The World is Shaking

Welcome to my fourth newsletter.

In just the last few days I have heard the following:

-??A US CEO client: “I don’t see where we are going as a family, I don’t see where we are going as an organisation and I don’t see where are going as a country”

-??A colleague: “In the past I have been concerned about what the future will be like for my children. Now I am concerned about what will happen in the next two weeks”

In the second case, as we paused to allow the reality of his words to sink in, we noticed we both teared up.

I began a recent talk about my new book at the Oxfordshire Literary Festival in the UK with the words “the world is shaking”. This is the state of things, and I want to enquire into what this asks of us, and how we best navigate such a challenging time.

Here in rural Puglia, South Italy, where my wife and I partially reside, I find that each day I am filled with two very contrasting inner streams of awareness and emotion.?

On the one hand I am touched more and more by the timeless beauty and tradition of the landscapes here – the incredible olive groves and vineyards, so carefully tended as they have been for generations, and as they will surely be for many more. There is a rare and precious sense that modernity has of course arrived, yet not fundamentally changed the way of life here. It is a big part of what draws us to be here.

If this is what I hold in my left hand, then in my right hand I hold the world situation, principally but not only the war in Ukraine. This of course includes the ever more devastating horrors and suffering that unfold there, yet extends to a larger sense of the global order ‘shaking’, of foundational structures in turmoil, of increasingly fragile instabilities.

It is not that many of the structures were not already in major dysfunction, rather that the containers that to a degree masked this can no longer do so. I hear many people articulating a version of “I feel a bit strange”. Of course. We seem to be heading, faster than we might have imagined, into exactly the ‘dark’ territories and times that so many of the ancient wisdom traditions foresaw, often with startling accuracy.?

This is the journey of humanity. This is the time where we can, or perhaps must, finally face the fact that, for all our extraordinary technological development, we have become more profoundly estranged than ever - from ourselves, from each other, from Nature and from what Einstein loved to call the ultimate Mystery of life. The fissures are everywhere, the cracks in the walls of the house ever less concealed.

Cracks can be there for a long time, but the house can come down very quickly indeed.?

What does this ask of us?

My best response is as follows:

• To strengthen in every way we can the practices that keep us in contact with if not rooted in what I have in a previous newsletter called the ‘two definitions of Presence’?

To deepen our capacity to rest in the Unchangeable, while at the same time engaging fully with the chaos of the fast-changing.

• To contemplate and to lean with less and less compromise into our sense of purpose and service. To engage two questions that I invite all the leaders with whom I work to digest and ‘walk with’:

- What is the work that is mine to do?

- What is it that being asked of me now?

The second question in particular invites us to listen beyond our ego sense of what ‘I’ want to do, and to step into a different stream, one of ‘calling’.?

In one of his last and greatest songs, “You Want It Darker”, Leonard Cohen sang the chorus “Hineni, Hineni, I’m ready my Lord”.

‘Hineni’ is possibly one of the most important words in the Old Testament, uttered by Abraham in Genesis 22.1.

• To keep ‘turning towards’ the world feelingly, as much as is possible, fully respecting our different capacities for doing so, even as they may change day to day.

- To do so wherever possible with at least one other person. Being ‘more than one’ creates a much more robust container to face and ‘hold’ the instabilities. My experience of doing so is that a very deep groundedness often arises in the core of the physical body, moving in a central axis, both upwards and downwards.

There is no knowing what outcomes will unfold. We do however have considerable choice about how we navigate, individually and together, and therefore how we contribute - each of us doing ‘the work that is ours to do’, each of us doing ‘that which is being asked of us.’

Building together the field of ‘Hineni’.