Locked down in Andalusia

Two weeks ago in Andalusia the queues were lengthening down the streets as people followed the instructions to stay 2 metres away from each other, while loudly proclaiming how mad it all was. Police at shops were limiting people to batches of seven. The bars closed, terrible for a culture that lives in the street. The skies grew silent; the planes stopped passing to and fro carrying hen parties, stag parties, golf parties, or just parties. It used to be a habit to look up at the distant vapour trails going in and out of Malaga, followed by the faint soft rumble of jet engines. Overnight the vapour trails and rumbles ceased. Rapidly the process of isolation moved forward. For Andalusians isolation offers purgatory of an Andalusian kind: we need noise, to call out and shout and make jokes and tell sillinesses, to hear the children shrieking as they play in the street, or race up and down the slides in the playground. Interaction happens in public, with song and conversation. Only recently there was a party of women who spent much of their dinner in the local mendero singing traditional coplas across the table, and doing that syncopated clapping that they are born with.

             Well, things have changed. There are a couple of people in the pueblo with ‘symptoms’. The weather has been cold, grey, wet, and windy. There’s a saying here that goes en abril, aguas mil, which means, roughly, “April in Spain, loadsa rain.” The streets are empty and silent save for single numbers of citizens proceeding slowly along with masked faces. The doors of the bars are barriered with rollers. The schools are shut, the shops that are shut, the market has ceased: you might as well be in a Swedish winter.

I am putting all my work online. I’m sure this plague is showing us the way we will need to live, work, and be.

                         During this year we have rescued the garden, which had become more or less abandoned by the team who were supposed to be caring for it.

Its replacement is an angelic and expert fellow called Manolo, who is a true man of the soil who can make dry stone walls, create huertos (vegetable plantings), clip young olive trees into topiary, and manage plants and trees with a wisdom and knowledge that has resulted in a magical development. He’s even shown us how to wash jacaranda leaves. He comes every Friday, a day that Viola the Scottie anticipates all week so that she can be licensed to burrow and dig and explore alongside this supreme horticulturalist. Manolo is our teacher as well as our helper. His knowledge of Andaluz plants is encyclopaedic, and he has a fount of lore and folk rhymes about when you should plant habas, broad beans (when the moon is waxing), or what the local name for phlomis is (matagallos, or cock killer, the feathered kind, that is). He has a natural intelligence, and we always finish our Friday mornings with a can or two of cold Victoria beer drunk around a little round table on the terrace that we have planted with bignonia, vines, bougainvillea, and roses. In that hour or so we can recover our strength and listen to Manolo’s stream of information about plants and soil.

            Spain is badly afflicted by the virus. We long for the return of normality. Normality here is connected to being inspired by nature, which is connected to inspiring others. It’s because the light in Andalusia is so strong that it forces you notice nature. In the softness of an afternoon in Northern Europe things merge. In Andalusia the light makes each bit of nature shout at you like a gypsy singer, or clap for your attention. You are forced to attend to details: the silver glare of olive leaves, the pure white blaze of a wall, the steely blue of the sky. When I’m at work I sometimes look up and see the jasmine curling itself around the iron bars of the window. Its pink-white flowers and tendrils seem to grow as I watch them, picked out against that steely brilliant sky, to push everything else away. This Andaluz light forces me, whereas in England it would invite me. It makes me ask what it is, how I feel about it, why it has meaning for me. It’s as though that jasmine plant is winding its way inside me and telling me to look, to feel, to care. I am unable to resist ‘breathing it in’. On a dull day in Surrey, I’m sure I’d have to work at it a bit harder.

I think this is key to what people often think of as Andalusia’s ‘hypnotic effect.’ I think it’s what people here have hope in, even as they battle through grey days of lockdown. The rain is good, it makes things grow. But the light, ah, that’s different. The light inspires us. It’s the light of the universe itself, the light of Love.

I believe that this inspiration is on the other side of the coronavirus; and that it helps us to prioritise effectively if we let it. It means prioritising life, our experience of life, over the tasks and goals and results and performance numbers that most of us spend our lives looking at.

AI will give us tools that will free us from the incremental tasks that close down our hearts and souls. There’s a new world awaiting us, where we can work to be inspired by.

How do we do that? Try this: look out of the window and, without any plan at all, ask these three questions:

1.      What do I see?

2.     How do I feel about it?

3.     Why do I care about it?

1. will raise your awareness of your own experience.

2. will help you be grateful for your experience.

3. will help you to value your experience.

This is incremental. The more you ask the 3 questions, the more aware, grateful, and value- driven your daily live will be.

How does this help my leadership?

Well, our economic model isn’t working. Too many of us have been hanging on by our fingernails to what was normal but isn’t any more – me included. Leaders are going to have to learn to ask real questions, and tell real stories. And the story you tell ourselves about the simple details of our life and what makes us grateful and caring is a very good place to start, because each question is a function of a key aspect of who we are as human beings.

What do I see? Is a function of my Mind, the tool of Creativity that makes my story.

How do I feel? Is a function of my Heart, the tool of Empathy that gives my story emotion.

Why do I care? Is a function of my Soul, the tool of Authenticity that gives my story value.

Businesses will soon become coalitions, and AI will be their enabler, so leaders must do what AI cannot do: create the stories that will help us cross the boundaries that might separate the coalitions - and inspire followership.

I believe we must start with ourselves. I believe that we will do best if we learn to be leaders who lead from within their own sources of inspiration so as to inspire others. During these dog days of confinement, we can look up and be inspired, so as to thrive as effective leaders in an economy that works for all.

And the setting sun illuminates the orange and lemon trees, and makes them glisten. Geraniums and plumbagos grow still, and seem to delight in offering up their contrasting blues and reds, and you wonder why everyone doesn't live in Andalusia, even just for a little while.

And then the night falls, and the moon shines her kindly light over the landscape, and you can sit in a chair on the western mirador with your loving little Scottie on your knee and, at this time of year, watch the twinkling lights of the village on the hilltop and listen to the riot of a summer party going on in the valley below, with shouts and shrieks and latin rythms, making the darkness ring with alegría.

These are some of the experiences I see, feel and care for. What are yours?