Being Meta-stable

If I could magically decree the top 5 skills to teach our children, somewhere in there would be how to resist the pull of dogma. To stay stubbornly open-minded.

It’s not easy. One reason for this is the aptly named confirmation bias: that we’re wired to think in ways that favour our existing point of view, to take in information that confirms our existing beliefs, and to discard any that doesn’t. (This comic by Matthew Inman does a fantastic job of illustrating the associated backfire effect.) The first step to overcoming this and our other biases is, as usual, to notice that we actually have them. By educating ourselves about how our mind works, then actively practising to ‘correct’ for our biases.

OpenMind is an online, interactive and evidence-based platform that helps us do just that. It was founded by the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and aims to “help people cultivate intellectual humility and open-mindedness while equipping them with the skills for constructive disagreement”. A concept I love that’s explored in the program and that comes from Haidt’s 2012 book The Righteous Mind is the Moral Matrix, in reference to, yes, that Matrix:

Many moral matrices exist within each nation. Each matrix provides a complete, unified, and emotionally compelling worldview, easily justified by observable evidence and nearly impregnable to attack by arguments from outsiders. […] Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices. This makes it very difficult for people to consider the possibility that there might really be more than one form of moral truth, or more than one valid framework for judging people or running a society.

Many people choose the comfort of the metaphorical blue pill. Haidt encourages us to choose the red pill, to step out of our matrix, to explore new ones. It doesn’t mean agreeing with everything we see. But merely acknowledging that there may well be more than one good way to live is a crucial step towards being able to constructively disagree. To being able to hold a discussion that respects the inherent dignity of every person.  

I was lucky to grow up understanding and seeing different moral matrices, but I’ve still struggled over the years with finding the right balance between having a clear preference at any given moment of what ‘better’ means (when I go on about making myself a better person and the world a better place) and keeping a genuinely open mind. Haidt’s vision might be a direction to aim for:

When I was a teenager I wished for world peace, but now I yearn for a world in which competing ideologies are kept in balance, systems of accountability keep us all from getting away with too much, and fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means. Not a very romantic wish, but one that we might actually achieve.

How are you resisting the pull towards dogma?

One of my modern-day heroes is Christiana Figueres.

If you don’t know who she is, you can check her out here. Short version: she played a crucial role in engineering the historic 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change in which 194 states agreed to (grossly simplifying here) reduce their carbon emissions in order to keep global warming well below 2°C (and ideally 1.5°C) above pre-industrial levels. (To date, the only state that has activated the process to withdraw its agreement is the United States.) I still remember the moment when I heard that it had finally been signed. I had not been involved one bit in that signature, but I cried – tears of relief after the huge disappointment of Copenhagen 6 years earlier which I had followed at the time, and tears of joy, of feeling uplifted by what humanity can sometimes collectively achieve for the benefit of us all. So little (it doesn’t go far enough for most people in the know), and yet so much (having seen the energy that can go into debating one sentence in contract negotiations with just one other party, I can only imagine what it must be like to get 194 heads of government – coming from different cultures and speaking in different languages – to agree on 25 pages of text).

Since stepping down from the Secretariat of the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), she’s continued to lead globally through the climate crisis, including co-writing The Future We Choose, that seeks to inspire and empower each of us to contribute to “moving beyond the climate crisis into a thriving future”. (It gets a rave review from Yuval Noah Harari too, whose brain I have had a serious crush on since 2013 when I first encountered him via Coursera.)

I haven’t read the book yet (I’m waiting to get my hands on the paperback version) but I have started listening to her companion podcast, Outrage and Optimism. In the past few weeks she and her co-hosts have started a series on how we can emerge stronger and better from the Covid-19 crisis. If you want to start with one, I can recommend the latest episode which features an interview with Joseph Stiglitz (2001 Nobel Prize for Economics). There’s a lot to take away from the frank and stimulating discussion that ensues, one of which for me is the need for us to develop a coherent systems approach to tackling the multiple interdependent crises that we are facing as humanity: the two that are front of mind right now – health and economics – of course, but also climate and, underpinning all that, inequality between and within nations.

It also got me thinking about the need for both outrage and optimism in making change happen. Certainly on the emergency that is the climate crisis, which seems just too far away from our everyday lives for many of us to actually take action to change our behaviour. How many people across the globe have been inspired into action by the single-minded outrage of Greta Thunberg?

But perhaps, also, in any change that we want to make happen. I’ve often found myself frustrated at feeling frustrated when I see something I perceive as flagrant injustice, lack of moral backbone, unashamed self-interest (yes, I’m still working on turning people into trees). What if that frustration were somehow part and parcel of making change happen? What if, instead of being frustrated at feeling frustrated, we can thank it for showing us that we care, then marry that precious energy together with optimism to fuel positive change?

What do you feel most frustrated about? And how might you leverage that into creating the change you want to see?

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?