Time to Think

Covid19, with its reminders of mortality, and the opportunities created to get to know ourselves better during lockdown, has given us TIME TO THINK – even if only in FRAGMENTS. For example: I am more deliberately taking up a life of being an elder, where it is possible to practice wise reflection and face the challenge of our mortality, our impermanence in this world. There is a letting go of personal ambition. Of economic striving. Of sexual competition and possession. There is a forgiving acceptance of declining capacities, of physical and mental frailty and vulnerability. There is an encouragement of the virtues of the young. We are at the mercy of the mob, which can never be safe. We have to be stoical in the face of the possibility of violent rage. Attempts by the elderly to hold onto power, as heads of state or corporate magnates are inevitably doomed to failure, and are obstacles to our capacity to adapt to the changing priorities the human project. A wrinkly and emotionally incontinent oligarchy does not prove the leadership that we need in this world. Our role is to be advisers and supporters of an emerging leadership. The Queen and the Dalai Lama are example of wise elders, privileged but not exercising power. The executive power of their historical roles has been stripped away. A gerontology of political leaders, which we have seen in African states, and in the superpowers of the USA and China, does not bode well. Everywhere I look, stress is very high. Different circumstances for each person, and different reactions. Misunderstanding and furious argument. I have had discussions online break up in out of control ways – people who are usually wise and helpful. We get nervous of conversations of any kind. I am struggling with the increasing realisation of the mess we are in and wanting to make a useful response. In no way privileging my position – only the urgency of my enquiry. So I appreciate the different discourses I find I am in, which are increasingly irritable and adversarial, as we have difficulty in finding any dry land of certainty and flounder about instead. My current preoccupation has been with the way that those I work with, those I talk with, and myself – when I talk to myself – seem to be able to hold two incompatible positions at the same time – so that we complain bitterly about the lack of direction from government, from advisers, from senior management in our organisations – those who ‘should know’ – and at the same time complain about such direction that we are given and lay claim instead to personal authority, believing whatever we choose to believe. Sometimes I can hear both in the same sentence. I hear it in my consultations with front line teams in the NHS. I want to keep thinking – being curious while recognising the tendency to rant. I am interested in the Buddhist teaching on wise speech, which are strikingly austere – only speak, if it is true, useful, unlikely to cause harm. The alternative of noble silence can seem the easier option. How to understand silence? Bion felt justified in interpreting the words of one or two members what the group thinks – if these words have not been challenged by other. In a zoom meeting there is an increasingly likelihood that objections remain silent and are not seen. I am influenced by what David Bohm had to say on dialogue. ‘In a dialogue, nobody is trying to win. Everybody wins if anyone wins. … There is no attempt to gain points, or to make your particular view prevail. Rather, when a mistake is discovered on the part of anybody, everybody gains. It’s a situation called win-win, in which we are not playing a game against each other but with each other. In a dialogue, everybody wins.’ Imaginative empathy is important for our capacity for dialogue. We have to listen to the other to imagine how reality looks to the other, different from the reality we are familiar with. The alternative is that we outshout each other from defended positions of certainty. We live in gated communities of the mind. There are processes of voluntary segregation. It is dangerous to wander from post code to post code in exploration of a diverse landscape. ‘The Earth just sent us to our rooms to think about what we’ve done.’ (Who said that?)