Have you noticed?
Things go wrong and sometimes they go ok. And they go wrong (and sometimes ok) in an endless loop, one after the other, each experience taking its throne in the centre your attention, dominating your perception before giving way to another.
Sometimes their moment of fame lasts only a few seconds. Sometimes they hang around for hours. Whatever the duration, they usually come knocking for a second, third or nth helping.
Life is just one damn thing after another (as someone said in 1909).
Here are some examples of the looping situations that have been grabbing my inner headlines in Q4, before stepping aside for the next thing:
Discomfort in my neck and shoulders - never seems to shift
Urgent unresolved school situation for our eldest - no obvious best option
Israel-Palestine - horribly near and far at the same time
Untidy office - symbolises my whole life
Sore throat - news just in
And that’s just a few of the most obvious.
The world of daily experience is a constantly shifting, fully immersive 4D movie crowded with raw living data - trees, roads, things, people, noise, feelings, thoughts - endlessly unspooling from the moment you wake up to the final abandonment of consciousness.
Everything is in our face all the time. There is always something and we endlessly and eternally have to deal with everything. It never ends.
Don’t you fantasise that one day soon it will all be easier? After the holidays, or this project, or next weekend, or when the kids grow up or…
But the movie keeps on playing.
Maybe that was the true meaning of The Flood: not an actual historical catastrophe but the psychic deluge of reality, the moment the child blinks into adulthood and notices suddenly that everything is in a billion pieces and it’s their job to put it back together again, to find dry land. Or is it?
Despite everything I know, a part of me still believes that tomorrow will be better. The incorrigible and dangerous optimist lives on.
- Maybe once there’s a shift in global shift in consciousness?
- Ha ha hahaha…
Thanks to the Taoists, the Buddhists, the non-dualists and all the other wonderful teachers, we know that the best a human can hope for, in light of life’s intransigent design, is to attain to a state of permanent okayness, to develop the capacity to accept - or even to enjoy - the endless inconvenience of it all.
But doing this can’t just be about meditation or spiritual surrender. Nailing life also has to involve some kind of a reliable, non linear, fuzzy logic process for resolving the difficulties which are likely to be in your face forever - if only so life is just not too much of a pain in the ass.
This is more or less the scope of the research project I have set myself in this life (and of this newsletter).
Luckily, one of the exciting things about this time of history is the range of tools we have at our disposal for solving just that - from Systems Thinking or Theory U to Appreciative Inquiry or Generative Dialogue - many of which are fruits of the glory period of post-WWII innovation, an outburst of experimentation in science, psychology, spirituality and business that didn’t tail off until the 1990s.
We are not even close to taking full advantage yet of those breakthroughs.
But I already know that it is possible to function at a high level of clarity, poise and creativity while simultaneously feeling overwhelmed, embattled and confused. It might not be perfect, but it’s a decent alternative to waiting for enlightenment.
There’s also just admitting that you’re feeling a bit pissed off, which has never let me down so far.
I’ll keep writing as we go along about living in the midst of the flood, about problem solving and happiness and flow, because it seems to be what I do, but for now - given life's endless carousel, and its tendency to never be completely just right - AREN’T WE ALL DOING WELL?
Happy Hanukkah