Author: Selena

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?

How might we accept impermanence with equanimity?

I remember feeling awed and terrified as a young child by the infinity of the universe… and the finiteness of death.

I still have an intense feeling of dread, whenever I allow myself to really think about it. Of existential terror.

After reading a book here, listening to a podcast there over the years, I decided that it was finally time to face it head on. I found the perfect opportunity with the start of a new Working Out Loud circle earlier this year, exploring week after week what death can teach us about living fully.

One of the exercises involves writing down 50 facts about yourself. I surprised myself – and my circle members even more – when I shared the fact that I had never been to a funeral. “Perhaps that explains my obsession with death”, I mused. “It’s theoretical.”

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“Are you pregnant?”, the quarantine official asked as part of his health screening routine, as we arrived at the next mandatory checkpoint in the airport after having travelled halfway across the world.

“No”, my husband answered, taking my hand.

“Have you been hospitalised in the past 30 days?”

This time I replied.

“I was pregnant, then I wasn’t, and I went to hospital.”

A pause. A look of surprise. And then unfabricated sorrow.

“I’m so sorry.”

It was one of the most pure, empathetic and touching responses I’ve received since my pregnancy loss.

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I’ve been ambivalent since childhood about having my own biological children. When we learnt together with my husband that it would be extremely unlikely, we decided to accept the situation, closing that door and opening another. So it took me a while to realise, and then to believe, that I might actually be pregnant. We were both overjoyed, and at the same time fully aware of the probability that this mini-version of us might not quite make it all the way.

After a first positive ultrasound, though, we started to hope. We kept reminding each other that the likelihood of a healthy birth was exceedingly low, but we started to dream that it wasn’t impossible.

The gynaecologist had asked us to come back for a second ultrasound one week later, just to be sure.

I knew as soon as I saw the image on the screen.

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Death is no longer theoretical.

I’ve carried it inside me.

How might I accept one day, with equanimity, the impermanence of this new life that we created through our love?

By acknowledging the loss.

By embracing the grief, along with the joy.

And by remembering.

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PS: The title comes from this extraordinary work by The Bengsons. Thank you Meg.

In the culture that my parents grew up in, reaching your first birthday is a crucial milestone to celebrate.

And since my parents’ culture is also part of my culture, I wanted to honour that by posting today, on Being Meta-stable’s one-year anniversary, and after a five-month conscious hiatus.

One of the rituals is to place a bunch of different objects in front of the one-year old and see which it picks first. This is followed by plenty of creative interpreting about its future!

I’ll offer instead a list of questions in no particular order, any of which I would love Being Meta-stable to explore as s.he grows:

What are we uniquely placed to do in this moment?

What is the most important thing for us to do right now?

How might we reinvent the economy to value what we value?

How might we proactively influence ourselves and others to care more about people we don’t know?

How can we better effect behavioural change – in ourselves and in others – to make the world a better place?

How can we show up consistently in a way that will bring out the best in others?

What do we appreciate most about…?

What are we assuming?

If we knew that what we are assuming weren’t true, what would we think?

What would a generous contribution look like?

How are each of us making sense of this?

How might we better discern the right meta-stable state between being and doing, accepting and changing, challenging and inspiring, pushing and letting go, self-care and other-care, trusting in our insights and recognising how little we know, … ?

How might we accept impermanence with equanimity?

What questions will guide you through 2021?

Almost 3 months ago, a new friend reached out and nudged me into signing up for Acumen’s online course based on Jacqueline Novogratz’s book, Manifesto for a Moral Revolution.

I’m so glad she did.

The book itself is inspiring and full of lived wisdom from Jacqueline’s decades of pioneering and then spreading the model of patient capital to solve poverty.

Working through the book with individual exercises and sharing those reflections week after week with a small but diverse team of extraordinary women, though, somehow fulfilled – and concretised – a need that I hadn’t until then fully realised that I had. And it reminded me of how grateful I am to Seth Godin for his Akimbo model of building thoughtful, generous communities of practice, for sharing the model with others (including Acumen), and for teaching and nudging us to step up and build our own.

The final exercise in the course was to write our own manifesto.

After sharing our versions in the safe and trusted space of our team, one of us asked if we were planning to put our manifestos up somewhere. To inspire and motivate us in the beautiful struggle of the moral revolution that each of us is drawn towards, yes, and also simply to remind ourselves of how much we grew throughout the course, knowing full well that growth up close rarely looks linear, nor one-way.

So here’s mine. It’s a statement of intention of my future self. But I find it helpful to think of it less as an end-state to be achieved, and rather as a daily practice, a way of being. It’s a commitment to myself: to practise being this way consistently, acting my way into the person I want to become.

It starts with consistently growing into a better version of myself and using that to make the world a better place for all, present and future.

That better version is always asking: what is the right meta-stable state – for me, for the situation, for the system – to be in, in this moment, on this spectrum? It advances confidently towards its Southern Cross and deliberately crafts a space for as-yet-unheard voices to offer different points of view.

It is a version that makes others feel seen and that they matter, simply because they are. It awakens possibilities, inviting them to develop into a better version of themselves. If they accept, it accompanies them: boarding their bus, trusting in their wisdom, letting go of the outcome, dancing lightly and staying curious.

It steps boldly into the role of cheville ouvrière, facilitator, or mediator;
it takes on the responsibility of moving complex, uncertain and ambiguous situations towards outcomes that it believes in;
it leads with love, integrity, hope and fierce intellect;
because it sees that that is what is needed, and because it can.

Who are you practising becoming?