Being Meta-stable

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?

How do we hold on to the insights and worldview shifts that the past months have sparked in many of us? How do we stay committed to “building back better”, to resist being seduced into the comfort of what was before?

In an online event I participated in earlier this week, someone responded by sharing a phrase that lingered on in my mind long after:

Remain in a state of blessed unrest.

An internet search revealed the source – Martha Graham, as recounted in her biography by fellow choreographer Agnes de Mille on the creative artist never being satisfied:

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. […]

No artist is pleased […] There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

I had to dig a little to find this, and I love that the first result that popped up was actually environmentalist Paul Hawken’s 2007 book Blessed Unrest: how the largest social movement in history is restoring grace, justice and beauty to the world. He explains in a short video – worth watching in its entirety – why he chose it as his title, weaving a thread from the abolitionists through to today’s social and environmental justice activists, all committed to “acting in such a way that allows others to be free”:

It seemed to me “blessed unrest” was a term that had arms big enough to hold the diversity and the depth and the heart of this movement.

I’ve always been in a state of unrest, often searching, rarely satisfied for long. I used to worry that something was wrong with me, until my sister a few years back said in one of our protracted intercontinental conversations: “it’s what makes you who you are”.

And now I can put a name to it.

What are you doing to remain in a state of blessed unrest?

I’ve been faced in recent weeks with deciding which meta-stable states to hang out in as the lockdown here in France has been progressively lifted.  

Between the two extremes of social isolation and joining in the summer festivities – and I have people in my network pulling me in both directions – are a myriad of possible balanced approaches.

To help clear my mental fog before taking a decision on how to act – whether that be voicing my discomfort in a group at the lack of physical distancing, wearing a mask when noone else is, or visiting older family and friends – I’m asking myself these questions:

What are the facts?

What stories have I been listening to, what emotions have they surfaced, and how might these affect my risk perception in this moment?

What other blind spots do I need to consider, especially the power of social norms?

What is the risk of not acting to myself and others? What is the benefit?

What is the risk of acting to myself and others? What is the benefit?

What is the level of risk that I’m currently willing to accept, knowing that there is no zero risk?

What is my inner compass telling me to do?

Am I ready to let go of the outcome?

What questions are helping you navigate through risk and uncertainty?

“I don’t mix personal and professional.”

That’s how a colleague from some years back memorably introduced herself to me, only to become shortly after, and while we were still working together, a close friend.

Just as our professional relationships can benefit from integrating some of the moral and social norms that are implicit in our lives outside the workplace, might our personal relationships also benefit from thoughtfully applying some of the thinking that makes us so effective at work?

Alain de Botton explores one aspect of this in a short animated video, with his unique blend of gentle humor, subtle melancholy and deep optimism:

Our attempts at friendship tend to go adrift, because we collectively resist the task of developing a clear picture of what friendship is really for. The problem is that we are unfairly uncomfortable with the idea of friendship having any declared purpose, because we associate purpose with the least attractive and most cynical motives.

He goes on to illustrate his argument for why getting clearer about what friendships are for can lay the foundation for genuine bonds, using four examples: networking, reassurance, fun, and clarifying our minds.

Friendship is, of course, so much more than its purpose. As C.S. Lewis wrote beautifully:

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself [. …] It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

How might clarifying its purpose enrich a relationship you currently have with someone whom you consider a friend?