It’s hard to see the sea we are swimming in.
The wind blows through the leaves on the tree.
The sunlight arcs through the clouds.
The world turns.
And we’re still here.
It’s always so hard to know, when slowing down, if we are seeing ourselves as part of a bigger pattern, or if our brain is simply filtering for people in similar situations to us.
That’s what’s called the Reticular Activating System, showing us other learning drivers when we’re learning to drive, other pregnant women and pushchairs when we’re expecting, other people in situations full of change when we’re in situations full of change.
Knowing how to treat our own role in something is always difficult. Talking to a group of people in a big organisation about managing their choices so they can manage their time, I’m always primed for someone to say ‘Well, it’s easy for you, you work for yourself.’
In my mind, I know that that is true. It is easier for me to manage my choices, because all I have to do is work through my own challenges to that, not my own AND my organisation’s.
And I know that things are discovered by people at the edges. Perhaps, instead, I have learned just how true it is that choice management is more important than ‘time management’ because I have more choice. What if people who have really played at the edges and extreme have something to bring to others?
It’s hard, too, to see the sea we are swimming in. Until we do one of two things: get out of the sea, or slow down to reflect enough to notice that we’re seeing through water.
And yet so often, looking back, we will see that sea in a different way to how we experienced it, with currents and tides at play, moving us in ways we couldn’t see in the moment.
One of my coaches once said something like: I have never had a client who lost their job who wasn’t on some level pleased it had happened.
I doubt they saw things that way as the job was lost.
The currents flow, the winds blow.
We are part of patterns and we create them.
We don’t see clearly, but we do see.
That’s the work of understanding, really - of ourselves and others.
We all see an approximated version of reality. As I wrote before, you only have to slow down for a minute to consider that some animals see things we can’t see and some hear things we can’t hear to remember that we don’t see ‘reality’.
The developmental journey is a journey of ever-increasing perspective. Of shifting ourselves and our worldview so that we can grasp things 1% more clearly this time, or grasp things clearly 1% more quickly.
That can be the difference.
The difference between being a more skilful and wise version of ourselves, and being a less skilful and wise version, in moments that matter.
I don’t know if it’s possible to transcend the deep patterns in my behaviour, but I know it’s possible to respond to them more skilfully.
My friend Mike Toller told me that we now know that much of our way of being is hardwired in the earliest years of our childhood. That, in the metaphor, is the hardware. But the software we run can absolutely be updated.
We can run Firefox or Chrome. Windows 95 or Windows 10.
And that can be the difference.
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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.
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