, as Lizzie says, we can inhabit our qualities wholeheartedly, that we find the deep reserves of kindness or courage, wisdom or attentiveness, that allow us to meet the world.Naomi Shihab Nye shows us early in her poem that all our attempts to save ourselves by holding ourselves in the grip of a comparison (such as with fame) are inevitably doomed by the transience of everything:

The loud voice is famous to silence,which knew it would inherit the earthbefore anybody said so.

As Simon Seligman so beautifully writes, in response to those lines:

'We are but a moment, and all around us nature and time, and the silence that came before us, are unfolding as they must. And so our voice, our moment, can only speak for itself, now, as we find it, and should let go of any hope that we will silence the silence. It is always there, it should always be there, and without it we would not be able to hear our own voice anyway, just as light has no meaning without the dark. The silence does not need us to confer upon it any meaning or purpose; it knows it will inherit the earth. We get to dance within and upon it for our span; it allows (indulges?!) us in this, and lets us witter on as if we were in control. But the water will close over our heads, the gravestone will be subsumed into the earth, and our one job is to accept and embrace both our living span, and its end, in time.'

Our one job - to accept and embrace both our living and its end. I know when I can do this, I can sit in the dark and watch my daughter, and let myself be overcome by joy and love and sheer wonder that she is here. I can work with a group of very capable leaders with curiosity and openness and truthfulness, without holding back and without closing down. I can love and speak and listen and create without holding onto a myth of safety or salvation. I can much more readily give up the demand for safe passage and instead participate, turning towards life with a whole-heartedness and playfulness that's robbed from me when I'm caught in comparison with how I am supposed to be, or how things are supposed to be. I stop pretzeling myself to try to get life to go my way.-The poem, Lizzie and Simon's wonderful words, and everything I've expressed here came from conversations in and around the Turning Towards Life project. You can hear the episode that includes Naomi Shihab Nye's poem, and much else, on our website here, and on our podcast.

Photo by Laura Wielo on Unsplash

All that he taught me by leaving

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

Stuck on the bus

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?

Photo by Edgar on Unsplash

On the economic narrative, and its limits

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.

Photo by Freddie Collins on Unsplash

Vast

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.

Photo by Dmitri Popov on Unsplash

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.

Photo Credit: Chirag D. Shah via Compfight cc

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.

Photo Credit: Lauren Manning via Compfight cc