Category Archives: How to live

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

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.

***

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

On doctors and other divas

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It came up in the comments that doctors might have an implied dispensation from communicating with empathy to their patients. I think many people, not least many doctors, would hold this view.

It’s based on a number of unexamined assumptions.

1. Skill or service or efficiency is not concerned with empathy or relating.

2. Not only is skill or service or efficiency not concerned with empathy or relating, they are in contradistinction; more of one guarantees less of the other.

3. Empathy or relating is a “nice-to-have”; it’s the icing on top but makes no appreciable (read, measurable) difference in the execution of a skill or service, nor in the world generally.

There’s also a fourth underlying assumption which Seth Godin notes (how great is this guy? Posts seven days a week, produces potent little gems most):

4. Trapped in the “scarcity model” of thinking, we assume if someone is truly gifted they don’t have the “time or focus to also be kind or reasonable or good at understanding our needs”. In short, a “diva” is great because she is a jerk.

All these types of assumptions are markers of the “scarcity model” of thinking, the conception of the world in which everything is finite. They are also markers of a conception of the world in which a fatuously mechanistic cause-and-effect operates.

It’s all nonsense, all a fundamental delusion about the world and the way it works, and people like Professor Jody Hoffer Gittell are illustrating it.

***

Professor Gittell is Professor of Management at Brandeis University in the US, and on a recent trip to Australia she shared her findings about the determinants of performance in the airline industry and hospital sector.

Professor Gittell looked at the organisations in each sector that performed well and those that performed less well, and distinguished three parameters as being vital to the performance differential:

  • shared goals
  • shared knowledge
  • mutual respect among workers.

So what? we might ask. We could all intuitively predict the presence of these factors, or factors like these, may lead to increased performance in an organisation.

Her findings are startling in showing the degree to which these factors make a difference. In fact, in the hospital setting, she finds these factors – factors which pertain to what’s happening outside the operating theatre – to be the greatest determinant of the effectiveness of the hospital, the satisfaction of staff and the patient outcome.

She has now shared her model of organisational performance which she calls “Relational Coordination” with many hospital systems around the world. And all over she meets with the same startlement, the same evidence of our delusion about the way the world works. As one UK surgeon, a little less invested in his amour propre, said to her:

It’s really hard to get it’s not what we’re doing in the operating theatre that determines the outcomes.

***

For more information about Professor Gittell, go to her website or to the Relational Coordination site.

New ears

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There’s a question I’ve been letting myself be used by this week:

Starting from nothing, what can I create?

If I were able to get outside what I know, outside what the past is telling me about who I am and what’s possible, what could I create?

Inside the question, I remembered someone.

***

Several years ago, a colleague and I were hired by a government department to provide recommendations on the technology it should purchase to assist staff members with a disability. During the engagement I met a staff member whom I call Iris.

Iris was born with a severe hearing impairment. She wore hearing aids and used lip-reading, and spoke with what she called a “deaf accent”. After I interviewed her, Iris invited me to go with her to a private appointment with her audiologist because she thought it would be a good opportunity for me to ask him questions. I went, and it was. Later, she asked me if I wanted a copy of something she’d sent her audiologist and I said yes.

It was a story she’d written about her life in hearing aids.

When she was a little girl, she wore a hearing aid powered by two batteries so large and heavy for a child they were supported by a halter that went round her neck. Each battery hung down on her chest, she said, like premature breasts.

At that time, children like Iris qualified for a government scheme which provided new hearing aids every five years or so. Iris was raised by her grandparents who were classical music aficionados, and every five years, they would take Iris to get her new hearing aids and Iris’s world would be turned upside down. Each new hearing aid would cancel out a whole swathe of her experience, while opening up new areas. On one changeover, she explained, she lost her grandmother’s favourite, Schubert, but she gained Chopin whom previously she could never hear.

At each changeover of hearing aid, she started from nothing all over again.

***

There are very few people I’ve ever met as confident and self-assured as Iris. And she was a leader. Normally, people hiring consultants seem to assume the consultant has some kind of magic power to see or understand what’s going on without giving them any information. Not Iris. She took responsibility for ensuring, as far as possible, I got some insight into what it takes to be deaf. She created opportunities to communicate with me and increase my knowledge outside the formal interview process, and she shared her life with me.

She totally got how she could contribute to me for everyone’s benefit, and she did it.

Today, I’m wondering how Iris’s experience of starting from zero every five years contributed to who she is in the world: a human being living the possibility of power, resourcefulness and leadership in the face of severe disability. And what she learnt of invention and nothingness.

***

Image: Poster by Raymond Savignac, 1978, courtesy Galerie Montmartre, Melbourne, Australia

Resurrections

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“It’s a life of crucifixions and resurrections,” said the priest. “Of course,” I thought, “that’s what Easter means.”

***

Last weekend, my mother’s quilting club put on their bi-annual quilt show. It was held in a white art gallery overlooking a bay. The sun was out, the gardens just starting to turn gold.

They’d set up a table selling raffle tickets at the local shopping centre in the preceding weeks, and on the morning of the opening one of the club members talked about the show on a major Sydney radio station.They were overwhelmed with visitors, some who’d driven for hours. The gallery staff were caught off guard. Having advised the club they could not provide their own tea and cakes, the cafe was now overrun with quilters desperate for a cup. The queues persisted for hours.

My mother had several of her quilts on display, as well as three quilts for sale. So many were the quilts, they had room to hang only one of the quilts she had for sale; the others were merely draped over the nearest spare object.

She could have sold the quilt on display at least 10 times. She had people fighting over it, and scores of people asking her about the colour palette and technique. Afterwards, she had a phone conversation with the woman who bought it and the woman told her she had come to the quilt show with an academic in textiles who had described the quilt palette as outstanding.

It was the same story with the quilts that weren’t even hung. She had numerous offers for each. One woman, on learning someone else had just bought the quilt she wanted, asked my mother if she would take a commission to make another. In fact, my mother not only sold all the quilts many times over, she got several requests for commissions and offers for the quilts which weren’t for sale.

My mother and her quilts were the talk of the show.

***

My mother will turn 80 this year. For most of her life, she has considered herself shy, and she frequently suffered in social settings. She was often unhappy and frustrated. Then about 12 years ago she discovered quilting and her life has been transformed. She found something that satisfied her need for creative expression, for passion, for friendship and sociability, and since then everything’s been different.

My father died in July 2010 after being married to my mother for 51 years. The first nine months were awful, and I feared for her life too. Now I see she’s turned a corner. Another resurrection has occurred.

***

Image: The classic Roebuck quilt (not my mother’s version)

The feared communication

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So, I haven’t exhausted the topic of truth-telling yet. I’ve got something more to say.

A few years ago I took the series of courses known as the Curriculum for Living offered by Landmark Education. The first course in the series of three is the Landmark Forum; the second is a course known as the Advanced Course; the third is a course that stretches over 3-4 months which is called the Self-Expression and Leadership Program.

I’ve been a participant and a coach in the latter program, and there’s an exercise in the program that never fails to stun people. The exercise requires each participant, over the course of the program, to interview at least five people who are close to them. They can interview as many people as they like, but five is the suggested minimum.

The interview structure and set-up

The interview consists of five questions:

  1. What are my strengths?
  2. What are my weaknesses?
  3. What can you count on me for?
  4. What can’t you count on me for?
  5. If you were speaking on behalf of the people who know me, how would you describe me?

Participants are carefully coached on preparing for the interviews. They are told when inviting someone for an interview, they are to make it absolutely clear that:

  • the interviewee is free to say whatever he or she wants to say
  • the interviewer is eager to have an absolutely truthful conversation
  • regardless of what the interviewee says, the interviewer will not react to, nor in any way, dispute their answer.

Participants are encouraged to invite their nearest and dearest, as well as their nearest and not-so-dearest, into an interview. People generally interview their husband or their wife, their siblings, their parents, their bosses, their friends, their work colleagues and so on.

Interviews can be conducted by phone, or face-to-face.

The outcome

As you’d expect, many people are terrified at the prospect of this exercise. Some put it off until the very end of the program, some don’t do it.

Most people, however, do take it on, and listening to them talk about it is an extraordinary experience. People who might not have said a word for the entire 3-4 months, stand up and talk about what their boss said to them, or what their wife or their brother said to them, and they are exhilarated. “I was expecting something really negative and it wasn’t at all! What a surprise!”, they usually say, their faces lit up, their whole body moving freely.

What’s happening here?

The relief is huge. But why relief? Because we spend our lives fearing a certain communication is about to come our way. You know the one I mean. That certain communication you think is designed just for you that you feel might very well kill you if you heard someone saying it to you.

So potent is the fear of receiving this communication, we design our lives to make sure no-one ever says it. For example, we enrol in endless courses and proudly insist on our teachability to ensure we never hear someone telling us we’re dogmatic or closed-minded, say.

When participants do the interview exercise, they discover without fail that the feared communication is not there. Interviewees inevitably say something quite different.

Multiple effects

The exercise generates multiple effects, not merely the relief of not hearing the feared communication.

It also uncovers any unfinished business between two people. Because participants quickly realise it’s impossible to invite a person for an interview, or in some cases, to complete the interview, unless the unfinished business is addressed. Suddenly, it’s there staring you in the face and you have a unique opportunity to resolve it.

By far the biggest impact of the exercise lies in experiencing oneself as someone who is not afraid of the truth, someone who can handle truth-telling. For this reason alone, the exercise is priceless.

***

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Too little said, too much communicated

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I’ve been thinking about this matter of lying that came up in the last post, and it occurred to me we operate under three assumptions when we’re considering whether to be truthful with others:

  1. Only what’s said counts
  2. The person to whom I’m talking is small and fragile and couldn’t possibly handle the truth
  3. No-one will know I haven’t been truthful if I just say nothing.

1. Only what’s said counts

We have it that we’re not communicating if we’re not speaking. Wrong. The unsaid is communicated, and the unsaid shouts louder than the said. Not only does the content of the unsaid shout, the fact of it does too. All of us are geniuses of the first order when it comes to knowing something is there, something is off. As the great US novelist, Anne Tyler, has one of her characters say of his family situation:

Too little said, too much communicated.

And saying something rather than nothing doesn’t change the equation one jot if the something is not the truth. Withholding the truth and giving a “white lie” instead is still a case of the unsaid. The fact of the lie, the fact of the withholding, registers. It registers in the speaker and in the other person and in the world.

The world is not merely the said; it is also the unsaid. The world is not merely the things; it is also the non-things. The world is not merely being; it is also not-being.

2. “They are small and fragile and couldn’t possibly handle the truth”

Only one thing to say here, and I’d suggest a mirror would come in handy. Who is small and fragile and not able to handle the truth?

All of us are large and able. Unexpected wonders occur when we give up our listening of others as small.

3. No-one will know if I haven’t been truthful

Wrong again. You’ll know.

***

Image: Photograph by George Roder

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Good-looking

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There’s a passage by the best-selling author and philosopher, Alain de Botton, that makes me laugh like … well, “like a parent on the opening night of a school play.”

… my priority was to be liked, rather than speak the truth. A desire to please led me to laugh at modest jokes like a parent on the opening night of a school play. With strangers, I adopted the servile manner of a concierge greeting wealthy clients in a hotel … I sought the approval of figures of authority and after encounters with them, worried at length whether they had thought me acceptable. When passing through customs or driving alongside police cars, I harboured a confused wish for the uniformed officials to think well of me.*

Priceless. I see myself as an seven-year-old walking down the street in a new dress with my mother and sister, holding my sister’s hand for once, preening and thinking to myself  “Everyone will think we’re so good.” Or my father, driving the five of us, telling us to “sit up straight” as we passed a police car.

Wanting people to think well of us, wanting to look good, is universal, fundamental and the root of much anxiety and difficulty. It was running the show in a story I heard yesterday.

***

A writer was invited to speak at a conference about happiness and its “causes”. For some time leading up to the event he was worried because he did not feel happy. How was he going to speak on happiness to 1,000 people when he was feeling unhappy?

The event went ahead and he spoke on this and that, and did not come clean that he was struggling. A little while later he did come clean, though not with the original audience. He confessed to his blog audience instead, and his unhappiness over the lie was still palpable.

His story has a number of interesting angles. You can look at it from the angle of integrity. From everything this man has written in the past, the absence of integrity will be eating him alive. It also vividly demonstrates our desire to look good. It was so strong in him, as it is in all of us, that it overrode his desire to be honest, even though honesty is what he regards as the “calling card” of all his writing. Do you get that? His desire to look good at the conference – his desire to be seen as a happy person – trumped what most mattered to him, the very essence of his identity.  Small wonder he’s feeling miserable.

There are a number of things he can do to restore his sense of self, but that’s a post for another day.

Consider that true freedom, true peace of mind, happiness even, lies in giving up our desire to look good.

***

* Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy

Five kick-arse questions

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A couple of years ago on this blog I discussed a woman who was going round asking people a question and turning their answers into a book (hey, books are created on a lot less). Now, I didn’t mind the idea; it was just the question that sucked:

Have you had a happy life?

I ask you. Is that not a dumb question? Not least because you gotta catch people on their deathbed it seems to me before you’d get a response. Who else would be strong enough to give an answer to that question, except the dying?

And if the past tense thing is not enough to make you squint, there’s still the whole beside-the-point thing. Really, there’s only one correct answer to this question and that’s “who cares?”

No, no, no, questions are precious jewels and have to be handled accordingly. Here are some not-so-dumb questions for your delectation over the weekend.

1. What does it mean to be?

Martin Heidegger was a philosopher with a very big insight, in fact, the biggest since about 500BC.

Consider that every time we say something like “I am confident”, “I am no good at numbers”, “They are stingy”, “John is always on time”, “My wife doesn’t understand”, “My son will never get a job”, “Muslims are x” or “Christians are y”, we are communicating our understanding of what it means to be.

Heidegger realised all these instances of the verb “to be”, all these is’s and are’s, indicated that we think of Being as something fixed and immutable in time and space. Not only that, he said, we’d been thinking of Being as something fixed and immutable since the time of Socrates over 2,000 years ago.

Before Socrates, Heidegger realised, it had been a whole other picture. The pre-Socratic Greeks did not think of Being as something fixed and immutable, but as an arising into presence, an arising and an abiding. The ancient Greek term is poïesis, from whence the word poetry, and it translates as something like coming forth, emerging.

What would life be like if we thought of people and situations as instances of poïesis, as instances of being which arise or emerge according to context, as mutable, malleable, contingent, something that can be called forth? Every time on this blog I seem to be saying something weird, or something you may not get, consider that this is where I’m coming from, or intending to come from.

2. What is Nature asking for?

When I read this question by Rosamund Stone Zander in The Art of Possibility I was stopped in my tracks. What is Nature asking for? Man, I love this question.

It occurred to her when she was out in a canoe “on a dazzling summer day off New England’s coast” and she found herself “not knowing how to cope with so much beauty.” What is Nature asking for?, she thought. The answer, when it came to her, “springing from a naive part of me”, was that it’s asking us to participate.

Her question, and answer she found, reminds me of a favourite, half-remembered quotation of a fisherman, from a Daphne du Maurier book:

his dull eye surfeited with undigested beauty.

3. How to live?

All the great writers are asking this question. The greatest of the great, such as Leo Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf, are asking it explicitly. Like all questions, only more so, it demands its asking, over and over again.

4. Who am I being?

This one’s the natural corollary of question 1. If what it means to be is not what we think it is, who might we be, now and in every moment? If being is not fixed in time and space, but is called forth, who or what might we call forth?

If I’m facing a difficulty — if I’ve lost my job, if my marriage is breaking up, if one of my children is in danger, if I’m facing illness, if I’m uncertain or I’ve lost my bearings — who am I being in the face of it? Am I being righteous, indignant, resentful, bitter, timid, passive, resigned, a victim? Or am I being trusting, powerful, resourceful, in action, courageous, mighty, loving, inventive, accepting, forgiving?

Who are we, who we be, is in our hands, not in our circumstances.

5. How do you stop the wind from coming through the other end of your telephone line?

The inimitable Totsymae asked this question this week, and had me and thousands of others pondering the mysteries of ending telephone calls. Tots, you are a gem.

***

Image: Piazza d’Italia, by Giorgio de Chirico, 1913