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Tea and coffee and the whole damn thing

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I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

~ T S Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

It was about to rain, the cafe looked warm and “we’ll have a quick latte”, we said, my friend wanting to put off the dreaded administration awaiting her at home, but guilty too. Then something happened. We saw real teapots and proper cups and ordered tea instead. She had a green cup with a gold rim, me a yellow one. And inhaling the honey vapour of Melbourne Afternoon the conversation went off-piste into matters wild and deep and never before said, matters in the earth of her life since she was small. We spoke strong and straight, and I saw the moment her shell cracked open. I saw her spirit move in freedom. Afterwards, we came out into the street new people.

I gave up coffee spoons twice over that day. I’m now measuring out my life in conversations.

***

Image: Konstantin Makovksy

Happy at work? Part 2

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The story so far:

Two receptions. A university starts a conversation about creating a happy, positive workplace and is ridiculed by staff and observers alike. A business magazine publishes an article suggesting employers thank employees for their work and an online leadership forum reacts with dismay and fury. Both audiences assume the employer is being false and manipulative, and is asking them to be false and manipulative too. What is going on here?

Here are some speculations.

I hear a couple of unexamined assumptions in the audiences’ reactions. The first assumption is that work is work and it’s not supposed to be enjoyable. The old Protestant/Calvinist streak is alive and well in our thinking here. We might have had “The Sixties”, to the faux despair of conservative or Tory politicians, but no matter how much love was free and how many bongs were smoked, they are a pimple on the bottom of an elephant in comparison to the depth and breadth of the Calvinist mindset and its commitment to joylessness.

The second assumption is that it’s not possible to enjoy work. Possibility can certainly occur like this. Damn infuriating! Talk to someone luxuriating in some beautiful, faithful misery of their own, suggest it could be different, and then see what happens. All I can say is you’d better watch your eyes. As for some poor schmuck who comes along and suggests it is possible, and, moreover, as in the case of the university, “we’d like you to do it”, well, the fury will be untrammelled.

This second assumption is starting to approach another factor, a deeper one, which may be what’s really running the show. It concerns the fear of blame, and the confusion about blame and responsibility.

We are enraged with the idea work may not have to be hard, disagreeable and coercive because it raises the spectre that our suffering may not be inevitable and this is a problem.

If our suffering is inevitable, then we can feel ourselves free from the fear of blame. Because it’s always blame, the premonition of blame, that’s lurking in our consciousness. Our Western culture is weaned and steeped in blame. We are all scarred with it almost from birth, and we will do anything to avoid it.

If, however, our suffering is not inevitable, well then that’s when things start to get tricky. If we were to admit the possibility that our suffering at work, our suffering in any sphere of life, were not inevitable, then a question would arise: who is responsible (or in the terms we’d hear it, who is to blame) for our suffering?

And then we may start to see, out of the corner of our eye, that we are there. We may start to see we bear responsibility for our lives and our experience in this moment, including our happiness and our suffering. Around the same time the stoppers in our ears, placed there by our own hand, might fall out and the call to give up blame and resentment and do something different might reach us at last.

***

In summary, my theory is that we ridicule the idea it might be possible to be happy and satisfied at work because we prefer the prospect of our suffering to the prospect of taking responsibility. The former is familiar after all; we know how to play that game. The boss is the boss, and we are the bossed, and if each of us just plays our respective roles, the world will go on turning. We may be miserable, but we’ve survived this far, and we’ll continue to survive.

For many people, however, there comes a day when the bankruptness of this stance is no longer tolerable. On that day, an opportunity presents itself. The opportunity to be a leader. When that day comes for you, what will you choose? To be a whinger, or a leader?

***

Image: Painter on the Road to Tarascon, Vincent van Gogh

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Happy at work?

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Two reports. The first in a national newspaper, the second in an online forum on leadership.

First report. The newspaper reported a major university had just published a document, prepared on their behalf by a big consulting organisation, which urged university staff to adopt “positive” behaviour in the workplace. Staff were furious, the article said.

Everything about the newspaper article was sneering, from its title – “So happy together” – to sentences such as this:

So far all RMIT’s 12-page, dot-point cajolement to be happy at work has succeeded in doing is raising the ire of its academics …

The commenters duly chimed in too.

Most were furious, scornful. They viewed the university’s discussion of “positive” behaviour in the workplace as coercive and requiring staff to pretend or suppress their real feelings.

Few, if any commenters could conceive that being happy or satisfied in the workplace could be a real experience. The concept “happiness at work” occurred to them only as “pretending at work”, and they viewed the university’s raising of the possibility of positive attitudes as demeaning and insulting.

***

Second report. A participant in an online forum on leadership cites a report in Forbes magazine about the benefits of employers saying thank you to their employees. An innocuous enough proposition you might think. Not at all. Commenters were scathing. One commenter was incensed enough to write her own blog post on the mistake of saying thank you.

Like the university staff and the readers in the first example, readers in this second example assumed without hesitation that having an employer say “thank you” could only be a ploy and a hateful one at that.

The blogger went so far as to say actions such as this – saying thank you – were responsible for an absence of employee engagement. “It’s no wonder,” she said,

we have such an issue with employee engagement, where 72% of American workers alone are disengaged.

It’s a pretty pass we’ve come to, isn’t it?

Investigating how staff can have a positive experience at work, or recommending people thank others, is viewed as damaging or threatening, while cynicism is allowed free rein. Neither group stopped for a moment to consider how their cynicism might be affecting the workplace. The issue is all over there, with the employers.

What is going on here? What is using these readers when some simple propositions are raised?

To be continued …

***

Image: The Sower, 1888; Vincent van Gogh

Plagiarism and integrity

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Yesterday, I said I considered it wasn’t my business if someone were to copy or plagiarise my thoughts. I view it as a matter of integrity between the person and themself, and, anyway, they’re welcome to it because there’s plenty more where that came from.

The power of the integrity point is not to be under-estimated, as I learnt a couple of years ago.

A student in the US wrote to me offering me money to take my blog offline for a week or two. She was about to submit an essay for her college course on the writer and Holocaust survivor, Primo Levi, and she had used some of the points from two posts I’d written about him. Before I had a chance to reply, she wrote to me again asking me to disregard the previous email. She apologised, and said she had changed the essay to make it clear she was using quotations from this blog.

I still find this pretty thrilling. Someone taking the time and effort to make her actions and the breach of integrity crystal clear, and giving up her ordinary human concern for looking good.

Did you know the word “integrity” has from time to time been the most popular search term on Google?  Integrity, in ourselves and others, is  immensely attractive and compelling.

***

Image: Shoes, 1888; Vincent van Gogh

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Blog readjustment

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It’s been bothering me that writing a book seems to demand I hold back the best ideas and insights gained by talking to people being leaders in the world until some as-yet-mythical publication date. If my book is published by a publisher, it may be years before it is published. If I publish it myself, it may be years before it reaches the audience I want it to reach.

In the meantime, as Goethe said, life is sweeping by, and all the while, remarkable people are living remarkable lives, transforming themselves and the most unpromising of circumstances into pure gold, while another group starves for want of joy and power and meaning in the world, the kind of joy and power and meaning available to them too if only they could know it was possible.

It’s seemed to me for some time that another type of book publication is needed. Something that allows instalments to be published and content to be written on the fly, as in the time of Dickens. Or something like the literary or political pamphlets that were previously a staple of publishing.

For these reasons, I’m choosing to take a different approach to this blog. From now on, I’ll be sharing more of the content I have previously been reserving for the book. I’ll also be using, with their permission, the real names of leaders and their organisations I’m writing about.

This might mean some content in the book will have been first published on this blog. I don’t foresee this will be a bar to book publication because the paradigm of book publishing is being entirely re-written, and it’s becoming routine for content to exist in a blog form and then a book form. I don’t foresee it will be a problem for potential book readers because the material will be integrated in a different way and there will be plenty of new material.

I’m also creating it that the book material will occur as entirely fresh and compelling, regardless of whether it’s been previously referred to in some other form.

As for the potential hazard of people borrowing ideas or stories, I choose to follow Seth Godin’s line on this. He is great in many ways, and his renunciation of the stance of proprietorialism is one of them. It’s never much interested me if someone were to copy or plagiarise my thoughts. For one, it’s a matter of integrity between the person and themself, and secondly, they’re welcome to it, for as George Gershwin reportedly said when he lost a song he was working on,

There’s plenty more where that came from.

Besides, it’s not as if I’m originating this stuff. I’m just a conduit for writing that wants to be written. I’m shepherding into words material that already exists, even if it hasn’t yet been said.

***

Image: Farmer sitting at the fireside and reading; by the glorious, inimitable Vincent van Gogh, courtesy of biblioklept

Out with “hard”

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At the beginning of this year, I was complaining to my coach about an ongoing personal issue. It’s a well-rehearsed subject this one, and I was giving it yet one more turn around the block. She put it to me that I was always having to have the issue “handled”, always feeling I had to be dealing with it in some way, and she asked me to consider a proposition.

Say if you were to declare a holiday from the issue? Say if, for this year, you were to say you were not “doing” the issue? By all means, communicate and respond as normal with the people involved, just don’t be “working on” or “doing” the issue.

This was startling to me, and very exciting. And so I did it. I declared I was not dealing with the issue in 2012.

Four months later, the results are remarkable. I’ve discovered nothing actually happens when I don’t deal with the issue. It doesn’t all go to hell; in fact, it’s the reverse.  Since I’ve given up trying to force or fix the matter, things I’ve wanted to have happen in the area have arisen of their own accord. In addition, I’ve got back the time and energy I previously spent dealing with it. I hadn’t realised how much of myself I was giving to the issue, and all to no avail.

The other day I saw another way to use this practice.

There’s a general agreement out there in the world that writing is hard, and unless it’s hard it’s no good. There are umpteen blog sites dedicated to the issue, and the stand-out is Steven Pressfield’s.

Pressfield has it that writing is hand-to-hand combat in the trenches, and he named his book on writing accordingly, The War of Art. He talks every week on his blog about the struggle, the beast he calls “resistance”, the hard. His commenters do likewise.

It’s a very common view; Pressfield is only the keeper of its flame. It pops up everywhere, and I’d been getting more and more seduced by it until the other day.

The other day it occurred to me I could simply do what I’d done earlier in the year with the other issue. I could just declare I wasn’t “doing” hard for a particular period of time. So I have declared for the month of May I am not doing hard. If I’m writing or contemplating writing, or doing some other task, and it starts to occur as “hard”, I will do one of two things:

  1. lay aside the task and do something else
  2. do the task in a way that does not occur as hard.

At the end of May, I’ll assess how it went and make a declaration for the period beyond or another declaration entirely. I’ll tell you how it goes.

***

Agreeing to create beauty

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An orchestra is … the only community that comes together with the fundamental objective of agreeing with itself. Agree on what? To create beauty…

With those words, Jose Antonio Abreu, an economist and classical pianist from Venezuela, had me.

In 1975 Abreu started a small children’s orchestra to share his secret about the profound effects of music-making, and today he is the founder of a program in Venezuela called Sistema involving over 300,000 children. Pilot programs based on Sistema are now being run around the world in the US, Scotland, England, Canada, New Zealand and, since 2008, Australia.

Yesterday, I attended one of the rehearsals of the Crashendo orchestra, the Sistema program established for the children of Laverton primary school in Melbourne. Laverton is a suburb regarded as being socially disadvantaged, with a high immigrant population. In the orchestra I found tiny wee girls from China with ribbons tied to their violins, sweet delicate boys from other parts, and bigger Australian-born children, one boy jumping over garbage bins in a single bound, two girls with small teddy bears in bags labelled “With love to Mum” perched on their music stands.

Their music tutors for the day, the astoundingly patient Laura and Eric, by whatever miracle, brought together this chirping, squawking flock of birds to play a hornpipe dedicated to “Cap’n” somebody-or-other and a tune called Barrier Reef featuring some of the children playing pizzicato.

Along the way they were many fits and starts: some of the children had forgotten their music or hadn’t written in their fingerings as they’d been asked; teddy bears fell on floors and had to be retrieved; the cellos went on a mini-strike because the violins were holding them back, and one boy cried over a disagreement he’d had with another child and declared himself “too stressed to play”.  But there were points at which the smoke cleared for a moment and in that moment something else was emerging.

One such moment came when Laura asked the double bass to play alone. After he finished, she asked him,

Did you notice something? Did you notice that everyone stopped talking while you played and that it was absolutely quiet?

The boy, who’d been very distracted, was still. At another point, she explained to the violins how the cellos were playing an octave lower and to have them be heard it was the job of the violins to “fit themselves into the cellos”. When they played the next passage it was markedly different.

In the final ten minutes they all sat and played together under Eric’s guidance, and there was a moment, I swear, when the six young girls on the violins next to me had me do a double-take. Hello, I thought. Where had this clarity come from?

***

As the Director of Sistema Australia, Christopher Nicholls, says:

There’s so much more to children than people give them credit for. They have an enormous capacity to be brilliant.

Chris has kindly agreed to be interviewed for my book about people being leaders in the world. What I know of him already is that he’s committed to having children live extraordinary lives, to having them experience joy and beauty and the grace of human harmony.

Sistema and the Crashendo program exists by virtue of Chris’s commitment and the generosity of people contributing their time and funds. It is one of the principles of Sistema as Abreu created it that no child has to pay to participate. Everything is provided by Sistema, including the instruments.

It really takes something to have this happen, to wrest something new from the ordinary inertia of life, and create it ongoingly. At present, Crashendo needs $60,000 for the rest of 2012. You can make a donation by clicking here.

For more information about Sistema and the Crashendo program, including a short video of Crashendo’s first concert, click here.

To read a recent New York Times article about Sistema, click here.

***

Image: Some of the children I met from the Crashendo orchestra in Laverton, Melbourne

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MONA revisited

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Went back to MONA on the weekend because I enjoyed it so much the first time round. Said hello to my favourites, Peter Buggenhout’s The Blind Leading the Blind, looking blacker and bigger and more sinister than even I remember, and Wang Qingsong’s Dream of Migrants. Marvelled all over again at the beauty and imagination of the presentation of works, including the tall inky cabinets of antiquities. Got a sob in my throat seeing the silhouette of a exquisitely carved cat, four inches high, an offering to a god from an ancient Egyptian tomb, cast against the cabinet’s side.

Looked in vain for the eye-high row of c*nt sculptures in the “Catacombs”. They’ve been replaced with a row of the pretty, lyrical drawings of Hungarian-born, New York-based Balint Zsako. His modern Kama Sutra, leafy and vaporous, is very relaxing. It requires only the eyeballs.

In the meantime, three of the sculptures have been turned into soaps one can buy in the gift shop, in the fragrance of Bianca, Angelique and another.

The one shot I managed to get off with my iPhone before the signal was lost in David Walsh’s underground kingdom is the first image below, which I believe is a medieval burial stone from Turkey. This dumb fellow moves me greatly. I could weep over him too.

***

* For more information about Balint Zsako, go to his website here. Note, the works above are not necessarily featured at MONA but ones very like them are.

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Fear? Oceanic.

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We never know the truth by being told it.
We have to experience it in some way.
That is the abiding grace of history.
It is the theatre in which we experience truth.
~ Greg Dening, Performances, 1996

I want to tell you about my week. Not much happened outwardly. Inwardly, I had a revelation. I started to get present to the fact I’m not present to the world.

By world I mean my experience of the world. As I started to glimpse this huge and fundamental fact I also started to get what was the stuff of my experience of the world. And I’m stunned to report it is fear.

Fear of other people, fear of not being liked, fear of losing love, fear of disapproval, fear of failing, fear of succeeding, fear of not doing what I want to do, fear of getting old, fear of the weather, fear of going to the shop and not getting a parking spot, fear of not having anything to wear, fear of having a bad hair day, fear of this and much much more. Fear of everything, fear on principle.

My fear is oceanic, and somehow I’ve completely missed it till this week.

There were a few things that came together to make it possible. I want to tell you about one because it may give you something too.

***

I was talking to a friend and she asked if the word “coward” fitted for some way I’d been being in a situation we were discussing. I easily turned this down. “No”, I said, “I’ve always known myself to be courageous.” Courage was the one thing I knew I could always count myself for. I may doubt myself in various ways, but never on this score.

Afterwards, I got curious about the discrepancy. How could it be, I wondered, that that word had presented itself to her and yet I had utter confidence in its antithesis?

The next day I happened to pick up a book on leadership I hadn’t yet read and the book fell open at a page entitled “fearlessness”. The author* made a distinction between courage and a quality she translated, from a Buddhist concept, as fearlessness.

Courage, she said, was the ability to act in the moment, to do what was required, with little or no thought. To save the drowning child, run into the burning house, speak up in the face of danger. Fearlessness, on the other hand, is the ability to go through fear to the other side. Not to dispel fear or overcome fear, but to experience fear on a sustained basis and break through it into a space beyond it. The Buddhists, and also I think the Hindus, call it abhaya.

When I researched it further, I found this sentence from a Tibetan monk:

Cowardice is not being present to fear.

Which was not at all how I thought of cowardice, if indeed I’d ever thought of it.

Here was a way in which both possibilities – courage and cowardice – could co-exist. One could know oneself as being courageous, and yet suffer an absence of fearlessness.

Around the same time I had a deep, bodily reaction to something that with my new attentiveness I now recognised as fear and sadness, and I saw I never usually let myself feel it. It’s unpleasant and shocking, and usually it’s ruthlessly suppressed by some aspect of my being, covered over, in my case, with boredom, restlessness or irritation.

This covering over, something I’ve not even been aware of, has made me oblivious to my fear. It has made me a coward.

***

As crazy as it sounds, I’m exhilarated and intrigued to know myself as a coward. It’s an entirely new thought and it offers ways of being I didn’t know were available.

Over and over, I learn that in order to see something new, one first has to give up what one knows.

***

* Margaret Wheatley

The deliciousness of talking about writing

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I had the delicious experience of meeting an author whose book I edited. Our conversations had been by email and he wanted to meet the person who “knows me so well now”.

He also wanted to ask questions about some of the editing decisions I’d made and I was happy to oblige. Having to teach another person about my thought processes would give me the chance to discover them myself.

One of the things I discovered is that the energy of a piece of writing comes from what’s not said; from the folds in a text, the pockets of unarticulated thought or emotion. The trick in writing is to be present to these folds and their potentialities, without pursuing them. To be at ease with their unsaidness; to have lost one’s fear of the unsaid. That’s when a text becomes pliable, robust, just quiescent enough.

***

In my own book writing, I recently drew up a list of rules: my rules of the game for writing the book. One rule is to give up intensifiers. Another is to make it as simple as possible “but not simpler”, as Einstein said.

As a leader I interviewed put it,

Once you get it really simple, then you’re able to communicate it at different levels.

***

Image: Joan Miro, Landscape, 1927

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