I have been struggling lately with a sense of misalignment in the tech accelerator social change world I'm embedded in. It's been hard to put my finger on, but the strongest thread has been this sense of a lopsided headiness in response to what feels to me to be a deeply emotional and spiritual crisis. And a deep intuition that actions coming from this place are trying to solve the problem from the same consciousness that created it (echoes of Einstein quote here of course). A beautiful idea enacted from the tired old paradigm of emotionless white male leadership does not change make, no matter how well-intentioned, competent or compelling that sole leader and their vision may seem. It is disheartening to watch us remain so uncreative - still heady, arrogant, and perhaps most frustrating, still so uncollaborative in so many of our social change conversations.
I can understand how scary it is to drop into the heart - to actually feel the intensity of heart-break we feel about the world that we've created for ourselves. Last week I heard a talk on NPR about the loss of biodiversity on my way to work, and I wept uncontrollably as I drove across the bay bridge toward my workplace. I felt half crazy, and half saner than I'd felt in a long time. I can understand how hard it is to find safe places for this level of feeling the pain that drives us to social change action, and how nervous it makes many who care deeply to have so much feeling and talking without action. This urgency for action is directly linked with the avoided confusion and guilt that comes with acknowledging our complicity, the deep fear of our individual impotence and helplessness, and how angry and stuck we may feel within entrenched systems and deeply unsustainable ways of being.
Yet, as Henri Nouwen has helped me articulate, creative response can only come if we begin here, with what's actually happening in the heart. Last night I happened to pick up Henri's beautiful book Reaching Out as bedtime reading, and his reflections from the early 1960s speak right to this point that's so alive in social change efforts today. Reading his words, I'm actually left with a sense of clarity, and hope, and remembering my own deep belief in the magic of emergence. When collective intention is aligned, when hearts are honest and we can confront our own vulnerability together, we touch the deep collective intelligence, power, and creativity that are required to help us create a different reality together. Thank you, Henri, for the reminder of what aligned leadership actually feels like: it's a movement from the heart.
"Life can teach us that although the events of the day are out of our hands, they should never be out of our hearts...When the answer to our world remains hanging between our minds and our hands, it remains weak and superficial. When our protests against war, segregation and social injustice do not reach beyond the level of a reaction, then our indignation becomes self-righteous, our hope for a better world degenerates into a desire for quick results, and our generosity is soon exhausted by disappointments. Only when our mind has descended into our heart can we expect a lasting response to well up from our innermost self.
....When only our minds and hands work together we quickly become dependent on the results of our actions and tend to give up when they do not materialize. In the solitude of the heart we can trulsy listen to the pains of the world because there we can recognize them not as strange and unfamiliar pains, but as pains that are indeed our own. There we can see that what is most universal is most personal and that indeed nothing human is strange to us. There we can feel that the cruel reality of history is indeed the reality of the human heart, our own included, and that to protest asks, first of all, for a confession of our own participation in the human condition. There we can indeed respond.
....A compassionate man can no longer look at [his time's] manifestations of evil and death as disturbing interruptions of his life plan but rather has to confront them as an opportunity for the conversion of himself and his fellow human beings. Every time in history that men and women have been able to respond to the events of their world as an occasion to change their hearts, an inexhaustible source of generosity and new life has been opened, offering hope far beyond the limits of human prediction."
- Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out (1966). pp. 56-60.
I can understand how scary it is to drop into the heart - to actually feel the intensity of heart-break we feel about the world that we've created for ourselves. Last week I heard a talk on NPR about the loss of biodiversity on my way to work, and I wept uncontrollably as I drove across the bay bridge toward my workplace. I felt half crazy, and half saner than I'd felt in a long time. I can understand how hard it is to find safe places for this level of feeling the pain that drives us to social change action, and how nervous it makes many who care deeply to have so much feeling and talking without action. This urgency for action is directly linked with the avoided confusion and guilt that comes with acknowledging our complicity, the deep fear of our individual impotence and helplessness, and how angry and stuck we may feel within entrenched systems and deeply unsustainable ways of being.
Yet, as Henri Nouwen has helped me articulate, creative response can only come if we begin here, with what's actually happening in the heart. Last night I happened to pick up Henri's beautiful book Reaching Out as bedtime reading, and his reflections from the early 1960s speak right to this point that's so alive in social change efforts today. Reading his words, I'm actually left with a sense of clarity, and hope, and remembering my own deep belief in the magic of emergence. When collective intention is aligned, when hearts are honest and we can confront our own vulnerability together, we touch the deep collective intelligence, power, and creativity that are required to help us create a different reality together. Thank you, Henri, for the reminder of what aligned leadership actually feels like: it's a movement from the heart.
"Life can teach us that although the events of the day are out of our hands, they should never be out of our hearts...When the answer to our world remains hanging between our minds and our hands, it remains weak and superficial. When our protests against war, segregation and social injustice do not reach beyond the level of a reaction, then our indignation becomes self-righteous, our hope for a better world degenerates into a desire for quick results, and our generosity is soon exhausted by disappointments. Only when our mind has descended into our heart can we expect a lasting response to well up from our innermost self.
....When only our minds and hands work together we quickly become dependent on the results of our actions and tend to give up when they do not materialize. In the solitude of the heart we can trulsy listen to the pains of the world because there we can recognize them not as strange and unfamiliar pains, but as pains that are indeed our own. There we can see that what is most universal is most personal and that indeed nothing human is strange to us. There we can feel that the cruel reality of history is indeed the reality of the human heart, our own included, and that to protest asks, first of all, for a confession of our own participation in the human condition. There we can indeed respond.
....A compassionate man can no longer look at [his time's] manifestations of evil and death as disturbing interruptions of his life plan but rather has to confront them as an opportunity for the conversion of himself and his fellow human beings. Every time in history that men and women have been able to respond to the events of their world as an occasion to change their hearts, an inexhaustible source of generosity and new life has been opened, offering hope far beyond the limits of human prediction."
- Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out (1966). pp. 56-60.