The Veneer Between the World and Your Spirit is Getting Thinner

The veneer between the world and your spirit is getting thinner.

That’s what you can feel.

It started with life. A vague stability that - although you knew was partly for show - was also real.

A stable instability.

Then things changed.

Conversations became less real, less grounded, less human.

Something was happening with the way we spoke to each other.

Relationships broke and bent. Or were abandoned, because they didn’t feel the same.

Because something happened on Facebook.

The stability of a complex system is almost entirely about the relationships in the system.

And many of them were broken, bent or abandoned.

And just - just - as it felt like things might be about to return to a stable instability, they didn’t.

Instead you were told to live in fear for two years.

You had torn away from you the few relationships you had left: from the great love far away to the small love in the coffee shop and the street and the office.

At first, it was quite nice. A relief, almost. The social pressure of the stable instability; the constant energy required to steer through all the possibilities available to you.

But, the stability of a system is about the relationships in the system.

And after a while, things felt different. No longer a relief. A deadening greyness.

Then, gradually, it ended.

Things opened up. The connections were allowed again.

But by then, everything was different.

And there was no going back.

Too many systems broken, and whilst everyone knows what they need - the connection, the aliveness - no one wants the inconvenience of having to go and get it.

Without you realising it, all the things that keep a sense of aliveness in your life have been removed.

And so, slowly, the veneer between the world and your spirit is getting thinner and thinner.

But not just you.

Me, too. And him, and her.

And so the events pile up, pulled by the gravitational forces of the universe, creating change in our culture, on our planet, in our souls.

Until your life sounds like a soap opera, with too many events of significance in too short a time to be realistic.

Until - after I’ve said that to you - I realise mine sounds like a soap opera, too.

And every time I start to blame someone else for not being there for me when things are hard, I find out their life is on the brink of breaking, too.

And none of us has enough veneer between the world and our spirits to handle it.

That’s what comes when we tear up relationships because of social media, live in fear for two years and separate everyone from everyone.

You can’t handle the little things any more.

Let alone the big ones.

There is no going back.

There is only going forward.

Only the hope that - perhaps - we are all, together, in the gap between the trapezes.

That, collectively, we can still catch the next trapeze, and swing to the platform across from us. A new way of being, together.

That we can complete the adventure.

And that, when we do, you and I are both still here to see the other side.

—

PS My best coaching work often happens with leaders dealing with the complexities of a team and ambitions to create change. You can read more about what is at the core of much of that work in my latest long-read article: Leading With Honour.

This is the latest in a series of articles written using?the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.?

Subscribe to this blog and get a FREE EBOOK containing the first 7 chapters of my book, How to Start When You’re Stuck, here.

Buy the 12-Minute Method series of books, written 12 minutes a week over three years, here.

Sign up to my mailing list to receive updates on my work every month or so: events I’m speaking at, my podcasts, and digests of 12-minute articles.