It is messy, it can be chaotic and what you learn and others hear might well change things...
I grew up in a family of words, but of very few books. I didn’t read for pleasure until the year I left primary school, when I picked up Wuthering Heights and hide in a tree until I was done. And that was it. A raw recruit to the written word.
Today my home is full of books, three deep. Fact and fiction, poetry and prose, classic and contemporary, sacred and profane, voices from across our world, and sometimes claiming to be from beyond it. Some I struggled with, some I couldn’t put down, and sometimes a voice would make me fume at its self-satisfied bombast and arrogance.
Books flow from room to room. I have several ‘on the go’ at any one time, addressing different needs, and feeding different moods.
However, I should have written this last sentence in the past tense.
Because in March 2020, I stopped reading fiction. I read for work. But I can’t read an act of make believe. I’m told it will pass.
Yet in the same period I’ve started to work professionally more closely with personal narrative. The stories people tell of themselves and how they make sense of the world through the speaking aloud of it to another human being.
The spoken narrative is ancient, it is set free in the telling and held in the conscious thoughts and embodied memories of those who speak it and those who listen.
And the listening and the space left for the listening are key. That space we can call stillness and the sound of it is silence.
And in that silence an individual begins to speak. Not the speaking of goals, achievements, and leadership. The speaking of not knowing, uncertainty and challenge. It can be raw. And each of us needs it. This need is no respecter of the roles we play. It doesn’t care whether your salary is 7 figures or 4. Whether you studied for a decade, or left school without a qualification. It doesn’t mind if your politics are to the right or left of Homer Simpson, or that you wear your faith visibly, or your lack of it emphatically.
This is not about the playing. This is about the being. Making sense of your being in the world. Step by step in the speaking of it and the stillness created by pausing, and the silence that follows if you dare to let it happen. Because that silence begets a deeper speaking, travelling down into the heart of your matter. It is messy, it can be chaotic and what you learn and others hear might well change things, a little bit or a whole lot.
That is how it begins. The speaking and the listening and the space left open for stillness and silence. As January 2022 takes hold of our working lives, whether you’re just starting out, in the middle of a career you’ve carefully carved out or you’re holding a team, a department or an organisation in your gaze. Hungrily seek out the silence. Make the space to listen and to speak from the heart of your matter.
Messy and Chaotic
Deep in the Heart of Your Matter
La Caminate
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