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
Convergent problems are the kind for which diligent, patient and repeated efforts produce answers we can trust. Many problems in mathematics, for example are convergent, as are the vast majority of engineering problems. Such problems are convergent because a suitable methodology and sufficient effort allow us to converge on a single, practical, true answer to the question at hand.Convergent problems lend themselves to solution by technique and process. And once we know what to do with a convergent problem, we can repeat the technique and expect to find a reliable answer, every time.Divergent problems are those for which, with diligent, patient and repeated efforts, we could expect to find many different answers. For example, in sentencing someone who has committed a crime, is justice or mercy more appropriate? Or, in the midst of many competing financial pressures, should we centralise our operation, seizing control of all the details, or should we decentralise, allowing the people with the most local expertise the opportunity to bring their own insights to bear? Is discipline or love more important in learning to do something well? Should we dedicate ourselves to conserving tradition, or supporting change? And in organising a society, is freedom to do what we each want most important, or responsibility to the wellbeing of others?Divergent problems are divergent precisely because it is possible to hold so many different perspectives. The more we inquire - if we are prepared to do so with sincerity and rigour - the more possible responses we discover. And such problems are inherently the problems of living systems in general, and human circumstances in particular - circumstances in which our consciousness, values, commitments, cares and many interpretations enter the fray.Divergent problems do not lend themselves to easy answers, to platitudes, or technique. Instead, divergent problems require us to make a transcendent move, in which we step out of the easy polarities of right or wrong, and good or bad. Such a move, which is clearly a developmental move in the sense that I have described previously, calls to the fore our capacity to live in the middle of polarities and complexity, uncertainty and fluidity. In the case of justice and mercy, this move might well be called wisdom. We run into enormous difficulty whenever we treat divergent problems as if they were convergent - as if there were some reliable process, however complex and sophisticated, by which to arrive at a correct answer. When we do this, we treat human situations as if they were mathematical or machine-like. And we strip ourselves of the possibility of cultivating discernment and genuine wisdom, reducing ourselves to rule-followers and automatons.It can never be justice alone - for strict justice is harsh, and unforgiving, and has no concern for the particulars of a human life. And it can never be mercy alone - for mercy's kindness without justice can be cruel and damaging to many in its wish to take care of the few. And it is never sufficient to say 'well, it must be mercy and justice' as if there were some simple, easy to understand combination or position between the two.And all of this is why paying attention to development 
I started my 49th year of life this week. Around 160 years ago (less than four of my current life spans laid end-to-end) a full third of my contemporaries would already have reached the end of their lives, and less than half of us could have expected to live beyond our late 50s (see source [1] below).Today, at least in the UK, two-thirds of us will live into our late seventies and many into our eighties. What a blessing, if we'll choose to appreciate it while we can. And what possibilities, if we'll find a way to use our chances of vastly extended life in service of those around us and those yet to come.Readers of my work here will know of my interest in ongoing adult development, which takes place through marked increases in our capacity to make sense of the world, to inhabit longer time horizons (knowing ourselves as inheritors of a deep past and contributors towards a long future), to be less 'had' by impulsivity and narcissism, to understand the world of others, to exercise more autonomy, and to take action in systems and contexts which are bigger than our own immediate concerns [2].Such development is very natural, if the opportunities come our way and if we're courageous enough and have enough support to take them. But it is quite different from the rote-learning, keeping up appearances, and getting ahead that so many of us are taught at school and in our workplaces. It typically requires facing into difficulty rather than turning away, welcoming back the parts of ourselves that we've disowned, failing and falling and getting back up again. It's not served by looking good, or knowing the facts, or keeping it all together, or learning just what's comfortable and familiar, or comparing ourselves with others.And it's probably the most important work we can do with the gift of these extra decades, if we're lucky enough to have them. Because the world faces challenges of a complexity our ordinary way of speaking, thinking, acting and relating to one another are often ill-equipped to face. And perhaps we have been given these decades - through the long slow evolution of human beings as a species - precisely so that we can work on the problems our shorter-lived ancestors never got the chance to tackle.References:[1] Modal Age at Death: Mortality Trends in England and Wales 1841-2010, 
It's a small shift, but a potentially profound one.What if you choose to see what you're in the middle of right now from the point of view of a year ahead? Or ten years? Or a hundred?Or if you were to watch this moment in life from the viewpoint of the moon? Or from the far edge of the galaxy?From here, what changes?Do your worries and fears have the same hold?Do the same things seem important?From what are you freed?What's called for, now?Sometimes, we need the perspective of a billion miles and an aeon in time to see what we've got caught up in that's trivial. And that what really matters is quite different from what we've taken it to be.