Softness

‘The air is all softness…’

“You’re awfully hard on yourself…”

…and our call ended.

There was no opportunity to ask, “What do you mean?” and so my colleague’s words have stayed with me. Sometimes the most powerful interventions are best left hanging.

In my workaday life, I am easily categorised as someone who can provide answers to the questions of ‘change’ or ‘transformation.’ Clients assume that I will help them do things differently but they are better at that work than I could ever be.

If I’m to intervene well, with integrity, I need to find a way to talk about change and transformation not in what we do but in the way we think. It’s the kind of conversation that can feel ethereal, too far away from the reality of production and the drama of endless busyness.

Quantum scientist and philosopher David Bohm said, “Almost everything around us has been determined by thought - all buildings factories, farms, roads, schools, nations, science, technology, religion - whatever you care to mention.” Yet when the structures we have constructed become problematic; polluting, dangerous, divisive, unstable, we believe we can solve our problems from within the thinking that created them. Bohm goes on, “The point is: thought produces results, but thought says it didn’t do it and that is a problem…. What I’m trying to say is that thought is the problem.”

As I reflect on the process of how my own thinking seems to emerge, I realise that as I observe and take in my surroundings, there is a moment of softness in my arising thoughts. There is a pre-cognitive moment before experience is interpreted and defined; before I find a label or category. Before I decide…

And then, in the moment that I announce to myself, ‘Ah, I recognise this now. I’ve seen it before’ my action becomes clear.

Inevitable, perhaps?

So, if I’m to effect change or transformation in any of the difficult ecological, ethical and social issues we face, I need to resist the rush to busyness, striving, action and results. There is a place for that but its not my work.

I need to hold open the moments of softness where the fragile light of creativity and difference can arise.

And when I’m hard on myself, I’m hard on my relationships, my clients, and hard on the world.

I’m not sure we need people like that.

Notes:

For some years, David Bohm has been my ‘go to’ thinker about thinking. His work ‘On Dialogue’ is an accessible introduction to his otherwise inevitably deep, profound thinking about the nature of thought itself.

Peter Garrett’s book, A New Kind Of Dialogue, is a comprehensive reflection and synthesis of a life spent working dialogically with change and transformation. The book describes the structures of intervention into the systems of meaning that underpin our institutions and organisations.

Finally, as I wrote this blog, I was struck by a quote by Marc Quinn: “I still think science is looking for answers and art is looking for questions.” Quinn’s work constantly confronts us with the question of who we are are as people in our late modern epoch.