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

Muted

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.

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Three myths to give up on if we want to grow up

At the times when the world has shrunk to its smallest horizons, when I have been most despairing, desperate, or alone, or when I have found myself working and pushing much too hard, it usually turns out that I have been living in thrall to one or more protective myths about life that I have carried from childhood.Myth 1 - I’m not like other peopleIn this account I’m not really a person, while other people are. Others' lives are complete in ways that mine is not. Other people know where they’re going, while I am lost. Other people made the right choices, while I stumbled. Other people aren’t as confused as I am. Other people don’t suffer as I do.Underpinning this myth is a great deal of negative self-judgement, which fuels a sense of deflation, self-diminishment or self-pity. But it can equally be worn as a mask of grandiosity, in which I puff myself up with certainty and arrogance. Sometimes I bounce between the two poles, from deflation to grandiosity and back again.Myth 2 - Death has nothing to do with meSomehow I’m separate enough from the real world that death is not an issue for me in the way it is for others. It’s frightening but far-off, a rumour, something that happens to other people. Consequently, I need pay it little real attention. I can ignore what my body tells me, and what my heart tells me. I’m protected from seeing that my time is finite and that I have to decide in which relationship to life I wish to stand.Myth 3 - A saviour is comingIf I’m good enough, popular enough, loved enough, successful enough, recognised enough, powerful enough, rich enough, famous enough, caring enough… then I’ll be saved. Someone - one of the grown-ups in the world - will see me and, recognising my goodness, rescue me from my troublesAnd then I won’t have to face them any more.This myth keeps me working really hard. Sometimes it has me try to save others in the very same way that I am desperate to be saved.--I know these are not myths I carry alone.Growing up calls on us to see how these myths of childhood keep us as children, and to find that the that the protection they offer is little protection at all:Myth 1 is the myth of specialness. It boosts our self esteem by giving us a reason for all the difficulty we’re experiencing. And protects us from feeling the suffering of others by keeping us out of reciprocal relationship with them.Myth 2 is the myth of no consequence. It saves us from the burden of having to choose, or face the outcomes of our choices.Myth 3 is the myth of dependency. By rendering us helpless it keeps us from taking on the full responsibility (and possibility) of our own adulthood.I think we cling onto these myths because, as well as the explanations they give us, we’re afraid that if we face the true situation of our lives (we’re not so special, we’ll die, there’s nobody to save us) then our troubles will be magnified. But, as with any turning away from the truth, they come at an enormous cost. In particular they keep both our dependency and our hopelessness going.And when we can learn to see through them, we can also start to learn how to grow up. We can find that the world has much less to stand on than we thought, and that we nevertheless have enormous ability to stand. We can discover deep sources of hope, courage and compassion which which we had been out of touch. And as we allow ourselves to step out of hiding and into relationship, we can discover that our capacity to help others - and to be helped by them in return - is far greater than we could possibly have imagined.

Declaring Meaning

When we find out how much of the world is made up - by us - it's tempting to pull everything apart. We pull apart institutions - because we see how groundless their authority is. We pull apart politics - because as we see more into the ordinary lives of our politicians we discover that they are ordinary and flawed like us, and we no longer have reason to simplistically trust either their intentions or their abilities. We pull apart relationships - because we don't feel any reason to commit, beyond our moment-to-moment likes and dislikes. And we pull apart beliefs and practices that can bind us together.This step - using reason to see through what we'd taken to be unquestionably true is in so many ways a necessary developmental step for each of us and for our society. Indeed, it's the step that allowed us to discover science and its methods of rigorous, grounded inquiry. And it made it possible to undo the divine right of kings to rule over us, and to bring about democracy.But it's also so easily the route to nihilism: the move to render everything meaningless, everything pointless, everything disposable as we discover that the structures and stories and roles we used to trust were made up by other people. And, as the philosophers Kierkegaard and Nietzsche warned us, this ends up with us tearing meaning apart too, as we find out that what meaning we encountered in the world was only there because other people declared it anyway.And so the next step important after undoing it all is to find out that it's also within our power to put things back together, to declare meaning for ourselves. To find out that there are many kinds of truth, including those that take into account goodness and beauty as well as just reason. That out of the fragments of what we have taken apart, we can still choose practices, people, relationships, stories, commitments and vows to live by that invest life with purposefulness, care, and dignity.  And that this is possible, and necessary, in every sphere of life - in work, home, community and politics - specifically because we've found out that without it there is so little for us to stand on.

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Taking responsibility for our stories

Given that we are the only creatures (that we know of) that can tell stories about ourselves;and given that we live totally, inescapably in the stories we tell;and given that stories of any kind can be more or less truthful, more or less kind, more or less generous, more or less creative, more or less freeing of our enormous potential...... given all of this, don't we have a profound responsibility to question the stories we were handed? To not just take things 'as they are'?And to actively find - and consciously live by - the most truthful, kind, generous, creative, possibility-freeing stories about ourselves, about others, and about life that we can?

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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.In the story, an elderly woman named Ariella is given a tour of each of two possible after-lives. Hell, to her surprise, is an elegant palace nestling in beautiful gardens. Tables are set with delicious food and everyone is gathered for a feast. But as Ariella looks closely she sees that they are all frail, desperate, and starving. Their arms are held straight by long splints and because of this they are unable to bend their elbows to bring food to their mouths.Hell is a beautiful paradise filled with longing, sadness, meanness and misery.Isn't much of the world this way?Heaven, even more surprisingly, looks exactly the same. Same palace, same food, same splints. But here everyone is well fed, and happy. The difference? The residents of heaven know about kindness, and have learned to feed one another. The very same physical situation with a change in narrative and different practices brings forth a radically different world.It's so easy for us to imagine that the world we inhabit is fixed, solid. We come to believe that we are a certain way, and the world is a certain way too. But it's more accurate to say that we're always making the world together through our interpretations and actions - what's 'real' about the human world is much more fluid than at first it might seem.

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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Care and Careful

Careful and care are quite different from one another, but we often confuse them.Careful:

holding backwaiting until conditions are just rightbeing nice rather than genuinesaying what's expected, what's socially acceptableprotecting yourself - for the benefit of whom exactly?

Care:

coming in closeacting when it's neededbeing kind, which sometimes requires sharpnesssaying what will actually help, teach, free people updropping your defences so you can be of assistance

Careful keeps difficulty going when it feels too risky to act. Care does what it can to reduce it.Careful twists the truth for its own ends. Care speaks it.Careful is full of caution.And care is full of contact.

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The life beyond our narrow concerns

We're taught to ask ourselves the question 'What do I want to do with my life?'.But we're much less familiar with asking 'What does my life want to do with me?'.Asking this question requires us to see that there is a something called 'my life' that is beyond the usual narrow, more self-interested concerns that we hold.Beyond ego, beyond all the conditioning that comes from our culture, and beyond our familiar preferences lies something that is always calling to us, if we can quieten ourselves and be still for long enough.Responding to our lives in this way no longer means that things will definitely 'work out' for us in the way we've been taught. But it does offer the possibility of making a bigger contribution to life. One that goes far beyond what's possible when we only look for ways to be liked, to be safe, and to know how things are going to work out.

Photography by Lior Solomons-Wise

The peril of having one story

The problem with being sure of your story - the one you have that explains to you who you are, who other people are, and what's happening - is what is inevitably left out.Your confusion, longing, terrified waking in the quiet hours of the night, your disorientation -

A sign that it's all over, and that you're lost?

An inevitable part of the human condition (experienced by many more of us than will ever let on)?

The birth-pangs of something new? Some new way of living, thinking and relating that is emerging into life?

Each story about what you're experiencing leads to a different place, to different possibilities.Each story calls on a different way of relating to yourself and others.Each story is sustained by different practices (what you're doing repeatedly in your actions, your thinking that keeps it going).And none of them is ever the whole story.Part of the practice of a life fully lived - and leadership well done - is the practice of finding new ways of telling what we're sure we've already understood.

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Being our home

A meditation for those days when we feel small, abandoned, or on the outside of our lives.Bless these feet that carry me by day and by night.Bless these hands that touch, sense, and bring the world towards me.Bless these lungs, transforming air into life on every breath,and bless this heart, for the continued heritage of all heartssince the first broke into the stillness.Bless this mouth, that can say what only I can say.Bless this body for love, joy, grief, rage, despair and hope.Bless this 'I' for incompleteness.Bless this mind that discerns, wonders, confusesand occasionally makes sense of the chaos.Bless the uncountable mistakes, accidents, chances and failuresthat keep life going and delivered me to this moment.I do not know, really, what is mine to do.But I do know that I am here,along with so many others.So bless the here-ness of me, and may it be my offering,My thanks, my home.

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