The 21st century has given rise to many new questions in our mind. While on the one hand we have to deal with the meltdown of the economy on the other hand we also have to deal with the meltdown of the earth. This probably has made this generation of humans wake up to the reality of several uncertainties in their lives and hence relook at many things our previous generations took for granted. One such element is the sense of security. With the financial crisis one has seen several workers being laid off, many have been fired and many have simply left their jobs, given the growing pressures to perform within these institutionalized and yet competitive settings fighting over scarce resources. The rat race has become a much tougher race in modern living and slowly we are trying to seek out other identities for ourselves beyond identities that work provides for us.
I have encountered many such individuals in my life who have had bright successful careers and then had to rethink the entire route they took from scratch as the presumptions of the market changed. Several of these members have at this point in their lives emerged as deep philosophical beings and it is here in these discussions that I began to wonder about ‘work’ and ‘what it actually means’. ‘Work’ or ‘jobs’ have made some people excruciatingly sad and pained, and it is interesting that while many see in a job a sense of self worth, it is not for long, till they begin to see it as a drudgery or an imposed regime on their everyday existence. It is through these discussions that I realized that beyond the conception of ‘work’ or a ‘job’ which for most takes up almost more than half their days existence is the very act of living one’s life. It is fortunate that I came across this wonderful article by Tim Malnick, ‘What is my work in the world’, which brings in some of the very questions that me and my friends have often discussed and gives some insights into how one can take a middle path and find work that springs from within. Happy Reading!
WH AT I S M Y WO R K I N T H E WO R L D ?
A paper based on a talk by Tim Malnick
Edited by Sarah Bird
source:
http://www.schumachercollege.org.uk
I want to talk about work in the context of Living and Loving in the 21st Century. How does our work help us live and love in the 21st century, and more specifically, what is the role of our work in helping us address and respond to some of the pressing social and environmental challenges of our time? And what
does Buddhist thinking and practice have to say to these tricky questions? How might Buddhists engage with their work, and how might Buddhist ideas and practices be helpful to the many people who are struggling to find a way for their work to be more satisfying and a more positive contribution to society.
I would like to do four things. First I want to say a little about the nature of work and point to the ways in which so much of our identity can be wrapped up in our work in the world. Then, based on my experience working with people across a wide range of sectors, who are trying to respond through their work to the question of how to make the world a better place, I want to suggest two main ways that we can get stuck when we try to engage with the huge challenges out there in modern industrial society.
Having identified these two main traps, I want to then suggest a middle way between these two extremes that might be the place from which a Buddhist inspired response to the challenges of work will come. And finally, I want to flesh that middle way idea out a bit, and give a few principles and practical examples, based on my experience working with people who are consciously changing the way they work.
WORK
So first work. Work is a big deal. Although there were promises a generation or two ago, when the modernist industrial myth was at its strongest, that we would by now be living in an era of leisure, with machines doing all the work, it hasn’t turned out like that. Economists David Boyle and Andrew Simms suggest that in actual fact modern Britons work harder than medieval peasants, with more working hours and less time off, citing this as one of “the many paradoxes of 20th century progress”.
A lot of our sense of self is bound up with the notion of the work we do. It seems to me that many people have their life energy residing in and around their work. I think the sickness, both physical and mental related to both working and not having work is a sign of this.
And whilst so much of our sense of self can be wrapped up in work (why is the first question we ask new acquaintances not ‘are you happy?’, or ‘what do you find beautiful in the world?’, but ‘what do you do?’), work as currently conceived also makes many people tremendously unhappy. Work is a necessity in our modern culture, and yet the experience of work for many is still quite unfulfilling. E.F Schumacher in his famous study of Good Work suggests that, “No management is unaware of its duty to avoid accidents or physical conditions which impair workers’ health. But workers’ brains, minds and souls are a different matter”. So, much of our time, our life energy and our sense of self is bound up with work, and yet work in modern life if often unfulfilling and soul destroying. And work that destroys the soul links very strongly to organisations that then damage and disrespect the wider world.
Work is important. In Buddhist terms work is a limb of the noble eightfold path – Right livelihood -something to be perfected on our journey of awakening. The question of right livelihood is much more complicated now than it would have been in the time of the Buddha. Originally, conceived relatively simply as avoiding certain professions that cause harm, today we need to explore a more Mahayanist conception. By this I mean that many people not only wish to avoid harm through their work, but are asking themselves, ‘how can my work in the world be a source of good, of benefit to others’?
Faced with alarming evidence about the growing challenges in 21st century society, and considering the role of the work we do, I find that people, broadly speaking, can form two main types of response both of which, from the Buddhist point of view, are based on confusion, and are ultimately unhelpful, or at least limited in scope.
EVERYTHING’S OK!
The first one is what I call the ‘Everything’s OK’ response. Here we hold on for dear life to the modernist, industrial myth that progress is delivering and gradually moving towards the perfect world. In our current version of this myth, growth through industrial activity will solve all our problems; technology, science and knowledge will conquer all obstructions, and there are no issues outside of our ability to solve them rationally. Work harder, increase growth, trust the power and range of technology, and everything will be fine. We get on with the rat race, climb the ladder, meet our targets, go shopping at weekends, and trust, or try to, in the grand narrative of modernist society that by so doing all will be well.
The other, slightly more complicated version of ‘everything’s OK’ is the pseudo Buddhist response, that conceptually understands that ultimately everything is self-existently pure and perfect (as they would say in the Dzogchen tradition) or illusory and empty as they might say more generally in Mahayana. Here we are mistaking a conceptual view of the world, albeit a profound and inspiring one, for a genuine experience of what the view is pointing towards. I’m not honest about my actual experience of the world if I claim to see it as perfect, without problems. I can aspire to that view, I can be and indeed am deeply inspired by it, and occasionally I may have genuine experiential glimpses. But if I use this as a reason not to respond to the problems we face, when my experience suggests that there are problems, then this is Buddhist bullshit really. Of course the view of primordial purity and emptiness is precious and important, and as practitioners we are often working with inspiration and glimpses. This Buddhist view has much to offer a world full of apparently solid, material problems. We can link the physical problems out there to confused states of mind, seeing how we create and recreate Samsara through fixed habits of thought. But this conceptual view could lead us to cut off from suffering and world problems.
I suspect that we all link into both of these responses at times. Perhaps because of the sheer scale and alarming nature of the challenges we face. It is nice to be able to opt out with the view, that everything’s OK. I summarise this approach as ‘denying the truth (albeit still a relative truth according to some views) of Samsara’ - denying that there is suffering and that suffering is manifesting in particular ways.
I CAN FIX IT!
What is the other side of ‘Everything’s OK’? Well, if we do open up to the existence of problems, and perhaps make a commitment to engaging with those challenges through the work that we do, the other main trap we can fall into is thinking that on some level we can fix everything, and make ‘saving the world’ a personal and material project. We are so uncomfortable with the truth of suffering, that subtly our response and action is linked to some agenda of ambition, personal success, and perhaps the hope that we can through ego-centric effort make these problems disappear.
The great 20th century teacher, and my own teacher’s teacher, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche wrote a book called ‘Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism’. He suggests that we might think that we have abandoned something unsavoury about modern life, and embarked instead on a spiritual path. Maybe we see the
world as overly consumerist or competitive or aggressive so we adopt a spiritual path. But subtly our egos just use this new path to play all the same games as before, so we relate to our spiritual path in consumerist, ambitious or aggressive ways. This often happens when people try to make their work more beneficial – there is something genuine and positive there, but also it can become yet another project, another thing to achieve, deeply bound up with projections into a better future, which of course is only ever arising in the present moment. I suggest that these sorts of projections underlie a lot of the life energy of our industrial growth society – competition, ambition, consumerism, looking to the future for satisfaction and wealth, rather than resting in the present. So to the extent that we allow similar projections to drive our search for meaningful work, and a better future, then perhaps we are actually just perpetuating the confusion that makes the world go round.
If we try to make too solid and personal a project of solving the problems of the world, we can also become materialistic in our approach. Often I find this in people working with environmental issues, and issues of social justice. Although the roots of their work may initially be deep and heartfelt, often the solution of the issues becomes materialistic – the focus becomes on technical solutions, measurable outcomes. This is fine, but from a Buddhist point of view we might say that our view has become narrow, that we have moved from a wish to benefit beings to a fixation on material solutions. Fundamentally from a Buddhist point of view the roots of our problems are our confusion, our greed and our hatred.
These manifest in the problems of the material world, indeed in some sense these kleshas create the material world we are in. Of course material solutions to material problems are absolutely vital. Of course we must give and provide material solutions as best we can to help others, but I think Buddhists have a contribution to make in pointing to and working with deep causes, even while we take material steps.
These responses I class as ‘Shit, there is a problem, it is x and I have to fix it’. We make something overly and, from the Buddhist point of view unhelpfully solid and personal about the problems, our role in solving them and adopt a fixed response.
SO WHAT IS LEFT?
If we are not stuck in denying there are problems, nor in trying to fix them all personally and materially, what is left? What is the middle way between those extremes? When I pondered what I thought was left, it seemed to me incredibly non heroic. When I considered what I thought remained, as a basis for action or work in the world, I found myself thinking “surely there is something more than that?” But then I got interested, and now I wonder if the fact that it seems so
utterly not enough, is indeed a sign that it is truly what we do need to base our work on. Maybe the fact that the middle way I am about to suggest seems so out of sync with our deep assumptions about the world of work, so counter intuitive, is a sign that it is exactly what we need.
RESTING BEYOND SPEED AND AGGRESSION
Trungpa Rinpoche suggests that when people start to meditate in this Western culture, the first thing that we notice is how racy, speedy and apparently out of control our minds are. I think that suggests a lot about how many of us experience our day to day working worlds, and our organisations – a basic sense
of speedy, relentless activity. If we sit with the speediness for long enough, he suggests, our minds will start to settle down, we will start to see things more clearly. At this point he suggests most people will experience aggression – not necessarily in an obvious angry way, but we will see how compulsively our minds resist or try to manipulate the simple truth of what arises within our experience. We will have any number of games and strategies, often not noticed as such, that are fundamentally aggressive – attempts to manipulate the spontaneous truth of our experience, an unwillingness to simply relate to things as they are, preferring to compulsively fix, change, or avoid them. Again there are links here to our work environments, our global business projects and to our personal attitudes to work for many of us. When we are not just speeding along, caught up in the adrenaline rush of work, many of us are working to strategies, and ambitions, held quite heavily and personally, tools for ego in one way or another to assert Its ground. Many of our plans for ‘changing the world’ or ‘saving the planet’ also fall into this category. If we can sit and let both the speed and aggression loosen and dissolve, which they will naturally and gradually do over time, then Trungpa Rinpoche says that we will then exp erience sadness; a tender hearted, raw, open sadness. I have always found this both true and amazing. The idea that just beyond the speed and manipulation of our minds (and thus we may also say our society and organisations) lies a soft, tender, heartfelt, natural quality. This spot is the birthplace of the warrior, the Bodhisattva, the person who vows to work for the benefit of all beings, according to their particular skills, situation and inspiration, until all beings are awake. Linking to this tender heart is the birthplace of the warrior working for the benefit of all. Speed and aggression won’t do it – no matter how many noble plans for
changing the world we have. Sitting with tender open heartedness is the starting point for the one who works tirelessly for the benefit of others.
We can decide for ourselves if this relates to our experience as we meditate, or allow ourselves to settle down and rest in a simple sense of responsiveness to the world, beyond our usual speed. Of course, in current society, full of offices, bureaucracies, and deep cultural assumptions, often untested and unspoken, about the nature of work and success I find that there is little place for tender hearted sadness. Our modern assumptions of work value exactly the opposite of what Trungpa Rinpoche describes. We may get rewarded for speed, for compulsive activity, for aggression – not overt, but the goal fixated, future oriented, manipulating mindset that never rests with what is. Conversely I cannot
remember a time when I saw genuine open tender heartedness manifested by a business leader. Taking this experience as the basis for action is radical, it is political, it is downright embarrassing too, but that is the point. We shouldn’t underestimate just how unusual and powerful such a starting place for a response in and to our work might be.
And this tender heartedness is not just a private experience to be wallowed in or fixed. It is the starting place for an active response, for our work – beyond trying to deny or fix Samsara, and beyond habitual speed and aggression. The idea is that to the extent that we can first rest in an open minded and open hearted, non conceptual responsiveness to a situation, the more skilful, compassionate, and wise our subsequent action will be. So the practice is to rest in this place and to gradually gain confidence to use this place of tender heart, rather than our usual hard hearted, ego-centric strategies and projections as the basis for true and skilful action in the world. We may find ourselves saying or doing something surprising or timely. A response may also be a longer term vision, inspiration or intention – that becomes a plan.
But a vision or plan that comes from the heart. The warrior, the one who truly works for the benefit of others, has confidence to rest beyond strategy and then respond. This may be radical, but how many more rational goal oriented action plans do we need in the world? Are our 21st century problems because we haven’t yet found the right action plan, or don’t yet have enough of them, or is there a deeper question of how we conceive of work and action, about where those things come from?
Finally, I think it is really important to acknowledge the sense of shame, awkwardness and embarrassment that we may have, at least at first, when we rest in this place of tender openhearted responsiveness to the world. Many cultural and organisational theorists have written about the way that certain experiences and behaviours are normalised within a culture, rendering other parts of the experience of being human, marginalised, abnormal, and therefore somehow shameful. Consider for example the idea of the ‘professional’, both a noun and an adjective, a word that I suggest has huge power for the way we think of work, and yet power that is rarely examined. To be ‘professional’ implies a person who is unmoved, rational, dispassionate, logical, not personally involved. There is little about tender heartedness that we see in contemporary notions of what it is to be professional. Is this a big con trick that we are all playing on ourselves?
Organisations, and the people in them, cry out for innovation, passion, inspiration, and yet in the subtle uses of language, the very thing that gives rise to these juicy energies is simultaneously marginalised. ‘Be innovative, passionate and inspired, but don’t you dare bring your raw and tender heart into this boardroom, that simply is not professional’. Part of our work, individually and collectively, is to heal this split, for it is this split that allows so much corporate and professional activity to damage the very world it professes to serve. And healing this split, in each moment, is heroic and courageous and thus part of
the work of the warrior of awakening.
So, I suggest that if we are to avoid the twin traps of denying problems or trying to fix them, then the dynamic middle way is to learn to rest as openly as we can with the truth of our experience as it arises, beyond our particular conceptual notions of how it is, or should be, or how we should make it.
Somewhere in there is a natural connection to a heart response, the essence of our wise and compassionate minds, from whence all true and noble volitions may come.
FINDING OUR WORK
The Bodhisattva is one who works in the world according to the inspiration of these deep heart volitions – in each moment, and over countless eons, according to his or her particular connections, skills, and inspirations. There is no limit to the ways in which we may work in the world for the benefit of others. There are no bonus points for being an activist rather than a politician, a doctor rather than a
businessman. There are no boundaries to the ways in which we may serve. In my experience of working with people, I think that many people, maybe all people, have some sense of what for them a true volition for working for the benefit of others might be. I have seen small business advisors longing to follow a path making hand sewn silk knickers, sales advisors joyfully retraining as plumbers. I'm not sure how such shifts inform the wider questions of global challenges, but I do recognise heartfelt longing when I see it, and I do see how people change when they allow their work to follow that.
The psychologist James Hillman suggests that all of us have an implicit sense of what the work of our soul is about but may spend years denying, confusing or avoiding it. Of course soul is not an easy word for Buddhists but let’s not unpick that here. What I want to suggest is that many of us do in fact experience some connection, maybe a hazy one, to a deeper heart sense of what our work in the world might be. And due to our incredible ability to confuse ourselves and complicate the simplicity of our experience, many of us spend years doing a damn good job of not responding to those deep volitions. Now I would like to consider some practical things that I have learnt working with people trying to find
and manifest their work in the world. These are things that I have found helpful for noticing the ways that we do and do not follow the heart.
MONEY
First, money has nothing to do with any of it! I have observed that for many people, hopes and fears about money, about having enough or not yet enough, constrain them from moving in a direction that feels meaningful. I have done some amazing work with a man called Peter Koenig. He has studied what he calls the phenomenology of money for 25 years. He points out that money is empty, a social construction, it is nothing much at all, other than what we make it through our projections. But what we make it becomes immensely powerful. If money is to us security, value, whatever, then it can drive us as we search for these things. A Buddhist perspective can be helpful in helping people unpick and
examine the ways we project our human hopes and fears onto money. As we liberate ourselves from those, the possibility of action becomes vaster.
FEAR
This raises the general area of fear. I think fear of not having money limits many of us from choosing to do the work of the heart. The Bodhisattva is committed to overcoming fear, in oneself and in others.
Noticing the many fears we have of following our deeper inspirations is powerful and helpful practice. I find in my own work that organisations, particularly large bureaucratic ones, are often fuelled by fear.
Grown adults acting like frightened children who simply cannot and will not say what they believe in through fear. This is tragic. Overcoming fear in skilful ways, and helping others to do the same, can be important work for people in any type of organisation. The teaching of the wheel of life, and the idea of the six realms, the six core styles of confusion that beings can have, is illuminating here. I think that many organisations are within the realm of the Asuras, the Jealous Gods. The key style of confusion is a sort of frantic paranoia. The competition, aggressiveness, and paranoia of being attacked, having to hold one’s ground, seem a good metaphor for many organisations. Being able to work open heartedly with the fear and paranoia that may arise for self and others when we try to work from the heart is important.
This leads onto one of the core teachings that Buddhists may consider in their work, the 8 worldly dharmas. These list 4 pairs of things that are inevitable to all of us in our lives, and which nevertheless we put huge effort into chasing and avoiding. These worldly concerns fuel our organisational and work related paranoia. The teaching says that we habitually:
Avoid pain and seek out pleasure
Avoid ignominy and seek out fame
Avoid defeat and seek out victory
Avoid loss and seek out gain
As a diagnostic tool for what goes on in most organisations, helping us to understand the paranoid games of the jealous gods, this is the best there is! People chasing victory, gain, fame and pleasure and avoiding at all costs the opposite. Once again I suggest there are clear links between our personal practice, the experience of organisational life and the wider societal impacts of work. We will always have victory and defeat; we will all have times of gain and loss. Could we just not get caught up in the game of trying to avoid some and chase others at work and in work? What energy or possibility of action might open up if we were less caught in fear and paranoia?
COMMUNICATION
Next, I want to say something about speech, about communication in the work context. Many people I work with who hope to create change, begin with a strong distinction between action and communication.
Somehow, initially at least, they see their response in terms of action, perhaps a new job, starting a project, doing something. But actually there is a wealth of literature in leadership and management that strongly suggests that speech, the act of communication is absolutely key to creating change in work, organisations and society.. Indeed when we analyse modern work activities, we don’t actually make things in the UK anymore, we find that actually what we are all doing most of the time is communication – meetings, emails, phone calls etc. So paying attention to how we communicate, and considering that a part of the work we do, is part of the Bodhisattva path. Indeed speech is a key aspect of Buddhist practice – one of the five precepts concerns speech – to speak truth in a way that is skilful and respectful. If we fixate too much on having to be ‘a person with a
project’ we can ignore the reality of what we are actually doing moment by moment, and the natural field of possible action that presents itself to us. But more than this, I suggest that lack of open, honest courageous speech is one of the most powerful things that keeps organisations acting in ways that harm people and planet.
Whatever our role, if we can find skilful ways of speaking truth, of naming or questioning what is actually going on in a situation – the damaging impacts of corporate activity on the wider world, the yearning of our collective hearts for something more inspiring, then we are taking powerful action. This doesn’t mean just blurting out our own biased projections and causing trouble that way. But developing skilful speech, developing courage to speak truth to power, what the Greeks called Parrhesia, can be a major contribution of Buddhist ideas - seeing through the confusion of a situation and naming that with gentleness and compassion.
There are connections here between speech, meditation and the idea I mentioned earlier of responding from the place of open and tender heart as the basis for action. All of these can be considered essentially an act of communication between self and world. As we breathe in and out naturally there is always some communication going on, some exchange between what is deeply inside oneself going out into the world (the outbreath) and then something of the world entering intimately into oneself (the inbreath).
In my tradition, we talk about formless meditation, shamatha vipassana. The idea here is that the outbreath dissolves into space carrying our awareness with it, and we are left in a gap, a brief pause or rest in openness if you like, before the inbreath returns, from the world, all of its own accord, into us. So meditation is an act of letting the breath take our awareness into the limitless space of the world, or of experience, having a gap, where we are not clinging to our fixated notions of the world, and from there allowing the world of experience to enter into us. I am suggesting that this simple act of breathing, linked into in meditation as we gradually train to open out ever more fully to the world, is in fact the basis for
any activity, response or work that we might skilfully do – responding from our heart, opening to the communication coming from the world, beyond our stuck notions, concepts and assumptions. It is significant that when we find our true work in the world we call this a ‘calling’ or ‘vocation’, words that suggest an act of communication and responsiveness between self and world.
DEVOTION
Finally I want to talk about the importance of devotion. This is a risky word in our material modernist era. It is wrapped up in concepts of blind faith, of dogma and religion. But faith and devotion are incredibly important; they are natural human dynamics – we are in fact doing them all the time, just often without noticing what we have faith in and show devotion to. People have great faith in the concept
of economic growth for example, even though evidence is all around that it is flawed. People are devoted to the idea of progress, personal or cultural – the idea that we are working for some better future.
If we are to develop courage to act with true responsiveness, the courage to move towards our true work in the world, we absolutely need faith in something beyond our individual selves. This is of course a key idea in Buddhism. Faith, Sraddha, sometimes translated as ‘confidence’ or ‘conviction’ is needed to encourage us to go into the unknown. We are back again to the idea of letting go into space. All real discovery, all new action requires this sort of jumping off. We can be clever, we can intellectually understand new possibilities, but a new act, a genuine responsiveness to the world beyond our fixed ideas, requires some faith that entering that space of tender openness is the right thing. We trust the situation, the naturally wise and compassionate nature of the world. It doesn’t mean that everything will always go well – in our limited sense of that phrase - but rather that we have a deep faith in some underlying compassionate quality in the universe, and in some innate natural wisdom in ourselves that is way beyond
our ego-centric hopes and fears. This is incredibly important for everyone in this troubling day and age.
Devotion relates to this idea. If we are to take action in response to the problems of the world, if we are to test out our courage to speak, act, rest with open hearted responsiveness, then we need to feel that it is not an individual act, not personal heroism or personal screw up. That doesn’t make any sense at all
from a Buddhist point of view. The Mahayana tells us that the universe is pervaded by living qualities of compassion and wisdom, that there are Buddhas in each and every atom in space – we can take this as literally or metaphorically as we like – but the point is that the universe is alive, inter-connected and
imbued with living qualities of wisdom and compassion that are beyond our conceptual imagination.
And we need to ask ourselves, what is our relation to this view? Really. When we think of the problems of the world, when we question the work we are doing, when we ponder a deeper response, what do we truly feel is supporting such questions, and whatever response we can offer? I would argue, and I think
Buddhist teachings would say this, certainly the ones I have received in the Tibetan tradition, that as long as we think we are solitary practitioners, individual Bodhisattvas doing our best, without a lived sense of the vastness of our connectedness to the living wisdom and compassion of the universe, then we are
doubly doomed. We are doomed because ego cannot go beyond ego, there is always a need for something to come from beyond ego – so our practice will be dry and stunted. But more than that, we are more likely to be doomed as a society too. The problems of our modern world can be seen as problems of
modernist ways of thinking - and these emphasise a separated, individual, goal-oriented, materialistic relationship with a world divided clearly into living beings, and dead things.
Devotion is ultimately about trust in something profound and genuine in the fabric of the universe itself – wisdom, compassion, and teachings are all around us. This view sustains people who are trying to act for the benefit of others, and is in itself the very sort of view we need as a culture to move beyond a dry modernist worldview with its many problems and fixation on technical solutions. When we have this world-view, our work is an outbreath and an offering.
CONCLUSION
So, to draw to a close. Work is a big deal for most of us – it needs looking at because of the personal and societal questions it raises, particularly in this strange day and age. And that when we try to connect our work with the immense challenges in global society we need to watch out for two traps – we need to stay open to the nature of suffering involved in work, in business and globalisation, not kidding ourselves that all is fine. But we also need to stay open enough to know that we don’t know the answers, that we cannot improve things by using our work, even our work to save the world, as yet another ambitious, goal oriented project that we subtly hope will give us the solid ground, security and personal credentials that we long for. That is just more of the same old stuff, far too seductive.
And where that leaves us is in a raw, tender, heart centred place, a place of great movement and of not knowing. Resting with confidence in that place, and allowing responses and actions to arise naturally is both act and path of the courageous Bodhisattva, the place where we might find our true work in conversation with the world, and also, a radical place when we consider how antithetical such a state is to modern work environments. In so far as we learn to rest in and act from that place, our actions are likely to be wiser, more compassionate and more genuinely responsive to what is needed – in both moment to moment situations, and across years and decades too. And in so far as we make that connection, and respond to some sense of calling – calling from the living world and from all beings perhaps, then we are also required to cut through our fantasies around money, hope and fear, victory and defeat and just act.
And finally I suggested that acting may be the same as speaking truth kindly and that we could, indeed must, see all of this as an act of service and offering to the world that sustains our activity.
The tender raw heart, the place of true volition and action is both a place of joy and a place of sorrow, and we need to be able to rest with and respond from both to find and do our work. I’d like to end with two quotes, apparently opposite, that illustrate this point.
David Whyte, borrowing from another poet W H Auden asks us ‘what hurts you into your work?’ As we open up, maybe something in the world will touch our hearts, will prick us into responding. Our calling may come from that in the world which hurts us.
Another quote says, ‘your work is where your joy meets the needs of the world’. I am not sure where this came from, I have seen it attributed to three different people on Google, so I will attribute it to the kind person who told it to me, David Ballard.
Just as the world may touch us, hurt us into our work, so we may also feel a deep sense of joy associated with a particular avenue, possibility or activity in the world. This is to be followed and trusted too.
Ultimately the place where our joy and our hurt meet the needs of the world is the same place, the place of our natural awakened heart. We all have that natural awakened heart fully present. It is there always. Perhaps our work is simply to
trust that, gain confidence in that, and knowing that awakened heart will express itself in an endless myriad of forms, simply respond, respond simply, from there.
Tim Malnick is affiliated to the Ashridge Business School, and practices with the Longchen Foundation.
He can be contacted at: tim@differentspace.co.uk, blog www.differentspace.co.uk
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