How should we approach the unknown? How should we orient ourselves to the inevitable unpredictability of the world – life’s way of going life’s way whether we like it or not? Should we despair at our lack of control? Be terrified of all the bad things that will happen? Should we retreat into a small, cosy space where we can spin the illusion of safety? Give up on doing anything because we are so small and the world is so big?

Nachman of Bratslav, a Rabbi and spiritual leader who lived in what is now Ukraine in the late 18th and early 19th century – and a great inspiration for me – taught that:

The world is, for all of us, a very narrow bridge.
And the most important thing is not to make ourselves afraid at all.

There is no escaping it. Our lives unavoidably carry us on the narrowest of scaffolds above a mystery that we cannot fathom. We come from somewhere we do not understand, and are heading to somewhere we cannot know. And there is nothing, really nothing, that can catch us.

But rather than face this, it often seems easier to try to hide from it. We feed our cynicism, despair and terror, and that of others. We try to imagine ourselves out of our situation by distracting ourselves, sleepwalking through, numbing ourselves in a fog of comfortableness that blunts our contact with the world.

And so we have a choice. Will we make attempts to avoid our situation by avoiding our lives? Or could we learn, even when we feel afraid, not to feed our fear? Could we live a life in which we intentionally practice taking a step into the fierce uncertainty of life, and then another step and another step, trusting that each step will take us, who knows where, but somewhere?

It is our willingness to learn to trust the very narrow bridge on which we walk that can allow us to enter into our lives. This very learning to trust in life is, for many of us, a call to a kind of self-transformation, of loosening the boundaries of who we’ve take ourselves to be, of knowing ourselves and our lives in the context of a far wider horizon than we’ve seen so far. It offers the possibility that we might discover a basic goodness to existence itself which, precisely when we face our vulnerability to it, can hold us.

In 1986, when he was a prisoner playwrite in communist Czechoslovakia, the future Czech President Vaclav Havel wrote this:

‘Hope is not prediction of the future. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.”

In other words, hope – even when we can be far from sure about how things will turn out – is a kind of trust. But it’s not the naïve trust of optimism, which promises that everything will be fine or that we will be saved, and nor is it the naïve mistrust of pessimism, which promises that everything will be ruined. It’s trust in something else. It is first trust in our own capacity to respond to the world with creativity and dignity, whatever happens, and second it is trust in a deeper kind of goodness in the order of things.

When we face the most difficult of circumstances, or are most worried about the future, it’s the presence of both kinds of trust that supports the possibility to take action. The first, the trust in our own capacities, so that we have the energy and determination to move forward and the second, the trust in which we partner ourselves with existence itself, so that we can keep going even when things might not turn out well for us personally, or when something is going to take a generation or more to change.

The philosophers Robert Solomon and Fernando Flores teach that trust – between people, between us and the world – is not a given but something we make every time our trust is broken, shattered, compromised and then we take purposeful actions to repair and to restore it. Trust and hope, in other words, aren’t a given, and they aren’t made by attempts to keep ourselves safe and away from the world’s unpredictability and uncontrollability. They are made by our full-on engagement with life – by how we choose to bring ourselves not only to life’s joys but to its troubles and dangers. Trust is made by our learning that life won’t simply go our way but, nevertheless, here we are.

And so, of course, to the end of Nachman of Bratslav’s phrase. The most important thing, he says, is not to feed our fear. Not ‘don’t feel fear’ but don’t feed it. We all walk a very narrow bridge between two ends that we cannot know, and we could, really, fall at any moment. And the most important thing, as long as we are able, is to keep walking.

If you’d like more on this:
‘All the Golden Openings’, Episode 110 of Turning Towards Life, the Thirdspace podcast with Justin Wise & Lizzie Winn, takes on many of these themes.

Photo by Tim Trad on Unsplash

I slip into the silky dark waters of the swimming pond on London’s Hampstead Heath, on a misty October morning. The water is bracingly cold and it takes me a few strokes to catch my breath. But I’m in and it’s like swimming in the earth itself, immersed, cradled, held by the planet that gave me birth and will one day take me back again.

In the inky water, in moments, the feeling of separateness I carry with me everywhere unravels and with it, I stop being afraid.

The strong and convincing feeling of separateness is, for many of us, one of the unquestioned givens of life. It’s rooted first in the way our bodies are separated from one another by the physical rupture of our birth, after which what seems to be ‘me’ ends where our skin meets air. It’s reinforced strongly in the culture of individualism and detachment in which we live. And although there is truth to it – we each follow a course through life that in many ways is ours alone – our sense of being separate fuels much of our fear, and our grasping, and our loneliness. Because as well as wanting autonomy we long to be held, and met and seen, in ways that our commitment to otherness from the world can’t address.

This is what I remember most fully, every time I enter the water. I am water, earth, air and sky. My earth-made body has already charted a course from infancy to adulthood that is shared by every human that ever lived long enough to do so, and will age and eventually die of its own accord. It is a body which was gifted to me by billions of ancestors without my say-so; a body which has contours, shapes, organs, possibilities and preferences I did not choose, that come from this giant endeavour which we call ‘being human’. I remember again that the separate self that seems so obvious to me is also an expression of something that dwarfs me, includes me, and brings me forth, vast in time and mystery and breadth. And that it is such a relief, and such a joy, to have found a reliable way to remember myself this way.

Photo: Bloodholds [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons

In the very last room of Olafur Eliasson’s beautiful exhibition (on at the Tate Modern in London until January) there is a pin-board spanning one entire wall. It is perhaps 50 feet long, and is filled with articles, clippings, images and notes that inspire Eliasson’s work. I’ve been spending some time there over the last few weeks, in the room of notes, letting the ideas and observations that are collected there sink into me, work on me, change me.

It’s been far from easy to do this. I can see that I am deeply affected, as so many of us are, by the narrative of productivity, of ever-more, of perpetual motion that permeates our culture. We are taught never, really to stop and look, to be still enough until the world can reach us, unless of course our stopping is for the sake of having more energy to get going again. We learn to be afraid of being unproductive, of open-ended, undirected time, of letting ourselves off the hook. We measure ourselves, relentlessly, by comparison with what-has-not-yet-been-done.

And although our ceaseless movement comes from fear, it serves perhaps as an attempt to protect us from bigger fears – the fear that we may not be totally in control (we’re not), the fear that we might be vulnerable (we are), the fear that things will happen that we didn’t choose and didn’t want (they will), and the fear that we’ll lose what we’re so desperately pursuing. We move without stop because we’ve been taught to, but also because it does something for us. The tragedy is that this frantic way doesn’t resolve or deal with what we’re afraid of. It just has us find ourselves further from the one life that we get to lead.

As I sit quietly in the room of notes I notice how much of this I feel. I can feel my being afraid. I can feel the push of my own inner criticism as it berates me for being here, for slowing down, for slacking, for being self-centred, for irresponsibility. I can feel shame, guilt, comparison, urgency, and a fizzing, clenching movement in my chest, shoulders and back. All of it cries ‘get moving’, ‘get out of here’.

But I stay. I breathe, and breathe, letting myself open and settle on each breath. What a miracle breath is. I let myself feel my feelings all the way through. After a while, I see that my fear and urgency is something that I am doing, not something that is happening to me. It’s a strategy, a habit, a way of trying to keep myself on familiar ground. And when I see that it’s something I’m doing, I get to see how much of my experience can be like this – not just what’s ‘arising’ but a way I’m actively committed to fleeing from contact with my actual life.

In the middle of the pin-board I see an except from some work by Claire Petitmengin (more on her work here). She writes:

I consider the loss of contact with our lived experience as the main root of the malaise that affects our society … We become blind to the very texture of our experience … cutting ourselves off from what is closest, most intimate to us. We become blind to the very texture of our experience. In particular, we live in the illusion of a rigid separation between an inner and an outside world, between ‘me’ and ‘you’, between body and mind, between seeing, hearing, touching and tasting.

We spend considerable energy trying to maintain these frontiers, which we consider essential to our survival.

In the rare moments when our tensions dissipate, these rigid boundaries fade, opening up a vast space. We can sometimes have a glimpse of this … One day there is a book, a song, an encounter, or a special light in the morning through the foliage, and suddenly you surrender, you lay down your arms. Recovering contact with this tender dimension is a huge relief. When we are less on the defensive, less anxious to protect our borders, we become more loving. We regain our integrity, our dignity.

Claire Petitmengin
From: Open House, Studio Olafur Eliasson, 2018

And I come to see why I am here in this gallery. I am here to find a way to relax some of my frontiers, to surrender, to lay down my arms. Art can do that for us. Words can do it. Other people can do it. And we can do it for ourselves, with some courage, and some kindness, and if we’ll let ourselves.

In these times when we’re walking around like coiled springs, when we see disaster around every corner, when we wonder if we’ll have a future – or if our children will have a future, Petitmengin’s words remind us that practicing letting life is no abdication of care, no unearned luxury, but a vital discipline in returning ourselves and one another to the dignity and capacity we’re all called to bring.

–

If you’d like more on this:
‘The Cure For It All’, Episode 107 of Turning Towards Life, the Thirdspace podcast with Justin Wise & Lizzie Winn, takes on many of these themes.

We can learn a lot by making distinctions between things. When we’re able to name differences – for example, between enlivening and deadening, generous and fickle, ethical and manipulative, truthful and untruthful – we make it possible to observe what would otherwise have been invisible to us, and take action on the basis of our observations.

Being able to distinguish between necessary and sufficient, for example, opens many avenues for moving beyond technical solutions to our problems and into what’s meaningful, principled and life-giving. The distinction between feedback and requestsallows us to decide when we’re trying to help another person learn, and when we’re secretly trying to get something we want from them. And the distinction between when it’s time to exert ourselves and when it’s time to rest makes it possible for us to pay attention to the ongoing energy and flourishing of our lives in a way that’s not possible if every moment is just another moment taken, on not taken, for work.

But while distinctions are necessary, we can run into big trouble when we let them harden into dualisms – an either/or, is-or-is-not understanding of the world. Because dualisms introduce separation between things that are rarely actually separate. When I say ‘I’m right and you’re wrong’ I create a dualism that leaves no space for mywrongness, and for your rightness. When we harden into ‘I’m scared of speaking in public, but I love being by myself’ we leave no room for the parts of us that long to be heard by others. And whenever we make sweeping and certain judgements about others based on their gender, sexuality, politics, business practices, skin colour, preferences and commitments the dualism we create blunts our capacity to see anything else about them, and very little about our own complexities and contradictions.

Very often, if we’re not careful, our dualisms imprison us and our capacity to respond to the world. And, when we start to look at the deeper dualisms that seem self-evident, it’s not so clear that they are as solid as they seem, either.

Is it really the case that what I call ‘me’ is over here and that ‘you’ are fully, and only, over there? If we allow the dualism to soften we can ask deeper questions: What about the ways we’re always in the lives of the people we love, even when we’re not with them physically? Even when we’re no longer alive. And what about the trail of words, objects, influences, impacts we leave behind and around us? Can we really say, absolutely, that they’re not ‘me’? What compassion might arise when we start to see that ‘they’ are ‘me’ and that ‘I’ am ‘them’ in very many ways? And when we see that what we are sure is only in others – all that we despise, fear, reject – is also in ourselves?

Can we say for sure that there’s a thing called ‘work’ that’s separate from ‘life’ such that the two need to be balanced against one another? Is life really the absence of death? Is death, really, the absence of life? And can we say, with any absolute certainty, that we’re separate from what’s around us?

When our distinctions harden into dualisms we easily close ourselves off to learning, to curiosity, and to a direct encounter with the world. It’s a difficulty made harder for us because so much of our contemporary culture and education thrives on dualisms, on certainty, on knowing.

And for this reason making distinctions but letting our dualisms soften enough that we can call them into question is necessary work for all of us. It’s the work of not knowing. Or perhaps, better said, the work of letting our questions be more important than our answers.

Photo Credit: Barbara.K Flickr via Compfightcc

For a long while, we think we’re unbreakable. We convince ourselves that what we’re doing – how we’re working, how we’re living – has no impact on us, really.

And for a while, as we try to do more, our level of stress goes up and our performance (or capacity to do what we’re intending) goes up too. We conclude that the move to make when things aren’t working out the way we intend is to push harder. And, for a while, it brings us exactly what we’re looking for.

But only for a while.

There comes a point where, for each of us, the body’s capacity begins to fray. It loses its ability to renew itself, to retain its coherence, to store energy and regenerate. Beyond this breakdown point, more effort not only results in less capacity, but in the breakdown of bodily systems themselves.  We get exhausted. We get ill. Our bodies show us what we have been committed to hiding from ourselves.

All too often, right at this moment where rest, recuperation, support and self-care are the only way back, we conclude that our dropping performance is because we’re not doing enough. And as we scramble to address the shortfall between what we’re ableto do and what we think we should be able to do, we make things worse.

Much worse.

This is no trivial matter. Study after study has established the link between sustained stress and heart attacks and other serious and life threatening illnesses. And yet in so much of work, and our lives, we act as if we’re invincible, even when the signs are right in front of us that we’re not.

It’s time we took our bodies seriously. And it’s time we considered rest, renewal, and support from others as a fundamental requirement to do anything well. Not an optional extra. Not a nice-to-have. And not some silly distraction from the ‘real work’ of business, or leadership, or parenting, or making a contribution.

Love isn’t a feeling, though there are many feelings that come with love – joy, longing, delight, anguish, frustration, heartbreak. And when we take love to be a feeling we rob ourselves of any agency when it comes to loving. The feeling has gone we say. I don’t love him any more.

”But, as the psychologist Erich Fromm teaches us, “Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision?”

When we start to see love as a verb, we are given the possibility and responsibility of loving free of our demands that we must feel a particular way. And, in doing so, we allow ourselves the possibility of loving not to get something, but as a gift to match the gift we receive by being loved. This is the path that allows us to love strangers we have never met before, people who are wildly different from us, and to love those close-in without needing proof of our lovability in return.

It may be that this path – loving as a verb – is what will eventually help us humans take care of those who we cast out, and those parts of ourselves that cast out also.

Lizzie Winn and I take up exactly this topic in this week’s Turning Towards Life, titled ‘They Just Look Like Love‘. In it we talk about Erich Fromm, and a wonderful quote from Stephen R Covey, and about the magical properties of simple practices for loving one another (like making a morning cup of tea for the person you live with who for whom you don’t feel love). And we begin with an excerpt from Rebecca Solnit’s new book ‘Cinderella Liberator’.

You can also catch our prior episode, ‘Walking Away During Supper‘, in which we talk about men and women, our stories about what men are supposed to be, and how the choices both men and women make about how to be men ripple out through our families, workplaces and community.

It increasingly occurs to me

That my relationship to the parts of the world

(most significantly, others)

Is most often a reflection

Of my relationship to parts of myself.

And that until I learn how to give up

Hating, despising, fearing and judging my interior world

I can expect to have a tricky time

Loving the outer world, in which I live every day,

As fully as I could.

Justin Wise, June 2015

We’ve been having a productive time with the ‘Turning Towards Life’ project, continuing to take up questions about how each of ourselves might bring ourselves most fully and truthfully to our lives. Perhaps most pertinent to the question ‘how do I give up judging and splitting apart my inner world?’ that’s addressed by the poem above, is our episode ‘Hokusai Says‘, which takes the work of the Japanese painter Katsushika Hokusai as its inspiration.

We have also considered the possibilities for our encounter with life and with one another are born when we cross the thin divide between ‘image’ and ‘realness’ in ‘The Call to Live Everything‘

And, one of my favourites, what happens when we start taking ourselves just a little bit less seriously, and start to look at ourselves as if from a distance, in ‘One Thing Among Many‘.

You can find the whole project over at www.turningtowards.life, and also as a podcast on all the major podcast platforms.

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

Waiting until you know for sure what’s going to happen – where people are involved – means waiting for ever.

With machines, it’s easy. With sufficient understanding of mechanics you can often predict exactly what’s going to happen. Cause and effect, straightforward to establish.

But human situations are nothing like that, even though we pretend to ourselves that they might be.

Take a meeting, for example.

Should you speak up about what’s on your mind? Now? Later? What effect will it have on your colleagues? On the decision to be made?

You cannot know for sure.

Whatever insight you have about the situation can only ever be partial. You can’t know what’s going on for others. You can’t know what they are thinking of saying. And you can’t know – even if you know them well – how they will respond to your speaking.

You have to act knowing that you’re speaking into an unknowable situation. And that speaking up will, in all likelihood, change something, at the very least for you.

But staying quiet is an act too, changing things no less than speaking up. So you have no choice but to be an actor, whatever you do, and however much you pretend it is not the case.

We get ourselves into trouble when we forget all of this. We imagine that we can only act when we are able to predict the outcomes of our actions. Or we blame and judge ourselves and others when things don’t turn out the way we expected.

And all the while we’re holding back our contribution, our insight, our knowledge, our creativity, our unique perspective because we’ve set ourselves standards of understanding that were never – could never be – reached.

Photo Credit: fliegender via Compfight cc