Tag Archives: The Art of Possibility

Context is decisive

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Rosamund Stone Zander* tells an anecdote about going on a skiing trip to improve her skiing. On the very first run her plans went awry.

I slipped and fell on a patch of ice. From then on I became vigilant, tensing up in resistance whenever I spotted ice, and, unfortunately, there was plenty of it.

She was having a miserable time and was about to abandon her project and come back another time “when real skiing was to be had” when it suddenly occurred to her she was operating under an assumption:

that real skiing is skiing on snow.

She saw immediately that if she were going to be “a New England skier”, she had better include ice in her definition of skiing.

Thereafter, she says, she “redrew the box” in her mind so now she had it that “skiing is skiing on snow and ice.” The next run, and all the runs after, were very different. Her physical self now “coordinated easily” with her new way of thinking and she “welcomed the ice.”

***

The box in her mind, and the one in ours, is our context. It’s essentially what we delineate as ours or “it”. Everything outside the box is not-ours or not-it. Dealing with the not-it of our lives is exhausting, futile and disempowering and yet we spend a lot of our lives doing precisely that. We regularly fail to get that we are the ones who drew the box and we can re-draw it at any time.

I used the distinction of context on a recent consulting engagement. Never the most patient person, I was getting frustrated at the glacial pace of the project. Tasks that would normally take hours were taking days, and whole weeks were going by with very little progress. No matter how I tried to hurry along my various colleagues and the client, nothing worked. And yet every time there was a hiatus I would stop earning income because it was a time and materials job.

At first I considered ending the engagement and walking away. Technically, I had fulfilled the terms of the contract because the contract end date had already past. In my heart, however, this wouldn’t have been honouring my word. I may have signed a contract formulated around time, but the unwritten clause, to which I’d also signed up, was that the job be finished.

As soon as I got that walking away was not an option, I saw what hadn’t been working and it had everything to do with my context.

The context I had had was that completing the project meant completing the project as quickly and smoothly as possible. In this context, the glitches, delays and misunderstandings were not “mine”, not “it”.

Yet say if I re-drew the box to include the glitches and delays and misunderstandings? Say if I invented a context that said completing the project meant completing the project in the face of glitches and delays and misunderstandings?

As soon as I got this new context, the frustration fell away. And, wouldn’t you know it, the project re-started almost immediately.

The glitches, delays and misunderstandings didn’t necessarily go away; what went away was my resistance to them.

***

* Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander, The Art of Possibility; this book just keeps on giving.

Image: Alpine skiing by Leroy Neiman

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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

The value of coaching, use in case of resistance

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Whenever I take my glasses off (usually they fall off), I panic. For one split moment, the grass becomes green fuzz, the sun, an overflowing cup of honey. There’s nothing ugly or aggressive about nature blurred. But I don’t know where I am. I can’t recognise friends. At any moment I could trip. That’s how I felt with Hanui’s playing – beauty glimmered all around me, but nothing was defined. I was helpless in a blur of colour. The transformation Hanui underwent brought clarity, and with it, a more intricate, true beauty. The pristine architecture of Bach finally rose up to its aching glory.

Music student, Amanda Burr, on the performance of a fellow student from The Art of Possibility, by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander.

***

Image: courtesy of Liquid Paper

Possibility: Part 6

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This is the final part of the series on possibility and The Art of Possibility, by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander.

I can’t take my leave of this glorious book without discussing what Roz and Ben call the practice of  “Giving an A”.  The practice was born when Ben, the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic orchestra, was about to start a new 2-semester course teaching 30 graduate students at the New England Conversatory of Music.

After 25 years of teaching Ben realised he was about to start another class with the same old obstacle in the way: that the students would be in such

a chronic state of anxiety over the measurement of their performance that they would be reluctant to take risks with their playing.

This time he did something different. He sat down with Roz, a therapist, and together they speculated about how they could move the students from the world of measurement – the world of right, wrong, good, bad, better than, less than, success, failure – into the world of possibility.

Ben describes what they came up with. “Roz and I predicted that abolishing grades altogether would only make matters worse … The students would feel cheated of the opportunity for stardom and would still be focused on their place in the lineup. So we came up with the idea of giving them all the only grade that would put them at ease”; the only grade that could “finesse the stranglehold of judgement that grades have over our consciousness from our earliest days.”

He announced it to the students as follows:

Each student in this class will get an A for the course. However, there is one requirement that you must fulfill to earn this grade: sometime during the next two weeks, you must write me a letter dated next May, which begins with the words, ‘Dear Mr Zander, I got my A because … ‘, and in this letter you are to tell, in as much detail as you can, the story of what will have happened to you by next May that is in line with this extraordinary grade …

In writing their letters Ben tells them to “place themselves in the future, looking back, and to report on all the insights they acquired … I am especially interested in the person you will have become by next May.”

The practice is a dramatic success, and not just with the students giving themselves an A. Because in exploring the idea Ben and Roz see it can be used in many different ways, including giving an A to others. There is so much more to say about the power and magic of the practice, and I could go on for posts and posts. For now, I want to end by including the letters written by two of Ben’s students and my own letter to Ben, from six months in the future.

***

Dear Mr Zander,

I got my A because … I changed from someone who was scared to make a mistake in case she was noticed to someone who knows that she has a contribution to make to other people, musically and personally … Thus all diffidence and lack of belief in myself are gone. So too is the belief that I only exist as a reflection in other people’s eyes and the resulting desire to please everyone … I have changed from desiring inconsequentiality and anonymity to accepting the joy that comes from knowing that my music changes the world.

Giselle Hillyer

***

Dear Mr Zander,

I got my A because I became a great gardener to build my own garden of life. Till last year I was intimidated, judgemental, negative, lonely, lost, no energy to do what-so-ever, loveless, spiritless, hopeless, emotionless … endless. What I thought so miserably was actually what really made me to become what I am today, who loves myself, therefore music, life, people, my work, and even miseries. I love my weeds as much as my unblossomed roses. I can’t wait for tomorrow because I’m in love with today, hard work, and reward … what can be better?

Sincerely, Soyan Kim

***

30 June 2012

Dear Ben,

I got my A because I gave my leadership project everything I had – my passion, my joy, my commitment – and I discovered I had so much more to give than I knew. I also finally discovered what you discovered: that people are always more important than the project or task I’m involved in.  What I love about the person I’ve become is that I broke through the limit on my creativity and expression that I’d often come up against, and which was one of the reasons I started my blog years ago. Now the limit is no longer there and I have become to expression what Jacqueline du Pre was to music, “a conduit for music to pour through”. As you say of her, I have the

radical confidence about [my] own highly personal expression that people acquire when they understand that performance is not about getting your act together, but about opening up to the energy of the audience and of the music, and letting it sing in your unique voice.

Yours in possibility,

Narelle Hanratty

***

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Possibility: Part 5

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A few days before Christmas I heard a British man speaking about his abhorrence of Christmas, and the lengths to which he goes to avoid it. This year he was spending the time in Australia;  last year, he’d gone to the Congo (of course, Australia, Congo … same diff).

He cited the hypocrisy of feeling, the consumerism, and so on. In short, he served up all the ready-to-hand “agreements” about Christmas in a two-minute burst of heat and fear.

What he left out, to my ears, was the source of the fear: that at Christmas we come face-to-face with the state of our relationships.

In the book The Art of Possibility, Benjamin Zander, the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic orchestra, tells of a time he came face-to-face with the state of his relationships: when his second wife

walked away from the marriage midstream.

Luckily, his wife saw something he couldn’t quite see at first. He tells the story thus:

At the same time [as leaving] she asserted – though at first I did not listen – that we would always be in relationship, and that it was up to us to invent the form. Clearly the family had not been thriving under the arrangement we’d had. ‘Let’s invent a form,’ she said, ‘that allows us to contribute to each other, and let’s set a distance that allows us to be fully ourselves.’

Get that? At this late, late stage, she raises the possibility of something completely new.

He gets it.

Going down for the second time, I understood and grabbed hold. I saw the whole thing was made up and that the game of success was just that, a game. I realised I could invent another game.

The game he goes on to invent he calls “being a contribution”. What he means by that is a post for another day. For now, what matters is what each of them saw.

His wife saw that no matter if they were married or divorced they would always be in relationship. Moreover, her stance also implies something much broader: that all of us are always already in relationship. Whether we are married, divorced, or strangers to each other. We don’t have to establish or build a relationship: it’s already there. What we do, if anything, is call forth something already there.

Benjamin saw that something new was possible. Amid the pain and shock of the marriage breakdown new ways of relating and being presented themselves to him. He was not being given by his past or by his circumstances, he was being given by the future.

What both of them saw was that if the present form wasn’t working they could invent a form that did work.

***

Today I’m thinking about that British man, so full of hurt and fear, and hoping someone invites him into a new game. I may see him again, and if I do, I’ll invite him myself. What about you? What new games, what new forms, are you inventing for your relationships in the coming year?

***

Image: Engadin ski marathon, Switzerland by Valentin Flauraud/Reuters, courtesy of The Guardian

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Possibility: Part 4

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Time and again, I get tripped up by my knowledge and my knowledge about my knowledge.

How often I think to myself I just know how a situation is, or how a situation is going to go, or how a person will be when I talk to them.

Yet that “I just know” keeps me from attending to what is actually happening and what a person is actually saying. And it keeps me from encountering anything really new. My filter of “knowledge” labels and shrink-wraps every situation and person before I even encounter them.

In our society, knowledge, reasoning, rationality is all. What cannot be known is not worth knowing. What cannot be known does not exist. If Kafka were portraying our condition afresh we would wake and consult the mirror to find ourselves transformed into a quadratic equation.

And yet the bounty of the world lies outside knowledge and any knowledge about knowledge. The bounty of the world lies in the realm of possibility.

Communicating possibility in a world of knowledge

Communicating about the realm of possibility is a tricky matter. We have only the tools of knowledge to communicate about something that lies outside knowledge.

It’s also easy to get waylaid by the common meaning of possibility: some set of circumstances that may or may not happen in the future; ie, possibility as probability.

Consider there is another kind of possibility that has nothing to do with future hoped-for circumstances. It is a kind of possibility which inheres in our everyday world, running like a subterranean river below the apparent surface of people and things and events. A kind of possibility that exists now and at every moment as itself: as possibility.

I use the image of a river as a tribute to the tremendous phrase I heard recently on a program about gambling. The speaker, a philosopher, raised the startling suggestion that one of the attractions of playing poker machines for the chronically addicted was the encounter with

the stream of indeterminacy.

That’s it! The stream of indeterminacy is the realm of possibility, the realm in which things and people and events have not yet been determined, not yet fixed, assessed or shrink-wrapped. Not yet known.

Possibility is the magic thing

The philosopher suggested that the connection with this other realm, the “stream of indeterminacy”, is the real high of the gambling experience.

In other words, it is possibility, not the win, which compels the gambler.

What I like about this speculation is that it also accounts for the gambler’s perseveration. Once the gambler has a win, they’re back in the world of knowledge, the determined, the fixed. What do they do then? Why, most often, they dive straight back into the stream of indeterminacy.

Contrary to what our veneration of knowing and knowledge might lead us to expect, it is the encounter with the realm of unknowing, the opening up to it, which compels and transforms our lived experience.

***

Image: The purple noon’s transparent might, Arthur Streeton, 1896

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Possibility: Part 3

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Two prime ministers are sitting in a room discussing affairs of state. Suddenly a man bursts in, apoplectic with fury, shouting and stamping and banging his fist on the desk. The resident prime minister admonishes him, ‘Peter,’ he says, ‘kindly remember Rule Number 6,’ whereupon Peter is instantly restored to complete calm, apologises and withdraws. Twenty minutes later, they are interrupted again by an hysterical woman gesticulating wildly … Again, the prime minister says, ‘Marie, please remember Rule Number 6.’ Complete calm descends once more, and she too withdraws with a bow and an apology. A similar incident happens a third time, until the visiting Prime Minister can restrain himself no longer. ‘My dear friend, I’ve seen many things in my life, but never anything as remarkable as this. Would you be willing to share with me the secret of Rule Number 6?’ ‘Very simple,” replies the other. ‘Rule Number 6 is ‘Don’t take yourself so g—damn seriously.’ ‘Ah,’ says the visitor, ‘this is a fine rule.” After a moment, he asks, ‘And what, may I ask, are the other rules?’ ‘There aren’t any.’

Rule Number 6 is one of the most enlivening and amusing chapters in The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander.

Ben, the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic orchestra, tells a story of what can happen when we adopt Rule Number 6 in our own lives. It concerns a masterclass he was leading in the UK which was being filmed by the BBC, and one of his students, a young tenor named Jeffrey who had just landed a job at La Scala in Milan.

***

Jeffrey was to sing “Spring Dream” from a Schubert song cycle. The song is about a jilted lover in the “cold days of the soul.”  Ben describes the music thus:

some of the most intimate, soft, subtle and delicate in the repertoire. It depends for its expression on an understanding of the nuances of sadness, vulnerability, and never-ending loss.

When Jeffrey began to sing, however, “there was no trace of melancholy,” Ben says. Instead, “out poured a glorious stream of rich, resonant, Italianate sound.”

It was “pure Jeffrey, taking himself very seriously.”

He describes what happened after Jeffrey agreed to be coached:

For forty-five minutes, I engaged in a battle royale, not with Jeffrey but with his pride, his vocal training, his need to look good, and the years of applause he had received for his extraordinary voice. As each layer was peeled away and he got closer and closer to the raw vulnerability of Schubert’s distraught lover, his voice lost its patina and began to reveal the human soul beneath.

He continues,

At the final words, ‘When will I have my lover in my arms again?’ Jeffrey’s voice, now almost inaudible, seemed to reach us through some other channel than sound. Nobody stirred – the audience, the players, the BBC crew – all of us were unified in silence. Then, finally, tremendous applause.

***

Afterwards, Ben thanked Jeffrey for his willingness to give up “his pride, his training, and his vocal accomplishment” and for the “sacrifice he had made to bring us to a place of understanding.”

He remarked how it is always moving when someone gives up their pride to reveal a truth, and that even the cameraman had been crying. At the time he said this he hadn’t actually seen the cameraman crying; he had simply been expressing that no-one could have remained unmoved.

Later in the evening, the cameraman went up to Ben and asked how he had known he was crying. He said he had not been able to see through the lens for his tears.

When I was sent on this job from London, I had no idea that this music shit was about my life.

***

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Possibility: Part 2

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It just occurred to me today that my father was a man who knew about possibility, and that the story I chose to tell at his funeral 17 months ago, from the hundreds I could have chosen, was a story about possibility.

It concerned an incident from when I was a little girl, and my father, still a young man. The story I want to tell today comes from when my father was turning 87, a few months before he died.

***

My father was a fisherman for more than 80 years. He fished for pleasure, for food, for spiritual nourishment. As a fisherman he was intimately attuned to the natural world. On any day he knew the state of the moon’s waxing and waning. He watched and listened to the tides and the wind and the pelicans that ride the thermals high above the eucalypts.

About a week or two before his 87th birthday, my father was fishing at his favourite spot when he looked down and saw, as if for the first time, a particular cone-shaped shell common to the tidelines around his home.

He was suddenly struck by the idea of using the creature inside as bait. So he hammered open the shell, put the creature on his hook and cast out. Within a couple of minutes he caught a black bream, and for the next hour he just pulled in fish wherever he cast. For three days he repeated the experiment and every single time he cast out, he caught a fish.

On day four I spoke to him by phone and his excitement was palpable. This was one of the greatest discoveries of his life. He had won the only lottery he ever cared to enter. He also felt he’d been given another 20 years of life.

As we chatted, we laughed and marvelled how it was that after more than 80 years of close observation of the natural world, as well as constant experimentation with bait type, bait recipes and locations, he could discover something completely new right under his nose.

***

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Possibility

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It’s obvious now some time has passed, and it was definitely what I wanted, even if I kept the want largely secret from myself. Writing a book about leadership requires the writer to confront the things that keep her from fully realising her own leadership.

As each week passes, I’m encountering another constraint in my own relationship to leadership. One of the most basic is not confined to questions of leadership and people attempting to write books about leadership. It affects all human beings and all situations.

It concerns possibility. This post is the first in a series about possibility.

***

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