Lifescape

It’s a while since the last Lifescape letter, but I’ve been involved in some interesting and exciting projects, including one that is turning out to be a deep, multifaceted programme of staff development at Cranfield University. After an initial phase of training on stress and wellbeing for all managers in the University during 2007, a survey was undertaken in May of this year – and the organisation is now is the process of planning the next stage – which has the potential to be really transformational in terms of how people experience their working life. Watch this space – or if you’re interested in talking further about this work, and how a similar programme could be supported in your own organisation, please do get in touch.

Please also check out my other website and projects: creativethorp.com and editionspoetry.wordpress.com for news of other activities – including the publication on my editions series of poetry pamphlets. You can also download two pdf. flyer brochures on talks, workshops and consultancy support I can offer – wellbeing with a difference and development with a difference.

SABOTAGE!

A few weeks ago, during a quiet and rainy weekend in Pembrokeshire, I came up with the central idea for some writing I’ve wanted to do for some time. This was exciting and inspirational for me – and reminded me of what a wise colleague once said to me a few years back when I was struggling with a faltering writing project. He said “I think this book is your spiritual challenge” – or words to that effect – and I think he was right, though maybe not about that particular project. What was true, and what I think he intuitively meant, was that writing MY book (whenever and whatever it may be) is part of my own calling. In a sense, this is the task we all have throughout our life – to unveil or reveal the calling that has always been inside us. In a sense – we all have to write our own ‘book’.

Someone said to me in frustration the other day “why is it that some people know their calling from the start, whilst the rest of us have to keep searching or don’t even know where to look?” and  I know that this is my question too. There is a sense for me of being one of the searchers, though deep inside there were always some clues: I’ve kept writing, listening and teaching in whatever context I find myself.

 This book, this exciting, new idea IS my calling, and it is a profound spiritual challenge. One part of that challenge comes from my internal saboteur that has come on the scene again. Since that revelatory weekend, I didn’t write a word of the new project  for three weeks, concerning myself (worried myself) with petty administration, marketing and the admittedly important task on finding work so I can pay the mortgage next year. Yet every time I sat down with space to write, something got in the way.

Perhaps, in truth, for many of us our good work carries within it a surrender and a risk-taking that seems almost too fearful to contemplate. The hopeful, eager, searching child inside me sees his dream as possible at last, but the grizzled old cynic – who has seen it all before and been with me when hope has died in times past – just raises an eyebrow and reminds me that there is a real world to be lived in with bills, debts, mortgages and duties to perform. This tension around the work we need to do and the work we feel obliged to do; the conflict between these polarised psychological positions is wonderfully described by David Whyte in his book Crossing the unknown sea – and reading it again has given my hopeful child courage, and reminded me that fighting my saboteur might not be best strategy.

David Whyte writes about how, for the child, “a courageous aunt, a roguish uncle, an authentic teacher, a true friend, a scintillating character in a picture book, all hold, by their example, imaginative treasures that a child will use later when they must open their life and work once more to a sense of freedom and happiness. Years later, at a different threshold – at thirty, forty-five, fifty-five or sixty five – we suddenly remember exactly the place in our body we buried these freedoms, and marking the spot, dig deep into the ground of that memory to reclaim and live them again”. (Crossing the Unknown Sea, p160).

Perhaps the practical cynic in me has, to some extent, my welfare at heart. He is protecting me against myself until, perhaps, I am ready to meet the challenge, ready to dig down and discover my freedoms. Without making this an excuse to procrastinate, and without allowing the final act to be one of sabotage, maybe it’s OK to let things unfold. This book, the good work that was revealed to me a few weeks ago, must be allowed to grow – it cannot be forced, or force-fed.

This more humbling viewpoint, recognises that my internal saboteur is protecting me against myself, and against the grandiose belief that I am ready – that I am grown-up enough. At fifty, perhaps I should be, but should is a word of sabotage in itself. As soon as it is spoken it takes us to other places, where restrictions, injunctions and sanctions rule, and into a trap that takes us farther from our authentic self. Perhaps this great protector is waiting for me to show that I am ready for the spiritual challenge; then and only then will he let the child free to do his good work.

Good work

Poet, David Whyte’s book Crossing the unknown sea is subtitled:  work and the shaping of identity, and it gets to the heart of what good work is about and is a welcome antidote to the pseudoscientific language of much psychological writing and to the shoulds and musts of adulthood.

Now, when I’m thinking about work, I sometimes ask: is this job a real job; that is to say: does it do something useful in the world. It’s a profound shame that young people – particularly graduates – in our society, emerge out of higher education and into ‘careers’ such a graduate recruitment, marketing and various nebulous ‘consultancies’ – often, in reality, jobs that simply service other jobs in the system; which in turn, service other jobs and so on up the corporate pyramid. And as we’ve seen recently, the pyramids of the corporate world are not nearly as stable as we had thought, hoped and trusted.  

So in asking us to look behind the bottom line, the FTSE and the pension plan, David Whyte reminds us that work is part of the human experience and part of the lifelong work of shaping and re-finding our identify and calling. However much we’d like to think otherwise, simply surviving or even thriving economically is ultimately meaningless. To be authentic, he reminds us, it to have good work.

With love

Steve