Page 86-91
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The first shadow-casting monster is insecurity about identity and worth. Many
leaders have an extroverted personality that makes this shadow hard to see. But
extroversion sometimes develops a way to cope with self-doubt: we plunge into
external activity to prove that we are worthy – or simply to evade the
question. There is a well-known form of this syndrome, especially among men,
in which our identity becomes so dependent on performing some external role
that we become depressed, and even die, when that role is taken away.
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These leaders posses a gift available to all who
take an inner journey: the knowledge that identity does not depend on the
role we play or the power it gives us over others. It
depends only on the simple fact that we are children of God, valued in and
for ourselves. When a leader is grounded in that knowledge, what
happens in the family, the office, the classroom, the hospital can be
life-giving for all concerned.
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A second shadow inside many of us is the belief that
the universe is a battleground, hostile to
human interests. Notice how often we use images of warfare as we go about our
work, especially in organizations. We talk about tactics and strategies,
allies and enemies, wins and losses, “do or die”. If we fail to be fiercely
competitive, the imagery suggest, we will surely lose, because the world we
live in is essentially a vast combat zone.
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The gift we receive on the inner journey is the
insight that the universe is working together for good. The structure of
reality is not the structure of a battle. Reality is not out to get anybody.
Yes, there is death, but it is part of the cycle of life, a great harmony
comes into our lives. The spiritual truth that harmony
is more fundamental than warfare in the nature of reality ity itself
could transform this leadership shadow
– and transform our institutions as well.
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A third shadow among leaders is “functional atheism”,
the belief that ultimate responsibility for
everything rests with us. This is the unconscious, unexamined
conviction that if anything decent is going to happen here, we are the ones
who must make it happen – a conviction held even by people who talk a good
game about God.
This shadow causes pathology on every level of our
lives. It leads us to impose our will on others, stressing our relationships,
sometimes to the point of breaking. It often eventuates in burnout,
depression, and despair, as we learn that the world will not bend our will
and we become embittered about that fact. Functional atheism is the shadow
that drives collective frenzy as well. It explains why the average group can
tolerate no more than fifteen seconds of silence: if we are not making noise,
we believe, nothing good is happening and something must be dying.
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The gift we receive on the inner journey is the
knowledge that ours is not the only act in town. Not only are there other
acts out there, but some of them are even better than ours, at least occasionally!
We learn that we need not carry the whole load
but can share it with others, liberating us and empowering them. We
learn that sometimes we are free to lay the load down altogether. The great community asks us to do only what we are able
and trust the rest to other hands.
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A fourth shadow within and among us is fear,
especially our fear of the natural chaos of life.
Many of us – parents and teachers and CEOs – are deeply devoted to eliminating
all remnants of chaos from the world. We want to organize and orchestrate
things so thoroughly that messiness will never bubble up around us and
threaten to overwhelm us.
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The insight we received on the inner journey is that
chaos is the precondition to creativity:
as every creation myth has it, life itself emerged from the void. Even what
has been created needs to be returned to chaos from time to time so that it
can be regenerated in more vital form. When a leader fears chaos so deeply as
to try to eliminate it, the shadow of death will fall across everything that
leader approaches – for the ultimate answer to all of life’s messiness is
death.
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My final example of the shadows that leaders project
is paradoxically, the denial of death itself.
Though we sometimes kill things off well before their time, we also live in
denial of the fact that all things must die in due course. Leaders who
participate in the denial often demand that the people around them keep
resuscitating things that are no longer alive. Projects and programs that
should have been unplugged long ago are kept on life support to accommodate
the insecurities of a leader who does not want anything to die on his or her
watch.
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A good scientist does not fear
the death of a hypothesis, because that “failure” clarifies the steps that
need to be taken toward truth, sometimes more than a
hypothesis that succeeds. The best leaders in every setting reward people for
taking worthwhile risks even if they are likely to fail. These leaders know
that the death of an initiative – if it was tested for good reasons – is always
a source of new learning.
The gift we received on the inner journey is the knowledge
that death finally comes to everything – and yet
death does not have the final word. By allowing something to die when
its times is due, we create the conditions under
which new life can emerge.
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Page 91
1) First, we could lift up the value of “inner work”. That phrase should become commonplace in
families, schools, and religious institutions, at least, helping us understand
that inner work is as real as outer work and involves skills one can develop,
skills like journaling, reflecting reading,
spiritual friendship, meditation and prayer.
2) Second, we could spread the word that inner work,
though it is a deeply personal matter, is not necessarily a private matter: inner work can be helped along in community. Indeed,
doing inner work together is a vital counterpoint doing it alone. Left to our
own devices, we my delude our-selves in ways that others can help us correct.
3) Third, we can remind each other of the dominant role that fear plays in our lives, of all the ways
that fear forecloses the potentials I have explored in this chapter.
“Be not afraid” does not mean we cannot have fear.
Everyone has fear, and people who embrace the call to leadership often find
fear abounding. Instead, the words say we do not need to be the fear we have.
We do not have to lead from a place of fear, thereby endangering a world in
which fear is multiplied.
We have places of fear inside of
us, but we have other places as well – places with names like trust and hope
and faith. We can choose to lead from one of those
places, to stand on ground that is not riddled with fault lines of rear, to
move toward others from a place of promise instead of anxiety. As we stand in
one of those places, fear may remain close at hand and our spirits may still
tremble. But now we stand on ground that will support us, ground from which we
can lead others toward a more trustworthy, more hopeful, more faithful way of
being the world.
Page 96
Seasons is a wise metaphor for the movement of life, I
think. It suggests that life is neither a battlefield nor a game of chance but
something infinitely richer, more promising, more real. The notion that our lives are like the eternal cycle of the seasons does
not deny the struggle or the joy, the loss of the gain, the darkness or the
light, but encourages us to embrace it all – and to find in all of it opportunities
for growth.
Page 96-97
If we lived close to nature in an agricultural society,
the seasons as metaphor and fact would continually frame our lives. But eh
master metaphor of our era does not come from agriculture – it comes from
manufacturing. We do not believe that we “grow” our lives - we believe that we “make”
them. Just listen to how we use the word in everyday speech: we make time, make friends, make meaning, make money,
make a living, make love.
I once hear Alan Watts observe that a Chinese child
will ask, “How does a baby grow?” But an
American child will ask, “How do you make a baby?”
Form an early age, we absorb our culture’s arrogant conviction that we
manufacture everything, reducing the world to more “raw material” that lacks
all value until we impose our designs and labor on it.
Page 100-109
Autumn
Autumn constantly reminds me that my daily dyings are necessary precursors to new life.
If I try to “make” a life that defies the diminishments of autumn, the life I end
up with will be artificial, at best, and utterly colourless as well. But when I
yield to the endless interplay of living and dying, dying and living, the life
I am given will be real and colourful, fruitful and whole.
Winter
Nature is not dead in winter – it has gone underground
to renew itself and prepare for spring. Winter is the time when we are
admonished, and even inclined, to do the same for ourselves.
When my father was alive, I confused the teaching with
the teacher. My teacher is gone now, but the grace is still there – and my
clarity about that fact has allowed his teaching to take deeper root in me.
Winter clears the landscape, however brutally, giving us a chance to see ourselves and each other more clearly, to
see the very ground of our being.
Our inward winters take many forms – failure,
betrayal, depressions, death. But every one of them, in my experience, yields
to the same advice: “The winters will drive you
crazy until you learn to get out into them.” Until we enter boldly into the
fears we most want to avoid, those fears will dominate our lives. But when we
walk directly into them – protected from frostbite by the warm grab of
friendship or inner discipline or spiritual guidance – we can learn what they
have to each us. Then we discover once again that the cycle of the
seasons is trustworthy and life-giving, even in the most dismaying season of
all.
Spring
I love the fact that the word humus – the decayed
vegetable matter that feeds the roots of plants – comes from the same root that
gives rise to the word humility. It is a blessed etymology. It helps me
understand that the humiliating events of life,
the events that leave “mud on my face” or that “make my name mud”, may create the fertile soil in which something new can
grow.
Summer
Here is a summertime truth: abundance is a communal
act, the joint creation of an incredibly complex ecology in which each part
functions on behalf of the whole and, in return, is sustained by the whole.
Community doesn’t just create abundance – community is abundance. If we could
learn that equation from the world of nature, the human might be transformed.
Summer is the season when all the promissory notes of
autumn and winter and spring come due, and each year the debts are repaid with
compound interest. In summer, it is hard to remember that we had ever doubted
the natural process, had ever ceded death the last word, had ever lost faith in
the powers of new life. Summer is a reminder that our faith is not nearly as
strong as the things we process to have faith in – a
reminder that for this single season, at least, we might cease our anxious
machinations and give ourselves to the abiding and abundant grace of our common
life.
Source: Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice
of Vocation by Parker Palmer (2000)
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