Friends, it’s been an existential two years — plague, climate emergencies (e.g., wildfires), and war. It’s been a lot to digest. And yet, it’s disorienting how much life is speeding up again here in the US where we’ve relaxed mask mandates and people are heading back to the office after 2 years. So, what if the most powerful leadership move we can make is to stop for a moment to catch up with where we are to heal what’s fragmented? As always, I love hearing your reactions. -M.
I wanted the world to stop in its tracks.
When my father unexpectedly died many years ago, I wanted to shake passersby and ask: “Don’t you realize the world has changed? How can you go on as if nothing has happened?”
In the grand scheme of this dizzyingly vast universe — where multitudes are created and fade daily — it was just another day. But in my microcosm, my world was rocked.
My assumptions about life’s predictability — where things had an order, a logic I could understand — were unceremoniously upended. And rather than let the chaos unleashed spin out any further, I wanted the world to stop.
Stripped of my ideas about how the world should be, all of the mundane things of life — work, commuting, errands — took on an absurdity. Without my old reassuring (if limited map), how could I trust that the normal things of life were trustworthy?
But those same mundane things quickly re-absorbed my attention, and I was moving through the world once again — using a map that I knew was incomplete and inaccurate, but that I didn’t have time to update.
“Why are we going about our days as if nothing happened? Why aren’t we stopping? Don’t people realize everything has changed?!”
These were questions a bewildered friend asked me the day after Russia invaded Ukraine.
Hearing these familiar words stopped me in my tracks. But this time, it wasn’t just my world that’d been rocked. The whole world — or at least the old rules-based global order — had been seismically shaken. And without the reassurances of the old maps we had to navigate life’s rocky terrain, we were feeling disoriented.
It’s primal to want to stop when we’ve lost the world we knew, and are unwillingly thrust into a new one. There’s a deep intuition embedded in ancient cultures’ rituals — e.g., around coming of age, marriage, death — that to consciously move into an unfamiliar world without falling back on old maps, we need to both acknowledge what’s been left behind, and give ourselves a chance to catch up with where we are.
But without a chance to pause, only two weeks after that conversation about Ukraine, it feels as if life has sped up again. Headlines of war have faded into the background noise of daily life.
When life moves faster than we can digest, nothing can stabilize (let alone grow).
As philosopher John O’Donohue writes in Anam Cara (a book I return to often when in search of wisdom):
There is a lovely story of a man exploring [a distant land]. He was in a desparate hurry on a journey through the jungle. He had three or four [men] helping him carry his equipment. They raced onward for about three days. At the end of the third day, the [men] sat down and would not move. He urged them to get up, telling them of the pressure he was under to reach his destination before a certain date. They refused to move. He could not understand this…
Finally, he got one of them to admit:
“We have moved too quickly to reach here; now we need to wait to give our spirits a chance to catch up with us.”
In a world where the political is a magnification of the personal, reaquainting ourselves with what we’ve left behind is perhaps the most gracious form of presence we can offer ourselves and the world right now.
Pausing halts the pattern of fragmentation that’s come to define our age of exponential speed, and perhaps allows something new to grow.
So, what if we just stopped for a moment? What might take root for you?
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Drop a comment below!
What I’m reading & watching
The best books, podcasts, and videos bringing me hope, making me curious, and inspiring me right now…
This week’s edition includes a deep-dive into the best of existential psychology that helped me have a bunch of big a-ha’s about not just Ukraine, but why polarization grows when we lose our old maps (e.g., why we’re seeing so many fights over issues like critical race theory, abortion, and trans rights). Now that I see these insights, I can’t unsee them!
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