Being Meta-stable

Something I’ve struggled with for a long time is judging. Judging myself. And judging others.

There is progress, although it’s painfully slow. My current technique is to act ‘as if’, to act my way into who I want to become, to learn by doing. From a macro level, I can definitely feel myself edging closer towards the universe of possibilities, as the Zanders memorably called it, away from the world of measurement that is our dominant narrative. But like most change it’s hardly linear. Some days I’m celebrating a new me… and some days it feels more like 2 steps forward, 2 steps back.

Yesterday was one of those days.

So I reached into my things-that-inspire-me-in-becoming-the-person-I-want-to-be toolbox and dug out this beautiful passage from Ram Dass, who would have turned 89 last Monday:

When you go out into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You appreciate it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree.

The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying “You’re too this, or I’m too this.” That judging mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.

I’m thankful in the current lockdown to have an unfettered view out across a diverse array of trees, some still bare and shrivelled while others are already blossoming in the northern-hemisphere spring. They’ll be my constant visual reminder.

Whom in your life might you practise turning into trees?

The world was already in crisis and the current pandemic only deepens it. Like the climate crisis, its effects are uneven and, in many cases, cruelly unjust, exacerbating the gulf of inequality within and between countries. Most functioning governments around the world have thankfully leapt into action, choosing their strategies, defining a roadmap in the chaos, doing the best that they can in a situation in which the usual solutions no longer apply. Some companies have contributed admirably, putting the We ahead of the I.

Then there are us, the individuals. If you are suffering in whatever way, my heart goes out to you. If you are going out to take care of those who are sick or vulnerable, to do something that means that the rest of us have clean water, electricity, internet, our rubbish removed and food to eat, thank you.

I don’t fall into either one of those categories. And now that my frustration is mostly under control, I’ve felt something else surfacing.

Guilt.

Guilt that I’m so fortunate. That, so far, the effects of the pandemic for me and my family are at worst an inconvenience. That, therefore, I have a responsibility to do more. But what? I have no skill that they require right now on the front line. I’m doing what I can locally and with the nonprofits I work with. But it hardly seems enough.

The word crisis is mostly used these days to indicate a critical situation. Leaders in organisations worldwide are rightly focusing on solving the immediate problem. Others are focusing on an equally important issue: keeping it from happening again. I can’t help feeling, though, that there’s also a huge opportunity to actually make things better. This fits somewhat with the original meaning of crisis: the turning point at which a sick patient either recovers or doesn’t. Can we dare to take it further, beyond ‘just’ recovery? In the same way that some people experience post-traumatic growth, might it be possible for us as a society to grow through this crisis?

This might seem like a nice-to-have, in the midst of the tragedy and the suffering, the urgency of it all. And yet everyone jumping in to solve the urgent problem is often counterproductive. Can we not manage chaos and innovation in parallel? Assigning different roles to different people, according to their strengths, making use of all the creativity and goodwill we have available to us?

The COVID-19 crisis is already generating innovations every day, big and small. There are the technical innovations, as we rush to produce enough quality masks and ventilators, as researchers collaborate to understand the virus, how it might mutate, to develop treatment and vaccines. There are the organisational innovations, as we learn to communicate differently with our teams and our clients, as we implement tweaks to improve online learning for our children. And then there are the less tangible learnings. We’re realising that things we thought were important, actually aren’t. We’re seeing how jobs and sectors we thought weren’t important, really are. We’re beginning to truly grasp just how interdependent we are on each other.

I’m giving myself permission to not feel guilty. To not feel guilty that I’m not feeling guilty. And instead to leverage one of my strengths: hope. To search proactively for the tiny tweaks that I can make, whether in myself, my family or in the organisations that I work with, capturing innovations generated by the crisis to build a better us.

What innovations will you take through to the other side?

I wrote in a previous post that each of us can choose to bring out the best in ourselves. That the essential step is to notice when we’re stuck in our self-made, self-justifying box. Which begs the question: how do we get better at noticing?

I grew up with a sitting meditative practice, although I’m not sure I understood exactly what I was doing. I dabbled with it on and off through the years until finally a few years ago, I decided to take myself off to the French countryside for a week-long retreat at Plum Village Monastery, founded by the Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh. I was delighted to discover that despite their practice being rooted in the Buddhist wisdom tradition, they had an approach that was refreshingly undogmatic and playful. As one of his disciples Brother Phap Hai writes: “we can be very serious practitioners and be very, very light and joyful”. One of their simplest, and most profound practices, which I have taken with me ever since, is the practice of noticing my breath, just as it is. With my in-breath, nourishing my body. With my out-breath, relaxing my body. A sense of being fully present, in the moment, celebrating life.

I was reminded of this yesterday as I found myself on Zoom with a handful of strangers from around the world, invited by Johnnie Moore, a wonderfully creative facilitator, to have what he calls an Unhurried Conversation. Connecting to each other from where we are, exactly as we are. Listening deeply to each other, to what is said, to the spaces between the words. Without having an agenda, without having to show up in a certain way. Here’s how he describes it:

Unhurried is about realising our capacity for learning and growth. It’s about people getting more in tune with each other and using our human intelligence in a way that machines can’t. Unhurried is not fast, it’s not slow… it’s flowing and it feels right.

We talked about Unhurried being a practice, a way to be rather than something to do, a journey rather than a destination. One person shared how she knew that starting her day this way – with the practice of ‘just being’ – would have a positive ripple effect on how she showed up the rest of the day, even more so right now juggling work and the kids at home with schools shut down.

Johnnie asked us what being Unhurried means to us. To me it means being fully present, encountering things – whether they be people, situations, or my own feelings – exactly where they are, just the way they are. And appreciating them for what they are.

How are you practising the art of noticing?

As I delve deeper into what it means to live a good life, I’ve been discovering some fascinating cross-disciplinary research.

Nicholas Christakis, who originally trained as a doctor and is now a social science academic, weaves a compelling argument that we have evolved genetically as a species to be unusually prosocial, to create societies that are full of traits like love, friendship, cooperation, and teaching. To care for others not just because they advance our agenda in some way, but for their own sake. To extend this caring beyond our immediate family and friends to strangers and, among the best of us, even to enemies.

And yet.

We don’t have to turn to history to find multiple examples of behaviour that it would be a stretch to qualify as prosocial. To take a topical example: I have been struggling with intense frustration these past days as I see people here in France flouting – some with glee – the government’s measured and proportionate directives to contain the spread of COVID-19. Putting I before We, whether in the streets or in the shopping aisles.

It turns out that we’ve also evolved genetically to favour what social psychologists call in-group bias. Us versus Them. One explanation for this, according to Christakis, is that preferring our group to other groups actually facilitated cooperation as human society grew in size. But, thankfully, he says that we can actively choose to counter this. By zooming out: expanding the boundaries of our in-group. Or by zooming in: seeing each person as unique rather than as a reflection of their group.

The operative word is ‘choose’.

We can choose, every minute of every day, to rise to the better angels of our nature. Easier said than done when we’re (I’m), for example, in the throes of vigorously passing judgment on an unsuspecting soul. The essential step is to notice that we’re stuck in a self-made, self-justifying box. As soon as we notice, we can choose. We can choose to get out of the box. What often works for me is thinking of someone in that moment who brings out the best in me, my out-of-the-box person. Another method I use, and which dug me out of my COVID-19-related frustration, is to deliberately notice the good. To celebrate what’s right with the world.

How are you bringing out the best in yourself?

What would it take to build a world in which each of us earns enough doing work that matters?

One shift that seems to me to be necessary, if not sufficient, is to nudge our culture a little further away from thinking of ourselves as completely free individuals, and a little more towards seeing that we are all inextricably connected.

I first came across this tension as a child growing up in a Western country to Eastern parents. (For a fabulous and more recent example, watch The Farewell.)

“Blood is not always thicker than water”, I would assert to my parents, as we had yet another lively discussion about some controversy in the extended family, and even as I would refer to the relative in question by their specific label which would convey to any outsider exactly how they were related to me (e.g. husband of my mother’s second oldest sister).

“Why should we help so-and-so? Haven’t they shown themselves not to be deserving of help?”, I would continue. (Forgiveness is, ahem, not one of my top character strengths.) My parents would proceed to explain to me how people do not act in isolation but as a function of their social context (a concept I would later relearn through the prism of social psychology). That different cultures have different social norms and that it’s important for us to balance the two. In this case, balancing independence, widespread in today’s Western culture, with interdependence, still prevalent in most Eastern cultures.

As one of my favourite social scientists Hugh MacKay puts it:

So here’s the classic human quandary: we are individuals with a strong sense of our independent personal identity and we are members of families, groups and communities with an equally strong sense of social identity, fed by our desire to connect and belong.

He then advises us on how to embrace the tension between the two:

Every community has its differences of opinion, its social divisions and its cultural tensions, which is simply to say that every community is both diverse and, inescapably, human. If you want to master the art of belonging, you’ll need to accept the imperfections, the complexities and the tensions and deal with them. And the best way of dealing with them is to overlook them. There’s a lot of tolerance – a lot of forgiveness – in the art of belonging.

(I clearly have my work cut out for me.)

Where do you sit on the spectrum between independence and interdependence?

PS: The title comes from my favourite alternative Australian anthem.