Being Meta-stable

“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?

“I don’t generally eat cheese nor drink wine. But I get that I’m in the extreme minority here. And that’s ok for me.”

This is what I found myself writing to a colleague a few days ago, in response to a suggestion that we hold regular Cheese & Wine events for our team.

In the not-so-distant past, I would have held my tongue. Wondered yet again if there was something (else) wrong with me. Seethed silently at the tyranny of the dominant story of society.

But recently I’ve found myself speaking up without angst, able to express my point of view in a neutral way, neither apologising for being strange, nor subtly accusing the other of being morally deficient.

It’s liberating.

The wonderfully wise Alain de Botton refers to this as a mini coming-out, and gently encourages us all to do it more:

There are constantly moments, when we might discover, in large areas and in small areas, in comedic areas and in serious areas, that we don’t fit the model of being normal that is sold to us.

And I think that a mature life, and a well-developed life, and a courageous life, is one in which – in as many areas as possible – we have a good sense of who we are and are able to take that out into the world and tell people about who we are, in ways that are not going to scare them and appal them, but hopefully interest them and lead them in turn to discover their own departures from the so-called ‘normal’, because this stuff is catching.

If somebody has the bravery to say, actually I don’t drink, or I like to sleep in a different way, or I fancy another person, or whatever it may be, then other people will discover that courage in themselves.

Which of your departures from the so-called normal might be ripe for a mini coming-out?

Sometime in 2020, when I was still living on the other side of the world, and my sister could no longer visit our parents in person, we decided to schedule a weekly family video call.

The purpose might have seemed obvious: for us to check in with each other.

There was a deeper reason too.

The conversations we had when we came together as a family were often mired in old stories and entrenched patterns. We both yearned for a space where we could experiment with different ways of being, and of being together, a space where we would (re)connect meaningfully as a family.

We sensed that our parents would be open to this. But how were we to accompany them effectively towards this on a relatively short video call from one week to the next, when they hadn’t undergone the organic evolution that we had over years? And how would we craft the conditions for each of us to show up with our best selves, responding thoughtfully – rather than reacting mindlessly – to our unique emotional triggers?

I’d been experimenting with Nancy Kline’s deceptively simple Time to Think components in my online gatherings, especially Attention – listening to “ignite the human mind”, without interruption; and Equality – giving equal turns and attention. Participants, including myself, were astonished at how merely respecting these two components deepened the quality of our interactions, giving each of us a feeling of ease, of being heard.

And so, one day, after some weeks of mediocre family conversations, we tentatively asked our parents if they would be up for trying something new. We would have a maximum of 3 minutes each to speak, we would mute ourselves unless it was our turn, and we would follow the same sequence for 2-3 rounds. I would cut the speaker off – including myself – at the 3-minute mark.

This might seem authoritarian, against the cultural norm of relying on implicit etiquette. Priya Parker encourages us to rethink this in The Art of Gathering, insisting on the importance of generous authority: combining compassion and order to serve our guests. One way of achieving this is to impose explicit pop-up rules, applying for the time of the gathering, and designed to ensure that people in all their diversities can share a common experience.

Our parents said yes. After a few weeks, the rules no longer needed to be enforced. Each of us naturally stopped after a few minutes, finding that we had come to the end of what we had to say. Sometimes one of us had a lot more to say, and it felt right to hold the space for that person. Other times, we listened intently through long moments of silence. Week after week, some of us found ourselves sharing things we hadn’t felt we’d been able to before, and we rediscovered each other, paying deep attention to what was spoken, and unspoken.

On our last gathering of 2021, we took turns responding to two questions:

How has this year been a gift to you?

What’s one thing you want to explore in 2022?

The answers were profound.

And as each of us spoke – and listened – I felt an invisible thread being woven between us, connecting us not only as a family, but as individual, beautifully imperfect, human beings.

How are you practising the art of gathering with the people who matter most to you, as we start this new year?