The plan (and the unplan).

I started blogging in summer 2009 because I wanted to share my thoughts and ideas about life and my journey.  My experience, albeit unique, is also shared by and with many people around me and opening up allowed me to get other people’s perspective. Sharing also gives me a sense of belonging; keeping this in mind is so important as whatever I do, I am always in context and in relation to other people.

A few years back I decided to change my career, this came about as a response to the realisation, that what I had done before, did not satisfy me anymore and also as a response to external events; one such was losing what seemed like a safe job.  At that point, I understood how much in life is unknown.

Often, we find the unknown frightening, when we stop doing what we always did, we can get a sense of falling apart.  And although it is not we who are falling apart but simply some of our ideas, the feeling is very valid and real.

At that stage, life seemed unsafe and I thought that a good plan would bring safety back, and so it was launched, I was going to re-train as a psychologist.

Plans give us a good sense of control, purpose, direction and continuity as well as beginnings and endings.  The thing about plans is that they can also be limiting, if I stick with a plan too rigidly I tend to block opportunities for growth.

Not having a plan on the other hand, can feel like drifting without a purpose.  This reminds of the conversation between Alice (in Wonderland) and the Cheshire cat:

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”  “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the cat.  “I don’t much care where—“ said Alice.  “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the cat.  “—so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.  “Oh, you are sure to do that,” said the cat “if only you walk long enough.”

(Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)

And so not knowing how to balance planning with unplanning my journey into the unknown continued.  It’s an odd illusion to believe that when we plan we know things better.  Our plans are based on rules which are based on assumptions and we expect the world to behave according to our rules – until it doesn’t.  And we make new rules.

Rules are an economical way of making decisions and good for keeping some structure around us.  However, the downside of rules is that they inhibit inevitable progress.

What can we do?  Keep them and remember they will only work some of the times and for some events and then rehabilitate them.  That is, if they don’t work for one thing, they might work for another.

I am now a psychologist (according to plan) and am in my final stages of qualifying as a Gestalt psychotherapist (not according to original plan) and doing two different jobs (not planned for) and am in the early stages of starting a new business after the previous one failed (never been planned).

I still make plans and they keep changing; I make new rules and I have to constantly rehabilitate them, and I try to create order but life insists on being messy and unpredictable.  In short I am doing what to me being human is all about (until I reach the end of the plan).

I plan to keep on blogging and sharing in my next post, I will try to write more about rehabilitating rules (if I manage to keep this plan).

It’s good to fail

In August I wrote a post about resilience.  Since then, I have worked with a few clients on how to actually become resilient.   The main question was whether resilience is a trait that some people are born with and some aren’t and whether it can be cultivated.

What emerged from the work was that while some people are resilient naturally, that is, they strive and thrive in the face of difficulty, the rest of us can cultivate resilience.

We become resilient when we fail.  There is something tricky to work out here.  Often, if we believe that our capabilities are fixed, for whatever reason, so we would only seek interactions and activities that would prove us right, that is, we will only engage with tasks in which we cannot fail.  This behaviour represents our limitations and also our sense of capability.

People who have conflicting feelings in certain situations, can understand this.  By conflicting feelings I mean wanting something to happen so we feel valued and at the same not wanting it so we can confirm our negative beliefs about ourselves.  Think about love, relationships, promotions and blind dates as examples.

But, failure is also where we meet our potential to learn and to me learning is growth.  When we learn, we enter a state of mind in which failing or succeeding become less relevant, what is relevant is the information we absorb and that we feel smart by just learning.

So what’s the trick? Adding activities into our lives in which we have a 50/50 or larger chance to fail, regardless of what the activity is as long as it has a sense of risk taking and as small as it may seem.  And fail and fail and fail. The more we fail, the more resilient we become and if we maintain the element of learning in the process we can see ourselves as being successful.

Open source relationships

Under Perens‘ definition, open source describes a broad general type of software license that makes source code available to the general public with relaxed or non-existent copyright restrictions. The principles, as stated, say absolutely nothing about trademark or patent use and require absolutely no cooperation to ensure that any common audit or release regime applies to any derived works. It is an explicit “feature” of open source that it may put no restrictions on the use or distribution by any organization or user. It forbids this, in principle, to guarantee continued access to derived works even by the major original contributors.

Open source culture is the creative practice of appropriation and free sharing of found and created content. Examples include collage, found footage film, music, and appropriation art. Open source culture is one in which fixations, works entitled to copyright protection are made generally available. Participants in the culture can modify those products and redistribute them back into the community or other organisations.

(source: Wikipedia)

Our relationships with other people in many ways operate as open source code.  We put ourselves out there in the world and let others add, change, impact, subtract and copy our behaviour.  There is little we can we do about it.  At times we believe we have a copyright on what we say or do, only to realise later that our actions or words have been edited or misinterpreted altogether.

When we hold on to what we believe to be the copyright of who we are, we actually limit the level of interaction we allow ourselves in any given relationship and by doing so we also limit our resilience and ability to bounce back after tough exchanges.

What if we freed ourselves from our need for copyright of who we believe we are and allow others to add freely?  I believe we would then open ourselves to fulfilling our potential and to a greater flexibility.  We would allow others to contribute and share with us honestly how they experience us.  We can let them impact on us and accept that their experience can bring about change in us.

This can be frightening at times and of course there has to be some measure of protection in place, our core values and what we stand for are important, and like Wikipedia, while anyone can contribute, only trusted and genuine sources are accepted.

It is true that some people only see us through their own fears and by doing so would only offer us a partial view of how they experience us; this is an experience we all share.  But if we create a trusted environment with the people who are close to us, we can create a beautiful and dynamic collage of us which would allow us to change and adapt to new realities.  Not only will we be stronger and more robust but also enjoy richer experiences.

We don’t always get it right with others, as others don’t always get it right about us, but I believe that an open source state of mind allows for mistakes and corrections to be made in a more experimental mode rather than a threat-resisting mode.

 

 

BlogCatalog

Two short stories

Heaven and hell

A Japanese warrior approached a Zen master searching for an answer to a question that was troubling him.

“Tell me master” asked the warrior, “are there heaven and hell?”

“Ha!” snorted the master in what seemed to be scorn for the warrior.

“What makes you think you could understand such things?”  “You are only an uneducated soldier who is wasting my time.”

The warrior immediately froze in shock, no one, but no one, ever spoke to a warrior like this.  It meant instant death.

“You are still here” said the master.  “Are you too stupid to understand what I said?” bellowed the master.  “Stop wasting my time and get out of here.”

The warrior was overtaken by rage; his hand flew like lightning to his sword and swept it aloft for the kill.  But just before the sword descended on the master’s head, he heard the master say  “this is the gate to hell.”

The warrior froze in astonishment.  His own rage brought hell to him and to those he attacked and the master risked his own life to make this point inescapably clear.

Sighing deeply, the warrior placed his sword back in its sheath and bowed humbly in awe.

“And this is the gate to heaven” smiled the master.

The town’s people

An old woman sitting by the roadside just outside her town was approached by a traveller who asked her “what kind of people live in this town?”

“What are the people like in your home town?” asked the old woman.

“Oh, they were terrible, all liars and lazy, you wouldn’t trust any of them, that’s why I left.”

“You will find the people in this town just the same” said the old woman.

Not long after, she was approached by a second traveller who asked “what kind of people live in this town?”

“What are the people like in your home town?” asked the old woman.

“Oh, they wonderful people, honest and hard working” said the traveller “I am sorry I had to leave.”

“You will find the people in this town just the same” said the old woman.

 

 

Tales of missed opportunities

In much of my work I listen to people’s stories about their lives I often hear a choice to focus on incapacities rather than competencies and possibilities.

Why do so many of us feel that we fail at achieving our goals?

To me we fail ourselves not when we don’t achieve what we strive to achieve but when we don’t consider what’s possible.   Only when we start with the assumption that something is possible rather than impossible can we engage with possibilities and impossibilities.  When we assume that something is impossible we only engage with impossibilities.

Often, we assume that because we have always done things in a certain way it means that there aren’t other ways available to us.  And I know that sometimes we feel as if there is no choice.  That brings me to free will – it is precisely the experience of fear and uncertainty that tells us that we have free will.

The more we deal with situations in a fixed way, the less our freedom to choose comes into play. If I am travelling a road with no crossroads, my life is just that road; I can run it, walk it slowly or stop but it is still just that road.  It is only at the crossroads that I can make it my life.

Every time we reach a crossroads we engage with what’s possible and for this to work we need to focus on our competencies and that takes optimism – the kind of optimism that tells us we are able to deal with life with hope and confidence, regardless of what it brings our way.

Being optimistic is always in relation to something, to us, to another person or events in our lives.  It’s a focus on what we do well.

I appreciate that often it is hard to see what we do well; we learn to brush the positive aside and focus on what’s wrong as we grow up.  I am not saying we should ignore our current shortcomings, I am saying that we can only deal with our shortcomings effectively when we use our competencies

The potential to do so is in all of us.  It is what allows us to get out of bed each morning, it is how we find our place in life and how we engage with others and it allows us to look for what’s possible instead of what’s wrong.

To me the choice is between a tale of what’s possible and a tale of missed opportunities.

The question remains, whether we want to have a choice or not and ironically, there is a choice in that as well.

Caterpillars and butterflies

“I shall have to put up with a few caterpillars if I want to see butterflies.  I understand they are very beautiful”.

The Little Price by Antoine de St Exupery

I have been blogging for a few months now enjoying sharing my exploration of the unknown bits of my future as much as I can explore the unknown.

I realised I couldn’t give up altogether my need to know what will happen next; living in the here and now, is a noble idea, but in my world it feels like a struggle to pracise all the time.  Trying to work out the future gives me comfort and a sense of security and continuity.  It’s fun, I can fantasise, imagine and dream my future and what I want to achieve and pursue it.  I can retell my story again and again and open up new possibilities.  Why give up such amazing creativity?

Someone who plays a very influential role in my life describes it as drawing the road ahead rather than letting it unfold.  And in a way this is reality, the road ahead can unfold in ways which can be hard to accept.

My argument against not drawing the road ahead is that it leaves me directionless.  What about my goals?

I was told I needed to find a golden path.

Noble, but it doesn’t work for me.  What is a golden path anyway?

What I did find was that I made a lot of mistakes – many of my caterpillars didn’t turn into butterflies, and that I could do two things with them.  One had backward implication i.e. feel bad about my choice and myself.  The other had forward implication i.e. what do I do with it now?  The second option requires optimism.

There are a few definitions to optimism, the one I prefer is that it’s not all good out there – life can definitely be harsh – but that I trust myself that will know how to handle whatever happens.  And if I don’t, I can ask for help.

So I plan, I love planning and I consider a few outcomes: everything will turn out as I want it to; only some things will turn out the way I want them and nothing will turn out as I planned.  When I do this, I can look the bad possibilities in the face and check what my fears are and how I can deal with them.  This is not to say that everything becomes predictable, but it helps to recognise what psychologists call the locus of control: in me or outside me and what do I do about it, in other words resilience.

It definitely requires me to be an active participant in my life, responsible for all my choices.  Aren’t we responsible for the caterpillars in our lives anyway, whether they turn into butterflies or not?

The boat

There is a Taoist parable that tells of a man travelling in a boat and suddenly sees another boat coming at him.  Reacting with anger he shouts loudly and gestures madly to the boat coming towards him to change its course.  But as boat is coming closer to him, he sees that there is no one in it and he himself steers clear of the empty boat.

Does positive thinking encourage us to see athe boat as empty when it isn’t?

The belief that we can compel anything into happening just by thinking positively encourages us to ignore problems of inequality, injustice, brutality, incompetence and isolation.  When we constantly attempt to take all the responsibility and blame for our failures we stop seeing ourselves in the context in which we live.

And when we do so, we stop ourselves from engaging with everything that life throws our way; we only engage with ourselves.

Of course, we are responsible for ourselves and our choices; how we respond to our values and needs is important, this is what gives us a sense of stability and continuity.  But only taking responsibility of how we interpret a situation numbs us to the world and renders us isolated from our context.

It is through our anger, disappointment, frustration and helplessness that we can evoke change, create and take from life what we need.

We just need to be reminded of the Iranians who did not accept the results of the last elections and of all the oppressed people around the world who choose to fight for their values and engage with the larger context of their lives in the attempt to bring about change.

And sometimes we cannot steer clear; we are forced to watch the boat coming our way.  Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning is the story of someone who could only focus on his own reaction, interpretation and meaning.

For many of us engaging with what is wrong in our lives is still possible and although it may seem frightening – often the price is feeling marginalised and outside the large consensus – we can choose to do so.  I believe that when we are in the margins we understand our uniqueness, quirkiness and madness, and it is in the margins that one starts a new trend.

Abraham Maslow spoke of safety as a primary need, while crucial for our survival, its flipside is lack of challenge and lack of growth.  Life seems to be alternating between these two positions, safety and growth and growth comes through difficulty, challenge, ambiguity, fear, confusion and complexity which are all part of what it is to be human.  When we seek to be in constant control of our responses, without making mistakes, we seek safety.  Saying that life is not complicated, but that we complicate it, removes us from our world and from engaging fully with our opportunities to learn.

To me the boat parable is one of choice and responsiblity for ourselves as well as our environment.

On goals and variety

My friend told me the following story after having read my last post; she thought it demonstrated the non-linearity of life events.

A Chinese farmer discovered one day that his horse has ran off to the forest.  His neighbours said to him: ‘how unlucky you are to have your horse run off’ to which the farmer replied: ‘maybe it is and maybe it isn’t’.  A few days later his horse came back with a mare he met in the forest.  His neighbours said to him: ‘how lucky you are, you now have two horses’ to which he replied: ‘maybe it is and maybe it isn’t’.  A few days later, the farmer’s son fell and broke his leg as he was trying to tame the new horse.  His neighbours came back to the farmer and said: ‘how unlucky you are that your son broke his leg’ to which he replied: ‘maybe it is and maybe it isn’t’.  The following day, soldiers came to the village to recruit his son to army, because of his broken leg, they could not recruit him. His neighbours said to him: ‘how lucky you are that your son was not taken to the army’ to which he replied…

If taken literally, you might judge this farmer as lacking purposefulness.  As a metaphor, it made me think of how often, when I had set my own goals in the past, the only thing that seemed to remain anchored in my plan was the goal itself, the journey was often full of surprises and winding.  I was fixated on why things weren’t working the way I wanted them to, as if there was only one way to achieve whatever it was I was trying to achieve.  The point I missed was that unpredictability had to be taken into consideration.

This is not about giving up direction, passion and needs; we have our point of view about life which is valid and important to us.  This is about having a say in life and also understanding that if our goals are seen as part of a larger system rather than in isolation, there are many possibilities available to us.  This also means that a head-on, full-force engagement with some perceived path may not be a useful strategy.

And this is not to say that because life is uncertain we shouldn’t plan anything, I don’t believe this is a good recipe.  It only means that we are not engaging fully with life, with its possibilities and risks.

I still find that when I allow several outcomes, difficulties and mistakes along the way don’t immediately throw me off course completely, but allow me to review my plan.

In many ways we are responsible for the meaning we give to our lives and without a purpose we lose part of that meaning.  We must plan and aim and hope and also fail, it is only human to do so and it is our way of creating continuity in our existence.  Otherwise, our experience is chaotic and meaningless because what we have done in the past and what we do now has no impact on our future.

So what would a plan without accurate predictability look like if seen as a system?  Something like this:

A goal put in the context of possibilities of achieving it with a few variations.  These variations then linked to possible risks, mistakes, failing, other unpredictable responses etc which in turn are linked to more possibilities until we have a manageable web that can support us help us to feel anchored in our experience.  The more we are able to manage in our system, the wider our possibilities are.

It’s like the difference between perfection and excellence.  To me, striving for perfection means focusing on our weaknesses, we never are truly satisfied; perfection leaves little room for variation.  Whereas excellence means that we focus on our strengths and the joy we take in achieving our goals regardless of setbacks and failures along the way.

The demons and angels of imagination

In my previous post I was suggesting that learning to work with ambiguity allows us to manage better the tension between the potential in the unknown and our need for concrete and clear experiences.

I believe that human creativity can only flourish in ambiguity; when we accept it as part of our experience we also accept our world as a system with unlimited possibilities rather than a linear process in which what has happened in the past indicates what will happen in the future.  Because our future depends on our available knowledge at present, it is only predictable to a degree, when we deny this we limit our ability to cope with whatever life throws at us creatively.

To imagine is a primary human ability which we constantly subject to the tyranny of the clear and concrete and in much of our current thinking we tend to move very fast from imagination to practicality, from ideas to results, anything else is a waste of time.

This often leads to repressing our ideas because they are unacceptable in our community – each community with its own restrictions. And often what is driven underground both on an individual level and community level comes out as destructive conflict.  We repress what we believe to be our demons and because in systems things are rarely either just good or bad, they mesh into one another, when we remove the demons we remove the angels as well.

Angels and demons by Escher.

What if sometimes we let our imagination just be without the rush into converting our ideas into practical activities or objects?  I believe we would then be able to express ourselves and our world much more creatively and in countless constructive ways.  Human imagination can create wonderful realities as well as horrific ones and they are all stemming from the same place – human mind.  To me, our demons must be allowed to be expressed together with our angels, that is, our fears together with our hopes, because this is where our full potential lies, in the chaotic, non-linear, disorganised and ambiguous.

I am thinking of the words of the American psychologist James Hillman who asked what if instead of bringing ourselves into line so we can function and cope within the system, we would bring the system into line with the symptoms of our imagination.

Our world today is what previous generations had imagined with their demons and angels and I believe that we could live in a much less repressive world if we allow some of our imagination to stay unconverted just for the sheer joy of imagining.