Being Meta-stable

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?

What is life asking of me?

This is the question that rose to the surface as I listened to Gautam Srikishan’s meditative music emanating from my laptop. Krista Tippett and her On Being guests have collectively been one of my spiritual teachers for so many years, but last week was the first time I’d participated in a real-time gathering. A solstice pause, to reflect on the year past, and to replenish ourselves in community for the year ahead.

The finiteness of each of our lives – and of my life in particular – is never far from my consciousness. But this year I’ve felt it more viscerally than ever before. As Sir David Attenborough said memorably on our responsibility towards the future of life on Earth:

It is impossible, other than lying down and dying, to cease [emitting carbon dioxide and contributing to climate change]. What we have to think about is that the carbon dioxide […] is not being misspent.

I love this way of framing the issue. It makes it clear that there is almost always a trade-off, a choice, that we simply can’t do All The Things in our finite lives. And for someone like me, who identifies as a multipotentialite, that’s sobering.

So, what is life asking of me?

I have been struggling with this question in one form or another for as long as I can remember.

And the answer is… I don’t know.

I feel like I’m edging closer to an answer this year, settling back into the country in which I was born, transitioning fully into the aptly named ‘for-purpose’ sector, exploring with more intent the caring professions. But I can’t help feeling that it’s not enough, that with all the privilege I was born into and luck that has come my way, I have a responsibility to do more.

Pixar’s beautiful 2020 creation Soul reminds us not to get too caught up in our quest for Purpose with a capital P, that our spark is often best found in “regular old living”. Like so many things, I think the answer, at least for me, will involve both. Finding the right meta-stable state between my inner compass that drives me relentlessly to contribute more to this world; and simply being, embracing the fullness of life.

Krista Tippett, inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke, refers often to living the questions. That when we have a question for which we do not yet have an answer, we are called to not seek the answer but to hold and to live the question, hoping to live eventually into the answer. This is easier some days than others. But I often find that this liminal period between Christmas and the new year, what Germans refer to as Zwischen den Jahren, lends itself specially to ‘holding’ these larger questions.  

What question are you holding as you cross the threshold from this year to the next?