Aboodi Shabi

I love London, I really do.

Since I moved to London six years ago, I’ve appreciated living there so much. In fact, I have often described the decision to move there as the best I ever made. And, yet, even though I have loved London so much, I’ve always been aware of the price I’ve had to pay for living there. There’s a ridiculous price premium one has to pay for living in the centre of London, for example (whenever I travel to other parts of Britain, and look in estate agents’ windows, I’m always sobered by what I could buy for the price of my very modest London flat). There is also the noise and crowds, the traffic, the lack of easy access to real nature, and the lack of horizon. Despite all of that, I haven’t been able to imagine living anywhere else, however sharp the pangs of longing I get when I visit the English country-side.

I still can’t imagine not living there.

But, a few weeks ago, I was teaching in Sussex, staying in a beautiful place in the forest, with nature right on my doorstep. I remembered again what it’s like to go to bed to the sound of silence, rather than the endless sounds of all-night buses under my window, sirens going off through the night, and drunk people talking too loudly on their way home. I also remembered the pleasure of being able to go for a walk in the dead of night, absorbing the sound of the trees and owls, or just the deep silence of nature.

More sharp pangs of longing, but still I couldn’t imagine not living in London.

And now, this week, I am on a kind of retreat, staying at the summer residence of the Catholic English College just outside Rome. And, it’s beautiful – in fact, I’m typing this sitting out in the evening sun, on the grass, listening to birds singing, and anticipating a good supper, followed by a glass or two of Italian brandy in front of an open fire which I will build myself. I spent most of the afternoon walking in the woods, captivated by the silence, by the light falling on to the trees. It was a bitter-sweet experience in some ways, because it reminds me that, much as I love London, there is a big part of me that is fed by what is almost “the opposite of London”. As soon as I settle in to being in nature, I remember just how it feels to be here. I notice the general sense of slowing down, the more natural rhythm, the stillness, and the letting go of the tension that is always present in being in the city, a tension that I often call “excitement” because of all the things that I love about London. It brings to the surface some difficult questions; questions which don’t really have any easy answers.

When I work with people, one of the topics we explore is the question of what we long for. One of the exercises we do begins with people thinking about what they most care about, what really matters to them, and then looking at what it costs them to not follow their longing. It’s often a very emotional time of reflection, engaging with such questions, and seeing that there are things that we really care about but which, for whatever reason, we have stopped listening to.

One of the problems, I think, is that often being in touch with what we long for makes us reflect on how hard it might be to move towards that. Forget the “you can have it all” promise of some books and courses. We often yearn for things that conflict very strongly with the life we currently live, or remind us of all the commitments we have. Sometimes, too, we need to face the possibility that we might never be able to achieve a particular dream or goal, because of the commitments we are already involved in – to our clients or employers, to our partners, to our children, or our elderly parents, from; commitments that we can’t just give up in pursuit of our dreams, however compelling they are. It could even be that we long for something that is actually impossible: a friend of mine talks about the pain of having two young children in different continents, and how sad he is that he can’t be with both his kids as they grow up.

Sometimes, we are faced with a longing that brings many conflicting thoughts. For example, if I did leave London, I know I’d miss it desperately – I’d miss the easy connections to people and culture, the regular Turkish Baths, the great choice of bars and restaurants, the river, the markets, the open all hours culture, the multi-racial aspects, the not needing to have a car. Even writing this makes me think again that I just couldn’t not live in London. I could put it differently – it’s as if my head and part of my heart would love to stay in London, but my body and soul crave to be back in the countryside. There’s no easy way to reconcile that.

What, then, are we to do?

It’s easy to see why we might give up on pursuing what we care about, but as Joseph Campbell has written we can’t simply go on ignoring the “call”. For me, I think part of the answer to this has to do with building the capacity to live in the question, to be willing to not know, and to resist the temptation to look for quick ways to “solve” our dilemmas. Can we live with the uncertainty, the disruption to our equilibrium that comes when we are in touch with that kind of gap in our lives, and the risk of the pain of not being able to achieve what we care about.

I have no way of knowing what will happen – whether I’ll end up leaving London or staying, or whether I’ll find some compromise, or win the lottery (unlikely as I never buy tickets) and be able to buy a quiet London house with a garden. But, as I reflected on this question during my walk, I did think that I might know the answer in ten or fifteen years time, and that maybe I could enjoy the finding out. It doesn’t necessarily make it easier, but it does open up a mood of curiosity and wonder to accompany the uncertainty and disruption.

In the personal development world, and in the wider society, there is a lot of emphasis placed on getting “closure” with people, and in getting over one’s past. It’s something I hear talked about frequently in coaching circles, to the point where it’s almost seen as a failing if someone hasn’t become “free of the past”, whatever that means.
I think one of the problems is that there has been a difficulty to recognise the limits of personal development – that there are some things we cannot change. It’s easy to see that I cannot change my height or the fact that I am bald, of course, but perhaps less easy for some to accept that I also cannot change my past.

Of course, by working on myself, I might be able to change my relationship with my past, but I am still shaped by the past, like it or not. The “nature-nurture” debate will probably go on for ever, but I’d say that at least a part of who we are has been shaped by our history – by the families and cultures in which we grew up, by the conversations and narratives in which we lived.

By reflecting on our lives, we can gain awareness of that shaping, of how we have become who we are, and we can even begin to build new practices to change, to expand our learned range.

But, at our default, we are still who we have been shaped to be. A good way to explain this is to think about it in terms of learning a language. If I want to learn a new language, I can do so. I can practice and practice, and over time even gain fluency in a new language, but my default language will always be English. Under pressure, or if I don’t practice enough, then I will revert to English, even if I have a certain level of mastery in a new language.

Similarly with behaviour – I grew up in a family with very volatile parents, with plenty of anger and tantrums (and that was just my parents!). I learned to get over-heated very quickly, and to look for conflict in every situation. And, now, I know that if I don’t keep up my practices of meditation, and time in nature, etc, then I am likely to end up reverting to the “old me” when things get tough.

In fact, I think I’ve had more problems in life when I have thought I should get over my past, and then blamed myself for not doing so, than when I have accepted that my history has shaped me, and then tried to accommodate that.

Rather than “getting over” our past, perhaps we can practice accepting it, and accepting its influence over us, so that we can live with ourselves and our history.

I’d even suggest that we have much more chance of “success” when we accept that we have been shaped by our pasts, and that we won’t ever fully get over them, but that we might be able, with practice to navigate who we have become, and find ways to be less likely to return to our old ways when triggered

Refections:

What aspects of your past have you tried to “get over”? What might become different if you were to stop trying to “get over” them, and instead focus on accepting that you have a history, and that it has shaped you? How might you navigate with that?

Quotes

“Your past forms you, whether you like it or not. Each encounter and experience has its own effect, and you’re shaped the way wind shapes a mesquite tree on a plain.” – Lance Armstrong

“You don’t get rid of demons, you just educate them.” – Robert Bly

“Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” – Reinhold Niebuhr

We’ve just been through the ten day period that marks the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah), a time of reflection over the past year, culminating in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. One of the stories read over Yom Kippur is that of Jonah, who spent three days and nights in the belly of a whale (or “big fish”).

And, as I look back over the last year, I have been reflecting especially on how, in the last twelve months, I have been to two places that, as a young man, I never thought I would visit, two places that have been through unimagined transformation, Berlin and South Africa.
I grew up with the facts of the Cold War, and of Apartheid, and although I hoped both would change (and, indeed, did some campaigning against the Apartheid regime), I never expected either reality to change in my life-time.

And, yet, within a couple of years, the Berlin Wall came down and the Apartheid regime began to dissolve starting with the release from prison of Nelson Mandela.

I remember spending Rosh Hashanah in Berlin last year, and stepping across the Brandenburg gate, crossing a line that 20 years ago would have been impossible to cross, and which many East Berliners died trying to cross. And, yet, here I was freely able to go from East to West as easily as putting one foot in front of the other.

And, then, in August this year, I was in South Africa, teaching in Newfield’s first ever South African programme. The day before the programme started, I went to the Apartheid Museum, a profoundly moving experience. One of the video installations included a performance of The Specials’ song Free Nelson Mandela – a song I remember buying nearly thirty years ago, and which I used to play when I was a DJ, at fund-raising discos for the ANC. And now, I was at a museum with a whole building dedicated to Mandela, celebrating his role as the initiator of the new South Africa, and architect of the transition from Apartheid to a non-racial society.

One of the other things, however, that struck me about being in South Africa was the security – to get into our hotel, we had to go through two guarded barriers. In all the residential areas we drove through, there were high walls, topped with barbed wire, and people spoke about having panic buttons by their beds, armed response units, etc. One of the things South Africa is having to deal with now is a huge rise in crime, and how to keep the country secure.

I even heard people saying that, even though they were very glad that Apartheid had come to an end, there were things about the “old days” that were better, and I heard both blacks and whites saying that. Similarly, Germany had to go through a lot of difficulties as it struggled with the question of re-unification, despite being jubilant at the collapse of the Berlin Wall. And, I’ve heard Russians talking about how things were better under the old Soviet system than they are today.

In his work on mythology, Joseph Campbell would talk about the hero’s journey, which would begin with a “call” – the realisation that things could not go on any longer the way they were. I think this is true on an individual, as well as on a collective, level.

Sometimes we ignore that call, but often it eventually gets so loud that we can no longer avoid it, and we have to heed it, and begin the journey. That journey of change is often a long, and challenging adventure into the terrain of what is called the belly of the whale. In those times, we might look back at what we have left behind, however much we knew we had to leave it, with a sense of regret – maybe it wasn’t so bad, maybe we could have stayed, made it work, or we might ask ourselves why we ever left.

Certainly this has been true in my own life.

There have been a few times when I have just “known” that I couldn’t go on with things the way they were. There have been a few times when I have left the security of a relationship, or a job, or simply upped sticks and moved to an entirely new town.

And, after the initial decision to leave, and the enthusiasm of starting anew, there have been many nights when I’ve lain awake wondering why I ever left, when I’ve worried that I might never land on my feet again.

And, yet, if I look back on my life, I am filled with gratitude for the places I have been and where I have arrived to now, knowing that I couldn’t have got there without that sense of the ordeal, without having passed through the belly of the whale – the long dark night of the soul, if you will, where nothing made sense and I would long for the familiarity of the old.

I am sure that I have yet more such ordeals ahead – more times when I will leave behind the security of something that I know to set out on another voyage of discovery, and I imagine looking back in ten or twenty years and being amazed at where I have been with, I hope, as much gratitude as I do now.

And, to return to where I started this piece, I imagine that in thirty years or more, we might look back at the journey South Africa has been through, and be amazed and delighted at what that country has achieved, despite all of the hardship and confusion it had to go through to get there.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and think that some of the causes are to do with a lack of discipline, a lack of responsibility, and a lack of community.

And, the other night, in my insomniac hours on a trip to Singapore, I mulled over what I might do if I were Cameron.

How about:

1) Declare a state of emergency – and admit that we, as a society, have got a lot of things wrong, especially in how we treat young people;

2) Bring back, immediately, national service – not necessarily military – but a (minimum) year-long, compulsory, “boot-camp” for 16 or 18 year olds, to learn that life is not just about getting what they want, that life is also about responsibility to a wider community, of which they are a part, where they learn the value of service and contribution. There are plenty of socially useful tasks that could accompany such service. Give people a sense that they have something to give, a sense of purpose.

3) Support the above with plenty of public education about community taking priority over the individual.

4) Make all public role models, politicians, the police and judiciary, and the media, accountable to a council of elders (eg House of Lords), and force them to comply with the same standards of contribution to community.

What, overall, I think is needed is a more paternalistic approach – all this hatred of “the nanny-state” and focus on the individual, as well as the prioritising of individual over community good, have created a culture where no-one gives a shit, and no-one is willing to take authority any more.

Although I profess to be (very) left-wing, there is something that the right used to have which was a belief in the importance of discipline and community. That’s been jetisoned in the pursuit of quick profit in the last fifty years or so.

People, I think, only act so selfishly and (self-)destructively because they feel, rightly or wrongly, that the world has little to offer them. We’ve been selling people a fake dream for the last fifty years or so. No wonder there’s so much nihilism around.

Of course, there are other problems to address, but I do think we have to change at the root, and that change will take a generation.

There are no quick fixes here.

A few weeks ago I was due to be teaching in Newfield’s coaching programme in Colorado and to take part in our first ever global summit. It was my first trip to Colorado in five years and I was very much looking forward to it.

But it was not to be. I arrived at Denver airport and got no further than immigration. What followed was a very strange and surreal two days, heightened by jetlag and very little sleep, and culminating in my returning home after being deported.

After a long flight I landed in Denver at what was already 2am London time and entered immigration, only to begin a lengthy interview process; my papers were deemed not to be in order. I was told that I would be put on the next ‘plane home. I was shocked and disappointed by this, as you might expect, but it was to get worse.

There was a long wait while they processed my paper-work, nearly four hours of waiting in fact – more questions, more waiting. All the while I kept blaming myself for being stupid enough to have got into this situation (something my friends were only too quick to tell me when I told them what had happened!) – maybe I had answered the questions wrongly, maybe I should have done something different, etc, etc.

For a long time, I was just waiting and wasn’t allowed to use my mobile ‘phone, although I did manage to text my colleague, Dan, who had come to the airport to collect me. The sense of being incommunicado in the no-man’s-land of immigration added to the sense of disorientation and surreality, which were stronger than any sense of upset.

Despite all this I was able to remain relatively calm and in good humour – even trying some banter with the immigration officials (only to be told I had “way too much energy” for them – must have been the time disorientation kicking in!), and reflecting on how my practices of meditation and exercise had built up my resilience to cope with adversity. I often struggle to remain calm at airports because I regularly get singled out for “random” checks at immigration and security – I put this down to my appearance and ethnic origins – so it felt like a real achievement to remain calm even in such an adverse situation.

I knew from the beginning that “the next ‘plane home” would mean an overnight stay, and I was looking forward to being in a hotel, and to getting re-connected with the world via e-mail but slowly it was dawning on me that this wasn’t going to happen. The immigration officials already had my main suitcase, and now they were asking for my cabin bag, and then my ‘phone, and now the contents of my pockets. When I asked about tooth-paste, etc, I was told that these would be provided in the “facility”.

This didn’t sound good, but it was to get more difficult and my sense of calm was to desert me. At around midnight local time (and 7am by my body clock), they were finally ready to take me to the facility. It was only when they produced a set of handcuffs that I finally lost it. I started crying and swearing at the same time – the final indignation, I think. They responded calmly, telling me that they had to handcuff me for their own safety while I was in transit from the airport to the detention centre. Eventually I gave up fighting and told them that I hated what they were doing but that I could understand it, and held my arms up for them to put the cuffs on.

I was then surprised by their gentleness – they kept asking if the cuffs were too tight, and loosened them for me. They also thanked me for calming down so quickly, and one of the young men told me that this was the worst part of his job – having to put hand-cuffs on people he believed to be decent human beings who had simply made a mistake with their paper-work. They put me in the van and gave me a bottle of water for the journey. They also, and I was very grateful for this, allowed me to take a sleeping tablet with me – another kindness. I managed three hours sleep in my dormitory at the detention centre before being woken for breakfast at 5 am.

The atmosphere in the centre surprised me, too. There were around thirty guys, mostly Guatemalans and Mexicans, all of whom had been there for weeks waiting for their appeals against deportation to be processed. They couldn’t believe that an Englishman was there – “You must have done something really bad to be here – did you harm someone? Were you driving drunk?”. They were friendly enough, but my Spanish was as weak as their English so we couldn’t communicate much. However, they were gentle and caring to each other, and towards me, and again I was surprised.

I was picked up again around lunchtime by the same crew who had brought me there, and, man, was I pleased to see them. I didn’t even demur when they put the handcuffs back on. Again, they took care that the cuffs weren’t too tight, and even apologised after driving a bit too fast over a bump. I spent the next few hours in the airport waiting for the evening flight home.

Again, I was surprised by their care. They allowed me a few favours, some time with my ‘phone, access to my toiletries, even offering to go into the airport to buy me some food, which, after the gruel in the detention centre, tasted delicious. While they waited for the international flight to come in they were chatting and joking with each other, and with me, and they allowed their stern masks to drop, talking about their hopes for their children and about their lives. This was even more surreal – the same stone-faced men who had greeted me the previous evening were now open and relaxed and friendly.

Just before the London flight came in, one of them looked at me, smiled, and said “OK, time to put our stern faces back on”, and they all did just that.

Finally, at about 7pm local time, I was escorted to the ‘plane by the guy I’d had most contact with. He shook my hand and wished me good luck, and I thanked him for his care. I was greeted on the ‘plane by the same flight crew who had flown me out, which only added to the strangeness of the whole experience. One more sleeping tablet, and I was back in London less than 48 hours after I had left, having spent about twenty hours in the air, and twenty-four hours at Denver Airport and in a detention centre.

Obviously, the experience had some impact on me, and still does in terms of the implications for future travel to the US (big hassles).

What I was most left with, however, was appreciation for the care and kindness of the US immigration team. This certainly wasn’t the reaction I expected to have, but my experiences left me with an experience of having seen the humans behind the stern official mask, and made me realise again the importance and power of emotions. Some of the treatment I received was unpleasant; being handcuffed, being held incommunicado and being held in a detention centre, but the care of the officials meant that it was never unbearable, and left me with an appreciation of them and the difficult job they had to do.

Many jobs include a certain amount of having to do unpleasant things to other people, whether that be denying them entry to a country, making them redundant or evicting them from their homes, to give just a few examples, but I do wonder what difference would be made if those jobs were done with the same amount of care and understanding as that I was shown in Denver last month.

Towards the end of her life, my mother, who grew up and lived in Baghdad until she was in her late thirties, developed Alzheimer’s, and started to forget herself during her conversations. Whenever we spoke on the ‘phone, or when we met, she would ask me what I did for a living, and I would try to explain.

It’s never been especially easy for me to quickly sum up just what it is that I do, but explaining coaching to someone whose English wasn’t fluent, and who couldn’t remember anything anyway, was especially trying.

Occasionally, however, she would get it.

And then, she would look at me with a slightly astonished expression on her face, and say “They pay you? To talk to them? Are they mad?”

It’s a story I often tell, and it points to something at the heart of why I do what I do.

We live in an increasingly rational culture, one that believes, in its rationalist way, that there is a solution to every problem. This has penetrated our culture in ways I couldn’t have imagined as a child. Go to any bookshop, and you’ll find rows of shelves devoted to “self-help” books; look on the internet and you’ll find advice on how to deal with any problem you can imagine, and some you can’t.

And yet, despite the mass availability of good advice, of information on how to deal with our problems, of workshops on how to make money, find or maintain relationships, live powerfully, etc, we are still seeking something.

Something else that I often say is that “if self-help books worked, how come we need more than one?”. It’s not that the information out there is bad, or that the courses offered aren’t any good, but it seems there is something missing. Something that people will, despite my mother’s protestations, pay for and which they value.

That something, I think, is listening. Sounds simple, but it’s almost as if the more solutions there are out there, the harder it is to simply be listened to. When we talk to our friends about our challenges, or to our colleagues, then what we often get is advice – “read this book”, “do this course”. Or, worse, we sometimes get told that we should “just deal with it”, or “get over it”.

In other words, we don’t really get listened to – we get “fixed”, or “told what to do”, but we don’t get listened to in the sense of being legitimised in our own experience – we don’t get seen, we don’t get witnessed, we don’t get that connection. We get information and advice instead.

Those of you who have dogs will know that, if you throw a stick for a dog when you are out walking with it, the dog will run after the stick, and then bring it back to you and drop it at your feet for you to throw it again. The dog doesn’t simply want the stick, it wants the connection, the relationship. Information and advice are a bit like the stick.

It’s not that we don’t need advice, or solutions to our problems – of course we do, but often in addition to, and sometimes even instead of, advice or solutions what’s needed is simple listening. In fact, I’d say that’s something that’s so vital and so rare. Sometimes we miss the obviousness of simply giving someone the gift of listening.

I know, from my own experience as a coach, and also from the experiences of the coaches I have trained and worked with, that often the coachee will say that, in coaching (and also in counselling), they have been able to speak of things they have never spoken about before, and that the simple act of being able to speak those things was sufficient.

In the excellent book, A General Theory of Love , the writers Amini, Lewis and Lannon, argue that one of the main benefits of counselling (for which you could also read coaching) is the connection between the counsellor and the client – the limbic connection between them is the healing, not the content.

In summary, I think we can say that the human soul longs, perhaps more than anything else to express itself and be heard or seen. It doesn’t need to be fixed, or told what to do next, or given a solution. It simply longs to be witnessed.

This need has been around since ancient times – Joseph Campbell used to talk about “sacred space” – a space where people would gather to speak of their important matters, and where the act of speaking would in itself be transformative.

I think it’s that space that people are seeking – the space where they can hear themselves, and be witnessed. And, for that, no, I don’t think they are mad to pay.

I’ve always loved this quotation from Anaïs Nin:

And then the day came when the risk to remain tight inside the bud is greater than the risk to blossom.

I think it’s such a lovely analogy for learning.

In my experience, both for myself, and in the people with whom I work, we usually only commit to real learning, by which I mean transformational learning, when the pain of living the way we have lived is pronounced enough for us to be willing to shake off an old habit, to leave our “comfort zones” behind.

The realisation of that pain, the awakening, if you will, comes in many forms. Joseph Campbell named it “the call”. Something happens to produce in us the awareness that life cannot go on as before. Sometimes we need to hear the call a few times before we respond, but there will come a time when we can no longer avoid it. Sometimes that happens because life “pulls the rug from under our feet” as the Buddhist writer Pema Chodron describes it, or sometimes it happens on a course, or during a coaching conversation.

And, then, having heard the call and made the decision to heed it, we can begin to take that awareness into action. In our work, we often talk about the importance of building new practices, new habits that will support us in developing the new identity we are moving towards, or in extending our range in the new direction. Without the practices, we soon revert back to “our old self”. We are what we practice.

However, there’s something else that also helps us to stay on track, and that is the conversations we are in.

One of the things I notice, whenever I embark in a new direction following a call that the practices are fine when things are going well, but that there will come a time, usually after a big step forward, when things might not go so well, or when we stumble as we take our first news steps.

For example, a few years ago, I did an Embodied Leadership course with Strozzi Institute to support me in developing stronger leadership presence, especially in my “front-of-room” work for Newfield, and in leading a team, and in being a team-member. I had a profound awakening of the cost of being a “lone-ranger”, and new that I had to begin to practice blending with others in new ways, after years of being self-employed, and “doing it my way”. Yikes! I left the course, with some new practices to help support this new direction in life, feeling optimistic, if a little daunted, by the possibilities ahead.

At first things went well, even excitingly. The practices helped me to build something new in myself, and I noticed differences in how I showed up in the team – they even noticed, too, which was gratifying.

But then there came the time when I needed to stretch further than before, when I found myself in some challenging situations where things didn’t go as I’d hoped, where I got “burned”. And it hurt. Sometimes it hurt a lot. And then, I didn’t want to do any of the practices – I just wanted to retreat back to my old self, to close down again, and my self-talk was all about “why bother growing? It only brings pain. Who am I to think I could ever really change anyway?”

In one particularly challenging episode, I got a huge amount of support from my business partner, Laura (Newfield’s European business manager). She and I are very close, and she’s become someone I trust enormously. Her response to my “burn” was to listen to me, to acknowledge how I felt, and to take care of me, and, at the same time, to gently, but firmly, remind me of my commitment to grow and extend. She pushed me to keep on going with my practices while acknowledging that I really didn’t want to – to keep blossoming, rather than to retreat inside the bud.

That experience was very important to me, both personally, but also in terms of learning something about change. Practices are vital, it’s true, but without the support of people who can genuinely hold and support the highest in us, we are likely to fail or give up when things get tough. Often, when we fall, we get re-assurance and comfort from our friends, but our friends tend to agree with us and can even encourage us to stay inside the bud, sometimes simply because they don’t want to see us get hurt.

It takes a combination of tender support and firm challenge to remind us of, and hold us to, what we are committed to – from people whom we can call committed listeners.

A committed listener can be a coach, a colleague, or it can be a strong friend – I now have a few such people in my working and personal life – people whom I know will care enough to not let me get away with wanting to retreat when the going gets tough, and it’s made a real difference. My practices have got sharper, and my learning has got faster and deeper.

We are our practices, as I’ve said, but it’s the conversations we are in that will determine our capacity to keep going with the practices when we most feel like giving up on them.

Reflections

What are you committed to? What practices are you committed to? Do your conversations support your practices?

Who are your committed listeners? Who supports you in your commitment to blossom?

Quote:

“The man, who, being really on the Way, falls upon hard times in the world will not, as a consequence, turn to that friend who offers him refuge and comfort and encourages his old self to survive. Rather, he will seek out someone who will faithfully and inexorably help him to risk himself, so that he may endure the suffering and pass courageously through it. Only to the extent that man exposes himself over and over again to annihilation, can that which is indestructible arise within him. In this lies the dignity of daring.” - Karlfried von Durkheim

Next week, I am heading out to Singapore to teach in Newfield’s Asian programmes.

In the work I do at Newfield, we spend a lot of time working with, and looking at, moods and emotions. Not in the psychological sense, but more from the perspective of moods and emotions as pre-dispositions for action. For example, if I am in a mood of anger, or resentment that pre-disposes me to different actions than if I am in a mood of joy, or gratitude. We are always in one mood or another, and understanding that is a key part of our work. By exploring where we act from, we have much greater capacity to change our actions, and the results we can generate in life.

If we move away from the idea of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ moods, we can instead see some moods as more helpful than others in specific contexts. For example, we can see that in some situations, fear is useful – alerting us to danger, and making us careful. At the same time, fear can be unhelpful if it stops us taking actions that would serve us. On the other hand, we can see that a mood of ambition will help us to create new projects and ventures, but, also, at the same time, it might blind us to the dangers or pit-falls in that project.

All moods have their benefits, or lessons, for us, and there’s no one-size-fits-all mood that is helpful in all situations. However, I have been exploring one mood that I think is especially dangerous, and while I wouldn’t go so far as to call it ‘bad’, or ‘wrong’, I do think we need to take a good look at this mood – cynicism – and the damage it can do.

I wrote a few months ago about the new coalition in the UK , and mentioned the cynicism which accompanied the new Government’s ambitions to create a ‘new kind of politics’. And, since then, the British press and the commentators on “have your say” columns have seized plenty of opportunities to talk about how “it won’t last”.

Cynicism is exactly that – the belief that something new can’t work, a belief that kills off any sense of possibility.

This is not an argument for blind optimism; indeed, a certain skepticism, or questioning of new ideas/ventures etc, is necessary to prevent falling into pit-falls, and to provide a certain groundedness in moving forward – making any new initiative or project into a success is not simply a case of “building it and they will come”. But, when we are in a mood of cynicism, then it’s as if we are saying “Don’t even bother to build it”, “don’t try to do anything new, different, because it will fail” (often, accompanied by the unspoken suffix “it will fail as anything new has done”). A mood of cynicism is often the result of having tried in the past, having believed in something, and then having been disappointed or let down.

In the introduction to his fascinating book, “The Politics of Meaning”, Rabbi Michael Lerner writes:

“There is a profound difference between cynicism and a methodological scepticism which rightly asks for some reason to believe that the world can be different. Much of this book is a response to the sceptic. But it will never satisfy the cynic, who holds with religious intensity the view that nothing fundamental can be changed. Pointing to the terrible crimes that have been committed in the name of social change, and relying on the disappointments most of us have felt when we gave ourselves to social movements or religious or spiritual traditions that promised transformation but actually reproduced some of the distortions of the past, the cynical wisdom of our age insists that to be sophisticated is to know in advance that no attempts to change the world could possibly work, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is necessarily a fool, or dangerous.

Yet, I insist on the possibility of possibility.”

I think that last sentence is an exquisite declaration, an insistence that, despite maybe several disappointments, several failures, it’s still worth trying to make something better.

A life that admits no possibility of possibility is the bleakest, most hopeless, kind of life, one I’ve certainly known in my own life from time to time.

However, it is one thing for me to be hopeless about the possibility for change in my own life – that creates plenty of misery for sure, but quite another thing to be cynical about the possibility of change for others, or in the world, that truly is the worst kind of mood because it has the potential to kill off any hope in anyone that things could actually be better.

Israel is almost always in the news, and it’s an area I take a keen interest in – I have plenty of family there, and it’s a place I know reasonably well. I read commentators in both the British and Israeli press, and often attend talks about Israel in London.

One of the things that strikes me the most, however, is not about Israel per se, but about how we talk about Israel.

For example, I recently joined The Economist group on Facebook, and, every time The (famously dry and even-tempered) Economist posts a link to any article about Israel, it takes about ten minutes for its Facebook page to fill up with comments, most of which are attacking the views of others, denouncing opposing views as ‘stupid’, ‘naïve’ ‘supporting terrorism (or state terrorism)’, or worse. You can see such polarised views on Twitter (do a quick search of hash-tags “Gaza” or “flotilla”), or on the “have your say” columns of any online news site.

And, the other night, I was at a debate in a synagogue in London. Even while the speakers were presenting their views, people from the floor were shouting “rubbish!”, “you’re wrong!”, etc. One man even had a home-made sign saying “Incorrect!” which he would hold up from time to time. There was a comedy element to this, and, indeed, there was plenty of laughter, mixed in with irritation, amongst the audience, but, ultimately, it was just very sad that there couldn’t even be a debate about the topic, with respect accorded to speakers whose views might be different than those of some of the audience. At one stage, a rabbi in the audience shared that for her, some of the views expressed were very uncomfortable, but what was more uncomfortable for her was the mood of hostility towards those expressing alternative views: “If we can’t respectfully listen to views very different from our own, then what hope is there for peace in the world?”

Despite all of this heat, there is almost no discussion about how we talk about Israel. In fact, we rarely talk about how we talk about anything, but what strikes me about talking about Israel is how quickly any discussion turns into a heated conversation, often turning very ugly very quickly.

And it has reached an even uglier place, where Arab Israeli members of the Knesset have received death threats for having a ‘poisonous stance against Zionism and Israel’. In other words, “if you disagree with how I see it, not only are you wrong, but you deserve to die”.

How can this be? How can we become so heated about an issue that we lose sight of the human being, and merely see whether or not they agree with us as being the key issue? And, how can we be so sure we are right, even without the hostility and the heat?

I think the key to what’s at play here lies in the confusion between our interpretation of reality, our beliefs about life, and reality itself. In other words, we don’t say “these events happened, and this is how I interpret them”, or “this is how I see the world”, we say “this is the way the world is”.

We think that what we see, and know, are “the truth”, but actually we are shaped towards seeing the world in a particular way, by the stories we grow up with, by the conversations we are immersed in, by the cultures in which we live, and then we claim that the way we see the world is the way the world is. And then, of course, because we are “right”, anyone who sees differently must be wrong (and, often, therefore, somehow less human).

In the introduction to “Presence”, by Peter Senge is a beautiful story from a leadership workshop which Peter Senge was running in South Africa, in 1990, when the apartheid system was in its last days.

During the workshop, which was for both blacks and whites, the participants were shown a video of Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech, which had never been seen in South Africa before.
After the video was shown, one of the participants, an Afrikaans business-man turned to one of the black community leaders, Anne Loetsebe, and said to her: “I want you to know that I was raised to think you were an animal.” And then he started crying. Anne just held him in her gaze and nodded.

Clearly, the man’s views are shaped in a particular direction by growing up, and living in, the cultural discourses of South Africa at that time. This point is made several times in the exquisitely good “Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation”” by John Carlin, about Nelson Mandela, and about his role in the Springboks victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa.

As the author points out several times, there is no “truth”, there are only ways of seeing the world, and the beauty of Mandela was that he understood that, and then sought to meet people where they were, understanding and legitimising their world-view, and seeking to allay their fears and concerns, even to the extent of learning to speak the language of his “enemy”. The culmination of his years of “meeting the enemy”, always treating him with courtesy and respect, is a very moving piece where he turns up on the pitch for the final game, in front of thousands of white Afrikaaners, wearing the green Springboks shirt (which was hated by black South Africans as a symbol of apartheid), and is greeted by shouts of “Nel-son! Nel-son!” by the mostly white crowd. It’s an astonishing moment of reconciliation that moved me to tears as I was reading it.

So, it is possible to have a very different kind of conversation, even about the issues we disagree on most. But it starts, I think, with one fundamental thing – the capacity to care for the other, and to legitimise that they might see the world very differently from us. I’ve been lucky enough to have had some very good conversations with some of my family and friends about Israel, where we disagree, but where our care about the relationship is more important than being right. When that happens, the conversation is wide open, and there’s nothing to prove – just the capacity to understand why someone sees differently than I do.

Quote

“A good conversation means lend me your eyes.” – Julio Olalla