Perhaps easy isn’t the point

I don’t know if I can do this anymore. 

This past year for me has been something of a rollercoaster of emotions and eye-openings. If you’ve been receiving our letters to friends, you’ll know about the miscarriage my wife and I experienced last year. If we’ve chatted any time in the last six months, you may have heard about my debilitating shoulder injury, caused by, of all things, stretching on the couch. 

In these times of shrinking funding and austerity 3.0, we’re having to make redundancies at CIA. Our dear friend and comrade, Lara, who joined us a year and a half ago and who has been the driving force behind making these letters a reality, will be leaving at the end of August because we can’t afford to keep them. This is a source of such great sadness to all of us. 

Going on behind and inside all of this for me has been a continual unpicking and deprogramming of many of the ‘efficient’ ways of working and false certainties I’ve developed growing up in late-stage capitalism. I’ve always been able to work very fast, juggling multiple responsibilities with apparent ease. It’s only been in the last year that I’ve come to see that this has always come at the cost of not listening to the signals that my body and my emotions were urgently sending me. I’ve been addicted to ‘high-achievement’, addicted to that self-image of being someone who gets shit done. 

Next week, I’m doing something that would never have entered my consciousness as a possibility last year. I’m going on retreat to a Buddhist centre in Scotland, spending a week immersed in a programme of ‘active hope for humanity.’ We’ll begin each day with Qi Gong by the loch then meditation in the shrine room. 

When we started Collective Impact Agency six years ago, we believed that ‘anti-leadership training’ and ‘alliance-building’ were the things we had to offer that would shift systems. We’ve given up those beliefs, and our practice has evolved massively to now focus on inner work for outer change, learning differently, power and relational practices. But for me, something else has shifted greatly too. I’ve been very influenced by Meg Wheatley’s book So Far From Home, in which Meg writes that we have to give up our belief that we can save the world – even that small bit of the world close to us. 

I won’t try to repeat Wheatley’s case here, but I highly recommend the book. From the pain I felt through our miscarriage, an experience that caused me to feel constant anxiety the like of which I’d never felt before; from the pain of my shoulder injury, triggered by stretching but in reality caused by too much stressful hunching over a computer screen, and causing such a loss of strength that I could no longer pick up or carry my four-year-old daughter, there emerged something new and profound for me. I started to see and feel the world in new ways. I felt weaker than perhaps I’d ever felt before. I was often close to tears, moved easily by many, many things. I felt unable to be there for others in the ways I’d taken pride before, because I was so full up of my own overwhelming emotions. I started to see things about myself in ways I’d never noticed or admitted to myself – my entitlement, my assumptions, my cultural conditioning. And when it came to the so-called ‘wicked problems’ I’d already been involved in tackling for years, I started to see these things possessing an overwhelming depth and mutual entanglement that had previously eluded me. The various ‘interventions’ or ‘reforms’ I’d been involved in creating now looked to me to be hopelessly naïve and superficial. 

What Meg Wheatley says in So Far From Home, and what Joanna Macy says in Active Hope – the focus of next week’s retreat – is that we have to give up the belief of results, but without falling into despair and nihilism through doing so. They both say, in different ways, that our ‘interventions’ will never fix the problems they intend to, and they may often even make them worse. But for both, they see a third alternative, separate to the belief of results and the despair of hopelessness. And that is the belief in the intrinsic value of our actions, whether or not they yield the results we wish they would. 

This is where I find myself right now – trying to give up the cherished belief that I can save the world (something which has been culturally drilled into me since childhood), seeing clearly for the first time that the interventions I’ve painstakingly built over years will never have the results I wish they would, struggling with a consequential sense of despondency, brought on by a heightened emotional sensitivity that has come from allowing myself to feel in ways I previously denied myself, actively trying to transition to a different way of being – holding the intrinsic value of the work without coupling this to the belief that the work will change the world. It’s a lot. 

I am so grateful to the various friends, allies, and confidantes who continue to hold space for me to articulate, explore, process, and share all this. Truth be told, I feel quite lost. I guess that’s predictable when giving up false certainties, but it doesn’t make it any easier. Then again, I do feel that feeling lost is a fairly appropriate response to this period, a period when it feels so many of our cultural certainties are starting to collapse.  

I am, simply, forever grateful not to be walking this path alone.  

If you find yourself on a similar path and want to reach out for a chat, please do. My inbox is always open.