Walking Curious in the Dark

Dear Ones,

How are you?

Do you still enjoy each morning, new pops of color, golden yellows, auburn, and burnt oranges? Or do you find yourself walking barefoot on glossy leaves, a bit lost in front of the ambivalence and reconciliation of the autumn season? For those who want to keep things the way they are accustomed, autumn is a tricky season. Nothing stands still, not us or the world we live in.

If you have missed the reminder that everything beautiful is perishable, you may not have missed the multiple celebrations around the world. From the Hindu Diwali to the Mexican Día de Muertos, the American Halloween to All Saints and All Souls days, observed on Nov. 1 and 2 by the Catholic Church in Europe and around the world, these gatherings, gently and sometimes with humor, remind us of the dissolution that awaits us all and the necessary acceptance of the impermanence of our improbable and finite lives.?This awareness that human existence is both joy and woe is a prerequisite to accepting responsibility for the effect of one’s intentions.

For humor and heartfelt, here is the Doritos Day of the Dead commercial titled “Nunca Es Tarde Para Ser Quien Eres,” or “It’s Never Late to Be Who You Are.”

Some celebrations involve trips to the graveyard, flowers, and candles to honor the dearly departed, but they all have in common this polarity between the opposite, the dark and the light, the pain and the joy, the beginning and the end. And our ability to hold them.

Still. As much as I like the ritual of lighting candles to drive away inauspiciousness and praying for our loved ones here or elsewhere, I don’t like our fear of the dark. Of our reluctance to accept the darkness, our constant need to illuminate it into nonexistence; we miss the opportunity to learn from it.

Owning Our Darkness

“What we cannot face will catch us from behind. When we gain the true strength to acknowledge our imperfect moral condition, we are no longer possessed by demons.” - Scott Peck

“Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty,” wrote the Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki. Darkness belongs to that class of blessings increasingly endangered in modern life yet vitally necessary to the human spirit.?The darkness that we should most fear is not one of the moonless nights but the darkness born from our ignorance.

An ignorance that educates us to be other than we are and tries to deny our whole and unique nature; that makes us think that, in order to be safe, we should be slaves of what people think, what people do, to adapt, not to stand out in any way, to do exactly what the opinions, rules, regulations, and habits of the environment demand as being “right.”

This ignorance pushes us into all sorts of excess, acting without concern for others, seeking the high side of life at any cost through instant gratification or hedonistic activity such as drugs, porn, and alcohol abuse. It indulges our materialistic hedonism (expressed in conspicuous consumption, exploitative advertising, waste, and pollution) and our desire to control our innately uncontrollable intimate lives (expressed in widespread narcissism, personal exploitation, manipulation of others, and abuse of women and children).

It’s an ignorance that fuels an uncontrolled power drive for knowledge and domination of nature, an unreasonable maximization of business growth and progress, and a fast-paced, dehumanized workplace (from the apathy of an alienated workforce, the unplanned obsolescence produced by automation to the hubris of success).

Such ignorance leads to individual and collective excess. And a call for radical responsibility must be heard here.

A Call for Radical Responsibility

“Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to human existence.” - William Blake.

Instead of blaming the ignorance of others, can we start with our own? Let’s investigate our own ignorance, biases, misconceptions, manipulations, and lies. And follow the invitation of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: The great epochs of our lives are at the points when we gain the courage to rebaptize our badness as the best in us.

It is not as if we have a choice, anyway. The world is waiting for a new age of constructive cooperation, an era when we finally start using the energy of enemy-making for problem-solving.

Whatever has been percolating now boils to the surface. We have been forced to it, feet through the fire, initiate. The news gets worse and worse. Pandemics, wars, social rages, climate change, our world, and our words are more heated. This is it. We see all of it, the constricting effects of our denial and that of the ones around us, the doubt in the values we live by; and we watch our illusions about ourselves and the world shatter. The status quo cannot be sustained. It feels, in moments like this, as if we’ve reached a fever pitch.?Be mindful that the potential for anger is strong. But so is the potential for brilliance and daring and bravery, doing it differently.

Our youngest generations urge us to move, to break through or out. How do we stabilize even as we push forth into new territory? Where is our role as leaders? Ideas, perceptions, actions. Blazing a new path. Things don’t change until we change. We may even surprise ourselves — or be surprised. Life has a way of seeping in; it’s all so much more interesting than artifice, brittle orchestrations of desire. Control is for the uninitiated.

The time of seeing a good leader with a kind of armor is over; we don’t want more invulnerability. What is needed is real leadership based on self-knowledge, how we are made, but also how the world is made and how other human beings are made.

Walking Curious in the Dark

“Not only do you have to face your fear; YOU must also face the mother of your fear.” - David Whyte.

Can we learn to walk curious in the dark??The “central defect of evil,” says American psychiatrist Scott Peck, “is not the sin but the refusal to acknowledge it.”

Whether we like it or not, we are constantly challenged to drop below our own narrative and conditioning in order to understand and feel the whole of life that is always beyond our own particular map. Otherwise, we make everything conform to our biased view of life, and we remain trapped in our web of assumptions and conclusions, and never grow.

The work is there in our darkness, our potential for destructiveness, in the genuine acceptance of who we are.

Let’s accept that we all had/have some experience of human destructiveness. Other persons, including those closest to us, have in some ways damaged our self-esteem, hindered our development, and kept us from seeking and finding what we wanted most.

Likewise, we ourselves have, at times, caused great hurt to others, including our loved ones. Indeed, myriad causes might drive even the best-intentioned of people to do harm — our blind spots, our unexamined beliefs, our own tender places and past traumas, our despair.

We mature when we recognize and take responsibility for our own destructive capabilities.

I like how Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, in her book on Repentance And Repair, considers the necessity of letting go of our attachment to a particular self-image as a person who means well and therefore could not possibly have caused harm:

“Addressing harm is possible only when we bravely face the gap between the story we tell about ourselves — the one in which we’re the hero, fighting the good fight, doing our best, behaving responsibly and appropriately in every context — and the reality of our actions. We need to summon the courage to cross the bridge over that cognitively dissonant gulf and face who we are, who we have been — even if it threatens our story of ourselves. It’s the only way we can even begin to undertake any possible repair of the harm we’ve done and become the kind of person who might do better next time. (And that, in my opinion, is what’s truly heroic.) (...) This work is challenging enough when facing the smaller failings in our lives — how much more difficult is it when our closest relationships or our professional reputation is at stake, or even the possibility of facing significant consequences? And yet this is the brave work we have to do. All of us. We are each, in a thousand different ways, both harm doer and victim.“

In this unapologetic world, when incivilities are becoming the norm even in the workplace, it might be so easy to remove ourselves from our duty to make excuses and do the repair work necessary to settle the hurtful situation.

May we remember that whether intentionally or unintentionally, when we hurt, It is by our choice to repent and repair, that we mature. It can help us not only to repair what we have broken to the fullest extent possible but to grow in the process.

Dropping Beneath the Surface

“One thing that comes out in myths is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.” - Joseph Campbell

What would it be like if we stopped blaming our “enemies” (colleagues, managers, etc.) for the problems we have been handed? What would it be like if we stopped blaming our families and our partners for the personal problems with which we are destined to wrestle, but ultimately we are the ones in whom they have made a home? We are the ones who must say thus far and no farther and then go down and confront them ourselves.

Do you see why we do not want to know what is down there? And why we certainly do not want to know that this obscuring darkness is actually of our own making?

We all have these very moments at a crossroads when we should take an uncomfortable new direction, but, uncertain of the outcome, we find ourselves wrestling with our demons of potential failure, shame, and guilt. And we stay there, frozen in our addiction to perfection.

It takes more than courage to recognize our fears and watch our darker side in the mirror. I like how the poet David Whyte explains that “The harder point is that the fears are almost always irrational. You cannot reason them out of existence. If you could, they would have gone long ago.”

Maturity is needed to admit that there is something uncomfortable and potentially scary beneath our surface. To accept our own ignorance, unconsciousness, irrationality, and the sober fact that we each bring it with us into our relationships and our workplace and make far-reaching decisions based on ghostlike in-securities.

And It damages more than we think in our lives, our workplaces, and the people around us. Unresolved parent-child relationships that play out into rigid company hierarchies, paternal management systems, and dependent employees; unresolved emotional demands individuals may have of fellow workers but will never admit to themselves; the refusal to come to terms with an abused childhood; the subsequent longing for self-protection and the wielding of organizational power and control at any cost to gain that protection.

In his book?The Heart Aroused , David Whyte explains, inspired by the myth of the hero Beowulf, that if ordinary courage and wisdom are indispensable, they are not enough to take us beneath the surface. We must possess something else in order to go into our darkness alone: vulnerability and self-compassion.?The vulnerability rooted in the deep physical shame that we are not enough and will never be enough, can never measure up, and our coming to terms with that vulnerability.

What would it be if we could defuse the negative emotions that erupt unexpectedly in our daily lives; feel freer of the guilt and shame associated with our negative feelings and actions; recognize the projections that color our opinion of others; heal our relationships through more honest self-examination and direct communication, and use our courage to own our disowned self.

Much as we would like to deny it, we are imperfect. But isn’t it in what we don’t accept about ourselves — our aggression and shame, our guilt and pain — that we discover our humanity?

Addiction to Perfection

“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.” - Thomas Paine.

In order to shift into a much-needed new paradigm, we are invited to confront our insecurities. What it means to be fully human. From our efforts to preserve our integrity and self-worth in the face of shame-induced cultural forces, we can remember our own sense of destiny.

Unfortunately, no other era has so totally divorced outer reality from inner reality.?Never before have we been so cut off from the wisdom of nature and the wisdom of our own instincts. Excesses, wrongdoings, violence, and addictions are the byproducts of our disconnected selves.

But how to not act otherwise in the face of our addiction to perfection championed by a hustle culture and tones of shallow and nauseous self-help / positive-thinking books?

And here we are, battling repeatedly with a black crow sitting on our left shoulder and its melopée: ”It isn’t good enough. You are not good enough. You haven’t tried hard enough.”

How many of us, in addition to devaluing our shadow characteristics, tend to view our physical and emotional problems as useless? We dislike what is wrong with us, be it a minor headache, upset stomach, severe cancer, or depression. We see little value in our illnesses. They get in our way to our “perfect success story,” and we try to eliminate them. Without realizing that by doing so, we reject the very essence of life.

I like how American songwriter and singer Taylor Swift talked about her last song and hit, “Anti-Hero” and her struggle with the addiction to perfection.?“I don’t think I’ve delved this far into my insecurities in this detail before. I struggle a lot with the idea that my life has become unmanageably sized, and, not to sound too dark, I struggle with the idea of not feeling like a person. […] This song really is a real guided tour throughout all of the things I tend to hate about myself. We all hate things about ourselves. It’s all of those aspects of the things we dislike and like about ourselves that we have to come to terms with if we’re going to be this person. So, yeah, I like ‘Anti-Hero’ a lot because I think it’s really honest.”

Men and women are addicted in one way or another because our culture emphasizes specialization, ambition, and perfection. Driven to do our best at school, on the job, and in our relationships in every corner of our lives, we try to make ourselves into works of art, stuck into rigid frameworks we have created for ourselves.

Working so hard to create our own perfection, we forget we are human beings. And we miss most of our joy in living, our faith in being, and our trust in life as it is.

In our obsessive, goal-oriented life geared toward doing things efficiently, we cannot surrender to allowing life to happen. We dare not allow ourselves to react spontaneously to the unexpected. We don’t feel the living pulse of our hearts anymore. Can’t we see that the pain we impose on ourselves is unbearable?

Can we let go of perfection, give up our ego plan and start living our lives with humility, curiosity and acceptance? Can we find enough love to extend to our broken and ruined parts, the disgusting and perverse? How much charity and compassion do we have for our own weakness and sickness? How far can we build an inner society on the principle of love, allowing a place for everyone?

Again the goal is not to cure the ego into perfection. But to get into conversations with our shadowy, unpleasant figures and discover an ability to love even the least of these traits.

If we can embrace the shift consciously and creatively rather than negatively, we will see new life stirring within us. Restoration comes from there, where feelings, intelligence, imagination, and humility dance with the dark. The reunion happens. The ego surrenders to the soul.

Unknown Does Not Mean Nothing

It might mean shedding. There might be little deaths. From loss, we reap change. Some old conditionings, old patterns, old ways to define ourselves, old traditions have to die if we want to have any progress in the world. It is humbling to go through anguish and pain and come to another side so glad to live anew. And there is empowerment, too, the willingness to stand in oneself, whatever the cost, to get right with ourselves.

My invitation is here: In order to become a whole human being and leader, to find new solutions to our uncertain world, we need to drop beneath the surface of our daily existence. With vulnerability and humility, surrender to our internal terrain, and discover its darker parts. By doing so, we can discipline ourselves to make the most of our gifts, physical, intellectual, and spiritual, attempting to bring them in harmony.?Finally, living in the now, we come to recognize our own individuality, and, paradoxically, the stronger we become, the less rigid and more flexible we become.?With growth, we experience the excitement of new modes of behavior and the continual unfolding of new energies. Creative, self-expression, play, and love, we feel rich and potent, full of possibility. Always on the side of life.

The Symmetry of Willingness

“Earth is one country, and all of us are its citizens.“ - Marion Woodman

As our time together is coming to an end, I would like to leave you with a reminder. If this newsletter is an invitation to draw us inward, to the depths of our being, the ultimate goal is to come back with an understanding, a renewed appetite for the creation of nurturing relationships, and to treat others as alive and independent human beings. It is also vital for anyone who is growing up / maturing to see who they are through others who care for them.

Unfortunately, sometimes we get caught in our personal and professional life in deadly relationships where the asymmetry of willingness prevails — one person willing (to forgive, to undefensively admit error, to do the work, to hold gentle space for imperfection) and the other unwilling.

And, as the fear of rejection never ends, nor the pain it causes, we choose pride in order not to let it happen again. Pride is the antipode of vulnerability and, therefore, our great enemy of meaningful connection; we often find ourselves too proud to ask openly for what we need. Instead, we start coping with the ongoing threat of rejection by growing armored and judgemental, avoidant, or anxious, without realizing that our coping strategies are ultimately more likely to damage any relationship than to protect them, to effect rejection rather than to ward it off.

How about reminding ourselves that we all need reassurance? And there is nothing wrong with admitting our tender need. The only real solution to genuine relationships is greater courage, candor and vulnerability.

Let’s create a secure space for our teams and our partners to feel unembarrassed and legitimate about asking for confirmation. And, of course, apply our own medicine to ourselves.

As always, I thank you for taking the time to do this reading with me. I am so grateful to journey alongside you. Please feel free to drop me a line at [email protected] with ideas, suggestions, or comments.

Your presence is my purpose.

Be safe and be watched over until we meet again in December.

With care,

Laurence

Laurence Duarte is the founder of the boutique management consulting firm?Strat and Shield Co ?specialized in strategy and risk management. She is a regular contributor to?Harvard Business Review France , writing about uniting profit and purpose to help businesses scale successfully and sustainably, with heart.