Change — aspiring, trying, failing

Practical Self-Management Intensive — Week 3 Reflections

“You can discard most of the junk that clutters your mind — things that exist only there — and clear out space for yourself:

…by comprehending the scale of the world

…by contemplating infinite time

…by thinking of the speed with which things change — each part of every thing; the narrow space between our birth and death; the infinite time before; the equally unbounded time that follows. (Meditations 9; 32)

Marcus Aurelius wrote these words more than 1,800 years ago. And Aurelius, one of the great systems thinkers, wrote:

“Keep reminding yourself of the ways things are connected, of their relatedness. All things are implicated in one another and in sympathy with each other. This event is the consequence of some other one. Things push and pull on each other, and breathe together, and are one.” (Meditations 6; 38)

Over the years I’ve aspired to the restrained stoicism and calm resilience inspired by these Meditations that Aurelius wrote to himself, all those centuries ago. That is — aspired, tried, and failed.

In moments of rare solitude, I can almost grasp at comprehending the immensity and sublimity of the world — something that came much more freely in my life prior to job, kids, mortgage. In quieter times, I could transcend and project myself into the infinite; I could almost grasp the immensity of things. Like Camus’ Meursault, “gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars… I laid my heart open to the gentle indifference of the universe.” The fleeting insignificance of our desires and conflicts offered an invitation; live life freely and with expression. Be happy.

A cosmological lens of life

This lens on life I’ve termed a ‘cosmological lens’ of the world; the existence of life on earth is a hilariously unlikely accident — if our Earth was to shift as little as 1.5 million kilometres in any direction — so they say — from its current position on our orbit of Sol — a margin of error of around 1% — complex life on our planet would be impossible. That our bipedal ancestors have stumbled around for barely 100,000 years — a grain of sand in cosmic time — puts us in perspective. But, day to day and sometimes many times within a day, I find this view in turns motivating, and despairing.

That we evolved to grasp complex ideas and communicate them in language makes us pioneers, but on an evolutionary scale we are simply the first ‘good’ prototype. We are the minimum viable product. A more sophisticated species would be able to discern emotion accurately and experience acute empathy; perhaps to the point of physically feeling it. I’m not talking about a mother’s intimate connections with an infant — I’m talking about being truly inside the world. A more evolved species would be able to grasp the totality of systems and understand their interconnections with clarity and immediacy. They would certainly have fewer of the mechanical animal instincts that make us cautious, skeptical and neurotic. They could be our best selves at all times.

“Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you’ll understand what little chance you have in trying to change others.” ― Jacob M. Braude

I don’t remember where I first read this quote, and I still don’t know who Jacob M. Braude is, but as a Coach and Servant Leader it made immediate sense to me and highlighted where I and so many others had failed in the past. We are told that agility is a mindset — a set of thought patterns that manifest as behaviours, an approach to how we solve problems, our conscious preferences stated as values and principles of how we go through life. But we can also adopt multiple mindsets based on context and what groups we associate with. In the course of a single day, we complex human beings can appropriate, mimic, or actually embody multiple disparate and even conflicting mindsets. I find this to be unsettling but on a practical level it presents a great challenge for someone like me who is supposed to aim for transformational cultural change.

All this is to say — humans are f%&king complicated.

So the challenge for me is that the cosmological perspective confronts a person with two hopelessly juxtaposed and irreconcilable positions: The first is that indeed it is the case that the folly of human endeavours matters little in the context of time, and that this creates a dreadful sense of the futility of effort; and secondly, that the senselessness and absurdity of the great majority of the same human folly is precisely the correct reason to fight, to strive, to overcome. Simultaneously — nothing will come of your ignorance, but then nothing will come of your passion either.

Yet for me the contemplation of the cosmological lens IS all that is required for humanity to achieve its true purpose — the shared appreciation for the sublime ignobility of our presence on planet Earth; and our response to that condition, which is to celebrate it with reverence. What I am talking about is the emancipation of the soul from considerations that are beneath our common spirit; that we as a species are intelligent enough to interpret the almighty swells of a godless sublime, but impotent in controlling it. Humans are powerful, but have learned powerlessness. To quote Camus again:

“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is” (Albert Camus)

Our economic, political, and cultural configurations are a tiny blip in the history of recorded ideas and we ought to be able to change them whenever we choose. But my practical experience tells me that organising people, setting them on a shared path, and trying to unwind or influence dysfunctional systems are all extremely powerful barriers to change. In my heart I’m an anarchist, in the correct sense of the term. People should share a code of norms and behaviours, and set about sharing and reciprocating our inherited genius until we have freedom and peace — the existence of poverty, inequality and aggression should therefore become logically impossible. True artistic expression in whatever guise would therefore become our purpose. But — power, war, misinformation, self-reinforcing hierarchies and legal arrangements, all of that — they complicate our ability to usher in a better world.

“A revolution is more than the destruction of a political system. It implies the awakening of human intelligence, the increasing of the inventive spirit…, it is the dawn of a new science… It is a revolution in the minds of men, more than in their institutions.” (Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, 158)

Purposeful and deliberate development

What concerns me is, how do humans achieve purposeful development? How do we welcome in our species’ maturation and an elevated consciousness? How do we overcome the stunted scarcity mindset that afflicts us? I’ve come to believe that the critical component is pure, unfiltered feedback. I know about radical candour and I know about the importance of transparency and feedback in complex systems. But interpersonal feedback is still the hardest thing humans do. There are a multitude of justifications and excuses for not doing it; everything from not wanting to hurt someone’s feelings, through serious repercussions to your professional career for ‘speaking truth to power’, through to a more sociopathic desire to see the person fail, and therefore withholding feedback. It is too simple to say ‘more communication’ and leave it at that. We have built powerful structures — in our own minds as well as in the material world — specifically to avoid the need to provide fedback, or to suppress it entirely.

So, this week as we went through the Liberating Structure of Heard, Seen, Respected (HSR), talked briefly about non-violent communication (NVC), created our Immunity to Change (ITC) canvas, and tried to construct Goals and Actions to bring about positive and lasting change, I will continue to reflect upon what these wonderful tools — and the many others — could achieve if we were able to deliberately develop ourselves as a cohort — communities, guilds, societies, species. And I will say this; I focus too much on these things that I cannot control, rather than on myself. I will continue to work at my ITC canvas, because there is work to be done.