The Ask and the Answer

We can learn a lot by making distinctions between things. When we’re able to name differences – for example, between enlivening and deadening, generous and fickle, ethical and manipulative, truthful and untruthful – we make it possible to observe what would otherwise have been invisible to us, and take action on the basis of our observations.

Being able to distinguish between necessary and sufficient, for example, opens many avenues for moving beyond technical solutions to our problems and into what’s meaningful, principled and life-giving. The distinction between feedback and requestsallows us to decide when we’re trying to help another person learn, and when we’re secretly trying to get something we want from them. And the distinction between when it’s time to exert ourselves and when it’s time to rest makes it possible for us to pay attention to the ongoing energy and flourishing of our lives in a way that’s not possible if every moment is just another moment taken, on not taken, for work.

But while distinctions are necessary, we can run into big trouble when we let them harden into dualisms – an either/or, is-or-is-not understanding of the world. Because dualisms introduce separation between things that are rarely actually separate. When I say ‘I’m right and you’re wrong’ I create a dualism that leaves no space for mywrongness, and for your rightness. When we harden into ‘I’m scared of speaking in public, but I love being by myself’ we leave no room for the parts of us that long to be heard by others. And whenever we make sweeping and certain judgements about others based on their gender, sexuality, politics, business practices, skin colour, preferences and commitments the dualism we create blunts our capacity to see anything else about them, and very little about our own complexities and contradictions.

Very often, if we’re not careful, our dualisms imprison us and our capacity to respond to the world. And, when we start to look at the deeper dualisms that seem self-evident, it’s not so clear that they are as solid as they seem, either.

Is it really the case that what I call ‘me’ is over here and that ‘you’ are fully, and only, over there? If we allow the dualism to soften we can ask deeper questions: What about the ways we’re always in the lives of the people we love, even when we’re not with them physically? Even when we’re no longer alive. And what about the trail of words, objects, influences, impacts we leave behind and around us? Can we really say, absolutely, that they’re not ‘me’? What compassion might arise when we start to see that ‘they’ are ‘me’ and that ‘I’ am ‘them’ in very many ways? And when we see that what we are sure is only in others – all that we despise, fear, reject – is also in ourselves?

Can we say for sure that there’s a thing called ‘work’ that’s separate from ‘life’ such that the two need to be balanced against one another? Is life really the absence of death? Is death, really, the absence of life? And can we say, with any absolute certainty, that we’re separate from what’s around us?

When our distinctions harden into dualisms we easily close ourselves off to learning, to curiosity, and to a direct encounter with the world. It’s a difficulty made harder for us because so much of our contemporary culture and education thrives on dualisms, on certainty, on knowing.

And for this reason making distinctions but letting our dualisms soften enough that we can call them into question is necessary work for all of us. It’s the work of not knowing. Or perhaps, better said, the work of letting our questions be more important than our answers.

Photo Credit: Barbara.K Flickr via Compfightcc

When we think we're unbreakable

For a long while, we think we’re unbreakable. We convince ourselves that what we’re doing – how we’re working, how we’re living – has no impact on us, really.

And for a while, as we try to do more, our level of stress goes up and our performance (or capacity to do what we’re intending) goes up too. We conclude that the move to make when things aren’t working out the way we intend is to push harder. And, for a while, it brings us exactly what we’re looking for.

But only for a while.

There comes a point where, for each of us, the body’s capacity begins to fray. It loses its ability to renew itself, to retain its coherence, to store energy and regenerate. Beyond this breakdown point, more effort not only results in less capacity, but in the breakdown of bodily systems themselves.  We get exhausted. We get ill. Our bodies show us what we have been committed to hiding from ourselves.

All too often, right at this moment where rest, recuperation, support and self-care are the only way back, we conclude that our dropping performance is because we’re not doing enough. And as we scramble to address the shortfall between what we’re ableto do and what we think we should be able to do, we make things worse.

Much worse.

This is no trivial matter. Study after study has established the link between sustained stress and heart attacks and other serious and life threatening illnesses. And yet in so much of work, and our lives, we act as if we’re invincible, even when the signs are right in front of us that we’re not.

It’s time we took our bodies seriously. And it’s time we considered rest, renewal, and support from others as a fundamental requirement to do anything well. Not an optional extra. Not a nice-to-have. And not some silly distraction from the ‘real work’ of business, or leadership, or parenting, or making a contribution.

Love is a Verb

Photo by David Mao on Unsplash

Love isn't a feeling, though there are many feelings that come with love - joy, longing, delight, anguish, frustration, heartbreak. And when we take love to be a feeling we rob ourselves of any agency when it comes to loving. The feeling has gone we say. I don't love him any more.

”But, as the psychologist Erich Fromm teaches us, "Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision?"

When we start to see love as a verb, we are given the possibility and responsibility of loving free of our demands that we must feel a particular way. And, in doing so, we allow ourselves the possibility of loving not to get something, but as a gift to match the gift we receive by being loved. This is the path that allows us to love strangers we have never met before, people who are wildly different from us, and to love those close-in without needing proof of our lovability in return.

It may be that this path - loving as a verb - is what will eventually help us humans take care of those who we cast out, and those parts of ourselves that cast out also.

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Lizzie Winn and I take up exactly this topic in this week's Turning Towards Life, titled 'They Just Look Like Love'. In it we talk about Erich Fromm, and a wonderful quote from Stephen R Covey, and about the magical properties of simple practices for loving one another (like making a morning cup of tea for the person you live with who for whom you don't feel love). And we begin with an excerpt from Rebecca Solnit's new book 'Cinderella Liberator'.

You can also catch our prior episode, 'Walking Away During Supper', in which we talk about men and women, our stories about what men are supposed to be, and how the choices both men and women make about how to be men ripple out through our families, workplaces and community.

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

Fear and Practice

I'm coming to see that of the three primary fear responses available to human bodies (fight, flight, and freeze), it's freeze that's the most habitual for me. Like many people who share a similar personality structure to me, the presence of fear or despair in the world is easily an opportunity to tune out, to dissociate, and to disappear in the midst of life. And this week, with ongoing news about the state of the earth's climate, with the attacks in Sri Lanka, and with the ongoing presence of an energetic xenophobia in our politics, there has been ample fuel for the kind of asleep-in-the-midst-of-things that it is so easy for me to fall into.All of this is one reason why I'm grateful for the increasing role of practice in my life. As I've written before, when I remember to live a life of practice - swimming, writing, contribution to community, meditation, Jewish practices, walking, music, intentional conversation - I feel more spaciousness in my heart, a renewed sense of aliveness in my body, and my mind is quieter too. I’m less convinced by stories about who I should be and what I’m supposed to be doing. Without practice it is easy for me to be swept up in my habits of absence, as if hurled by a swelling tide until I no longer remember that I’m swept up in anything and life becomes an invisible whirling torrent of fear and falling short and things to do and places to be. It should be of little surprise to me (though it often is) that in the midst of all that my body has tightened up, my heart more rigid, my mind filled with barely visible oughts and shoulds, judgements and obligations and disappointments.

It's practice that allows me to rehearse, repeatedly, a relationship with the world that’s full of life, and full of expression, full of connection to others, and full of welcome for all of it – even the greatest difficulties. And this, I’m starting to see more clearly, is the very point of practice – that over time, done again and again, it allows us to experience life as if parts of ourselves that are more often marginalised, abandoned or simply forgotten have come home again.

--I'm particularly grateful today for the poem Thanks by W S Merwin, which points to the restorative possibilities of giving thanks, practicing gratitude, right in the middle of the darkness. It's what I've needed these past weeks, and the conversation that Lizzie and I had as part of this week's Episode 82 of Turning Towards Life (another restorative practice for me) explores it in depth.And, if you missed them, we've also talked in the past couple of weeks about the moment-to-moment choices between possibility and fear (in Episode 81, Two Paths), and about the problems being too certain about things can bring us (in Episode 80, The Place Where We Are Right).You can catch up with all the conversations in that project over at turningtowards.life, and you can also find all our conversations on YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google and Spotify

Photo by Clark Young 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

On Being a Path-Maker

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.

Photo by Felipe Santana on Unsplash

Waiting to Know

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.

Photo Credit: fliegender via Compfight cc

The Abandoned Parts of Ourselves

Dear readers. New writing is in the works!Meanwhile, the Turning Towards Life project continues to dive deep into big questions of human living. If you haven't joined us yet, I invite you to explore this week's conversations and the growing archive on the links below. Over the past 74 weeks we've explored some fascinating topics that can contribute to a more full engagement with the joys and difficulties of being a person.Last week, in 'The Seven of Pentacles', we talked about seeing through the stories we have about life that have us either be too small (and which have us give up) or too big (when we demand that the world goes just our way); what it is to see that most of life doesn’t unfold in a ’cause and effect’ way; patience; participation in life as a way of meeting life; and ‘living as if you liked yourself’ – finding our goodness in the midst of everything that happens.This week, in 'The Abandoned Parts of Ourselves', we talk about adult development, about the loyalties to particular ways of doing things that we enter into during childhood, and about what it is to find ourselves free – to a greater or lesser extent – to pursue what is increasingly ‘ours’ to do in the world. Along the way we grapple with the many kinds of orthodoxy that shape us throughout life – family, religious, societal – and explore together how we might turn our loyalties to them into a bigger kind of loyalty which takes in life itself. We end with a consideration of the support and community that can help us find a life that feels true and real and which can joyfully welcome the parts of us that our loyalties – up until now – have had us turn away from.

What to Remember When Waking

The latest conversation in the 'Turning Towards Life' project, What to Remember When Waking is here.This week - how to live in the middle of life's mystery without being swallowed by fear, or losing touch with ourselves, how to have our lives be informed by the depth and imagination of our sleeping dreams, and what it is to find a way to be a gift back to the life that is a gift to us. Our source this week is by the poet David Whyte.

Photo by Danielle MacInnes on Unsplash