I feel like I’m being whirled around at speed at the moment, hanging onto a ceiling fan with one arm while trying to grab things with the other – an apple, a can opener, a life raft. Random things that seem useful, practical.
It’s partly the time of year; partly context. I’m buried under the new admin of schools and winter sport, as well as months of backlog. I’m also studying this year, doing the year-long MBE program: a reimagined MBA with purpose rather than profit at its heart. It is incredibly interesting and inspiring but is taking up a lot of time and brain space, so the inside of my head is clogged, mushy and thick, without the usual light and spark. There’s family; house and life stuff. And then there’s my actual work: writing articles, chapters of my book, comms consulting.
Things are still on track – deadlines are being met; the kids are fed, and I’ve managed to squeeze in time for homework help, painting crap watercolours, had brief periods of engaged parenting. But I feel too busy; like I’m not doing anything properly. And worse, like I’m not even sure what properly is any more. My mind is like a computer with too many open tabs: slow to process, hard to navigate, a confusing, colourful mess of topics and priorities.
Then on Tuesday night Lorna Davis popped onto my Zoom screen. She was a guest speaker on the MBE, there to talk about ‘Leadership in the next economy’. She knows her stuff: she’s been CEO of huge corporations like Kraft; she led Danone to be the largest B Corp company in the world. But she didn’t talk about what I thought she would – strategy, building teams or change management.
Instead she started with the fact we’re all made of stardust; how it’s a miracle that there is life, let alone that we’re each lucky enough to be living one. And about how we’re all so much more than our bios, and that we’re always, constantly, changing. (That should be a good thing, rather than scary – as Virginia Woolf put it, ‘a self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living’.) All this change means we’re always six months behind ourselves, trying to catch up. She talked about poetry, and quoted David Whyte’s lines from ‘Just Beyond Yourself’:
‘Just beyond
yourself.
It’s where
you need
to be.
Half a step
into
self-forgetting
and the rest
restored
by what
you’ll meet.
There is a road
always beckoning.’
Over the next hour Lorna took lots of tangents that fed into each other around the theme of change: where to start; how to know where to go. She talked about how you can never really know the impact you’re going to have, so it’s not a great thing to use as a guide for where to spend your time - your one unrenewable resource. Instead, she said, tap into your own inner wisdom for guidance.
How? Her answer began with the fact that every human has around 70,000 thoughts a day, and most of them are crap: internal chatter about logistics, events and judgements - what’s for dinner, petty whinging, to-do lists. Don’t listen to these. Instead, tune into the few that are interesting, that shine, that make you pause for a second and attend with curiosity. Follow those ones.
The analogy she used is this: it’s like when you’re in the car, driving, with both the radio and the navigation on. Most thoughts are like commercial radio: diverting, noisy, flip-flopping between good and bad tracks. The wise thoughts are like the GPS, momentarily silencing the rest, and actually telling you something useful about where you should go.
I can’t tell you how to tune into your internal GPS. (I wish I knew.) But according to Lorna these ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions are the ones to ignore anyway, to tune out so you don’t get swept up in the cascade of following thoughts. Her invitation was this: instead of asking how or why, stay in this life. There is a rhythm to it, she said, and we notice when we’re in it. When we’re out of balance, we spend all our energy trying to work out why, and then how to fix it. But that doesn’t work. The noticing is enough.
Lorna said so much more, most of which I’m still processing. But the clear message for me was this: slow down, and be conscious of where you put your attention. It’s time to stop grabbing at random things, and let go of the fan. It’s time to stop spinning and start listening and take a proper, considered break for lunch.
Last weekend was the inaugural Manly Writers’ Festival. The ‘insular penisula’ of Sydney’s Northern Beaches isn’t traditionally linked with creativity: instead it was considered the home of tradies and surfers, and now lawyers, accountants and other business types who can afford to live here. It was so exciting to be there to celebrate some of our incredible local writers.
I got to watch Booker-prize winner Thomas Kenneally while watching the waves roll in at Manly Beach and eating delectable little tarts. He’s 88, and my quote of the night was this: ‘old folk are heading to the great cosmic mincer – they know how to appreciate a beautiful day’!
I managed to fit in a swim before I went to see the amazing Julia Baird talk about her new book Bright Shining and the transformational power of grace. I haven’t read her new book yet, but there’s a signed copy sitting on my shelf, waiting.