Being Meta-stable

“Remember, each of you has agency!”

This was a favourite saying from one of my former managers during our one-on-one check-ins. It would be prompted by some observation I’d share about what those in positions of power, including that manager, might consider to address whatever issue I’d been hearing from the team.  

What I would reply now, that I couldn’t quite articulate then, is that not everyone possesses the skills, or feels they have the agency, to speak up or to ask for what they need. That the power differential creates a real barrier. And that those in positions of power hold a responsibility to identify and reduce those barriers through individual behaviour and structural changes.

I’ve been thinking about this in the context of the different teams I’ve been a part of over the years, as a team member or a people manager. As a team member, noticing when I felt able, say, to talk about my intense sensory sensitivities – and when I didn’t. As a manager, remembering how I would go first sharing my shortcomings to give my team members permission to tell me how I could do better. And how I could unintentionally shut a team member down under the stress of a looming deadline.

I’ve also been reflecting about this in the context of my spiritual care work in public hospitals. One of the foundational muscles we exercise in spiritual care is to bear witness to someone’s suffering. In a place where a lot is already being done, we prioritise ‘being’ over ‘doing’, leaning firmly away from fixing, solving, or giving advice. We often seek to reconnect people with their own agency, to shift their perspective or take a decision. For some people, this is enough.

For others, the real and perceived power differential with their treatment team – especially their doctors – is too great. I’ve found this to be true even for some people who speak English as their first language, are university-educated, and have social support around them. It’s led me to reconsider the power inherent in my role as an employee of the hospital, even if it holds relatively little status in the hospital hierarchy. It’s meant that I find myself advocating on behalf of patients, trying to ensure that their voice is heard and valued in considerations about their care. It’s left me pondering what else I can do beyond this case-by-case advocacy, to make the overall system better.

Because while each of us does have agency, the effectiveness of that agency depends on how we are situated in the system within which we operate.

Where are you situated in a system that you are trying to change, and how does that inform your agency?

An old friend from France asked the other day what the current state of the world is like for me. My response came surprisingly spontaneously: I told him that what I’m doing feels far from enough given the scale of what we’re facing. And, I’m doing work in which I feel useful, and which is growing me towards the sort of person I believe is needed to better handle our collective predicament.

I’ve always had a knack for spotting what might need to change in a system. But it’s taken me lots of change ‘experiments’ with varying levels of success to more deeply understand the wisdom behind those famous words often attributed to Mohandas Gandhi: be the change you want to see. Embodying that wisdom is, of course, a work-in-progress.

What I’m currently practising is to pause, and to check in with my intentions, each time I feel an urge to respond to a spark of anger triggered by what I see as ‘wrong’. To be brutally honest with myself and discern whether the urge is coming more from a place of righteousness, or more from a place of fierce compassion. And, if it is grounded in fierce compassion, to then engage in a tiny act of pushing a superficial boundary, or peacefully refusing to comply.

This might look as tiny as stubbornly writing my clinical notes in hospital using the patient’s first name instead of the efficient, dehumanising ‘Pt’. In choosing, after taking a long, deep breath, to ask as open and gently curious a question as I can manage in that moment to try to understand what someone has just said. Or in answering brontë velez’s magnificent question*: how will I be useless to capitalism today?

In what tiny ways are you becoming the change you want to see?

*which I discovered through Sarah Wilson’s equally stunning I eat the stars

“We need to do something, but what?”

The daughter of my patient, who was in her nineties and fast approaching the end of her life, looked at me expectantly. Her mum had been brought up to follow a certain religion, but that had fallen away over the years. What do we do when there is no longer a tradition to follow, when there isn’t an accepted norm, and yet we feel a deep yearning that something needs to be done?

We ended up exploring together what she thought her mum would find meaningful, what she would find meaningful, and how the intersection of these two might sit with the rest of the family. We talked about small, simple rituals that they could lead now on their own, while her mum was still in the hospital bed. Things like playing a favourite piece of music on their phone, reading out loud a much-loved poem or passage, holding hands with her mum in an unbroken circle, each person honouring their relationship with her mum with a word, or two, or more. I saw in her eyes the moment she realised her agency, that she didn’t need to ask for permission, or advice. That she could trust her instinct that something needed to be done, and her inner knowing of a ‘right’ thing to do.

I notice I’ve been feeling similarly for a while now about a much more mundane threshold: that moment just before eating a meal.

When I was growing up, we had a whole ritual around dinnertime. We would set the table with the filled rice bowls, chopsticks, and soup spoons. My sister and I would carefully carry out the two dishes that my mum had laboured over. Then we would wait for everyone to sit down and formally invite the others to eat, before starting. It wasn’t much, but it was something. An acknowledgement that we were eating the meal together.

These days I’m feeling the need to acknowledge something more basic: that we get to eat. To acknowledge the myriad of life forms and all the ways they need to interact for this singular act of nourishment to be possible. And, when I’m eating alongside another human, to acknowledge that we get to do it together.

We’ve been experimenting with my partner when we have dinner together at home, taking turns to offer a few words, whatever feels most salient to us that day, before we start eating. I haven’t landed yet on something that feels right enough as I continue to attempt to wrangle all the bits that I like from a bunch of different wisdom traditions into a set of decidedly inelegant phrases. At the heart of it, though, is the habit of pausing daily to zoom out from our everyday joys and grievances, to give thanks for all the improbable conditions that have led up to this very moment that we are experiencing right now. To remember how incredible it is that we get to be alive.

What moments in your life are you feeling a need to acknowledge, that you don’t yet have a form for?

This post has been a long time coming.

It’s been three and a half years since I last wrote here. Lots has happened in that time, and I’ve done plenty of writing elsewhere. But since I threw off the last shackles of a mainstream-ish career a few weeks ago, I’ve found myself drawn back to this blog.

The resistance has come from not knowing what to say. From wanting this to be useful for someone else. From knowing that I need to write about something I know, and doubting that what I know might be useful for someone else because of the unusual-ness of my lived experience.

The insistence has come from delighting in what has changed and what has stayed the same these past six years as I reread my old blog posts, and from wanting to offer the same gift to my future self. From reminding myself how much I appreciate when someone else, who has a lived experience that on the surface looks so different from my own, summons the generosity to share their unique perspective. From remembering that I also doubted, before training and now working in spiritual care in a public hospital, that I would manage to connect meaningfully with all sorts of people, because of how different I perceived my life to be. From realising that there are days when I still doubt, and that I show up regardless.

People often ask me why I work in spiritual care. Do I enjoy it? Not always. Is it hard? Sometimes. Does it make me come alive? Without a doubt.

And so it is, in a very different way, with writing.

I’m reminded of these wise words attributed to the architect of the American non-violent civil rights movement, Howard Thurman:

Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

What makes you come alive?

“But you could do so much more!”

I’ve lamented some version of this to my mum over the years, starting from the kitchen conversations of my childhood when she was preparing our family meals and I was sporadically attempting to help.

When I started being accelerated through school, well-meaning adults would comment that I must have gotten my “brains” from my dad (he’s a doctor). I would retort, “no, from my mum!”, and then add that she didn’t finish school, just to make clear my stance on external indicators of status.

Or at least my stance in that moment. It was clear to me already then that one of the dominant stories of society on high status was to earn a degree at a prestigious university and go on to make an impact in your chosen field, respected by your peers and acknowledged visibly through well-known prizes and influential positions. And as much as I like to think that I’ve charted my own path, following my own compass, I know that a large part of my résumé has been influenced – consciously or not – by that story.

I hated that people assumed my mum wasn’t the exceptional human whose gifts I profited from every day, simply because she didn’t have a degree. I would ask her what she dreamed of doing once we were out of her hands. She would reply that showing up every day in the way that she wanted to for the people she loved was enough for her. Which would lead to my lament above. And then to a discussion about the birth lottery, and the responsibility that the lucky have, to use their gifts for the betterment of society.

I count myself amongst the lucky. I’ve been driven for as long as I can remember by this narrative, that I need to maximise the use of the gifts I’ve been given, to make the world a better place. Intertwined with this is an unspoken, less noble, narrative. That doing so will earn me high status. That I will be seen as fulfilling my potential. That I will be, and be seen as, special.

My work these past few years has been to practise letting go of this prestige motivation. To quiet my ego. Often it feels like I’m going in circles.

Sometime last year a friend suggested taking a course together. As I investigated the work of Emily Esfahani Smith, the course instructor, I came across one of her articles that quoted from George Eliot’s Middlemarch, a book I’d not gotten round to reading. The quote struck a deep chord, and some weeks later, when I’d finished the book, I was able to appreciate it fully:

Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

I don’t have it all sorted out yet. But I think where I’ve gotten to for now is that this is part of moving from the paradigm of measurement to one of possibility. We are not more or less worthy depending on how much impact we have. What matters is that, at every stage, we do what we can, with what we have, where we are. This will look different from person to person. And it may look different as we journey through our lives.

I’m learning to focus on a humbler goal: to do one thing every day that makes life a little better for another person in some tangible way.

What’s one thing you can do today to make the life of someone else better?