Human to Human

I admit, I’m really interested in the American political process these days. I know, it sounds a bit like a shameful confession, which I suppose says something.

Like many, I try to stay informed, listening to the candidates for Republican and Democratic party nomination. I try to listen to the issues and the platforms. It’s not easy, I find. It takes a lot of patience. You have to get through a lot of posturing and attack talking points to hope for a small chip of a gem of authenticity. I would say this is true with those who analyze the process — including professional media and arm chair analysts over coffee.

What is easy is to jump into the social and psychological insights of the process itself. The fact that this nomination and election process takes close to two years remains absurd to me. I’m Canadian eh — what’s wrong with five weeks, or even three months as it was in the recent federal election that brought Justin Trudeau to the office of prime minister.

But never mind that. I believe the process is set up to bring out the worst in the candidates, no matter who you may favor. Not intended that way, but just results in it that way. It’s one that privileges winning over truth-telling. And it has such history that this stooping is largely unavoidable. Good and rather talented human beings must fight with one another. The more bombastic the better. The more outrageous the better. The more shocking the better. The more clever in witty quips and putdowns the better. It reminds me of the fights I would get in with my sister, when we were both under the age of eight — “She started it! No, he did! Mommmmmmm!”

Why is this tolerated and even supported in the American system? It’s a bit crazy. Most people know this. But underneath lays some shadowy realities that are not limited to Americans. I wonder — yes, I’m guessing — if there is such an addiction in the American collective psyche to being entertained and shocked. It creates great opportunity for outrage which, let’s face it, if you are living in an overall numbed state, feels inherently good to react to. It’s the hunger for feeling alive, even emotionally and neuro-chemically that feels so good.

Crazy right? Sure. Or maybe not. It’s a reality that is not limited to Americans.

Robert Langan is a psychoanalist and longtime Buddhist practitioner. I recently read one of his articles, “A Buddhist Psychoanalyst Puts Our Divided Country On The Couch.” He offers a story worth reading to address some of this dynamic in American politics.

Here’s a couple of teasers from his article that stood out to me:

• “We fear things becoming worse and hope to make them better. There’s the rub. Our country is in the midst of a polarized conflict between hope and fear, with each side’s hope becoming the other sides’ fear.”
• “Demonization of the other only fuels the conflict. The more certain one’s sense of righteous rectitude (the side of the angels), the more adamant is one’s determination never to shake hands with the devil.”
• “The acceptance of not fully knowing does not stymie action. It credits others’ ways of knowing complimentary indicators of what we humans should be doing with ourselves, our communal best guess.”

One of the things I believe is that we as a human species (yes, it’s a very broad reference) have a fundamental inability and fear to accept an inherent unknowable of human existence. The American political process, like most political processes, imposes and privileges knowing on top of inherently unknowable dynamics. Until we (you, me, us…) become more comfortable with that — which I suppose could be never — this “ah, screw it; entertain me” disposition will continue to govern the collective psyche and the processes that grow from it.

 

 

William Stafford was an American Poet, raised in the midwest of the United States in the 1900s. He wrote this poem, one that I once memorized and used often:

The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow.
It goes among things that change.
But it doesn’t change.

People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.

While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt or die;
and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.

You don’t ever let go of the thread.

I’ve heard that William Stafford wrote a poem every day for decades. Someone once asked him, “What if you write a lousy poem?” I’m told his response was, “I lower my standards.”

I love this poem. I love even more that exchange.

It speaks to practice. It speaks to not getting stuck. It speaks to refining one’s crafts. It speaks to an internal kindness. It speaks to humility. It speaks to commitment. It speaks to freedom. It speaks to imagination.

Any of those are good threads, no?

 

 

Recently I hosted with a colleague a workshop in which the primary focus was on presence. Our overall focus was on leadership. But our first gateway into that leadership was presence.

For this gathering, I wondered what books to choose as resources for people to peruse. I didn’t want to bring too many. Four seemed enough, one placed in each of the cardinal directions in the center of our circle. I brought some favorites. One by Pema Chodron (Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change). Another by John O’Donahue (To Bless The Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings). Another by Mark Nepo (The Exquisite Risk: Daring to Live an Authentic Life). These are each rich. They are books that I can randomly open to most any page and find a paragraph or two that deeply satisfies.

The fourth book surprised me just a bit. The Circle Way: A Leader in Every Chair, by Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea. It’s not the quality of the book that surprised me. It was the realization that I wanted this book as one of only four to encourage presence. The Circle Way — as process methodology and as way of being — has been helping me to develop my practice of presence for close to twenty years now.

Here’s three ways of how I’ve experienced that.

The Circle Way Invokes Stillness — Most of us live in rather frenetic worlds don’t we. Meetings on top of meetings on top of meetings. Multiple channels of data that we comb, cull, or that regularly ping us with the latest happenings. Our texts. Our news apps. Our email. Who hasn’t realized after a few innocuous clicks that they’ve fallen into a bottomless Facebook rabbit hole of Top 10 this’ or thats. So much stimulation and mass awareness can evoke a kind of adrenalin rush, doesn’t it. I feel that. It can be rewarding in the moment. It’s just not helpful as an uninterruptible pattern over the long haul.

I want to suggest, contrary to this frenetic pattern, that stillness (and a simple process for evoking it) is equally important. If it were a list of capabilities required for a job, I’d put stillness next to “ability to multitask.” The stillness that is bringing full attention to the matter at hand. The stillness that is not jumping ahead to the other meetings that you know you still need to prepare for. The stillness that is kindness, by offering the gift of our showing up undistracted with the people that we are with in the moment. The Circle Way is a simple approach to invoking and remembering stillness. It’s structure and practices inherently encourage it. Waiting. Passing a listening piece. Being able to see others in the group. Democratizing meaning-making.

The Circle Way Creates Turning To One Another — One of my mentors, Margaret Wheatley, wrote the book, Turning To One Another in 2009. It’s a very good collection of short essays that are at the center of people learning together. It’s also a primary narrative for what we are supposed to do together that I’ve been using since Meg wrote it. It is engagement. Encountering one another. Listening for what can’t be known by any individual but can only be known by people being together.

The Circle Way is a process methodology. It has structure. It has agreements. It has intention. It entrains a way to interrupt the pattern of isolation that many of us find ourselves in. Separation has been the game for many years now — human beings are skilled at buffering from each other. The Circle Way moves us from a classroom dynamic of “informing” to a collaborative dynamic of listening together for what is in emerging among us through our turning to one another.

The Circle Way Reveals Subtle — Many of us now know that there is always some level of mystery involved in our work, in our communities, in our families, and in our relations. Some things can’t be objectively named and measured. Yet they remain quintessentially important. Like the special something that makes Granny’s soup different than yours despite the same recipe. Like the grandeur that many feel, inexpressible in words, trying to describe their feeling at the Grand Canyon or other places of beauty.

The Circle Way can help us discover a feeling together, a subtle feeling, that isn’t secondary, but rather primary for influencing all of the tasks and things that we do. It gives us a kind of attainment, a coming into resonance. It gives us a gentle way of being together in an unknown or an unknowable. It gives us a way to discover subtleties that change the arc of the whole narrative.

I have flown many times from Salt Lake City to Seattle. Yesterday was a time when I happened to have a window seat, a clean enough window, and clear enough weather to catch a few vistas using my phone. I could see the Salt Lake Valley when taking off. I could see Seattle when landing.

Vistas often inspire, don’t they. Stretch the sight. Stretch the vision. Expand one’s imagination and range of perspective. They do for me. From top left to top right, then bottom left to bottom right, here’s the sequence from yesterday.

 

               

If I’m correct, the first is Antelope Island State Park, just north of the Salt Lake airport. It’s an island in The Great Salt Lake. The park is known for its free range antelope, bison, and bighorn sheep. The lake itself is known for its long skinny size (80 miles by 30 miles), it’s shallow depth (average is about 16 feet), it’s color that I don’t fully understand (lots of green, brown, and turquoise) but is influenced by its, well, salt. That’s the Rocky Mountains snow capped in the background, the Wasatch range.

The second picture is likely somewhere over Eastern Washington. It still amazes me to be able to pop up over the clouds, which you can see is a pretty solid blanket, and see the blue sky horizon.

The third picture is some of the breaking clouds coming into Seattle. I’ve learned that patches of blue sky like this in Seattle are often called a “sunny day.” Well, I suppose that is more true in months other than July and August.

The last picture is descent close to SEATAC airport. The ports are interesting to me, the amount of transportation and exchange that happen at the edge of a continent. The stadiums, home to the Seahawks NFL and the Mariners MLB teams. The body of water is Elliot Bay. That little tip of land just beneath the clouds is West Seattle where my son is now engaged in faith community service.

Big picture will always matter, right. Yes, the on the ground awareness too. But for yesterday, just the joy of some sights that I’ve seen often, yet don’t get to see or feel every day.