Your support means I can spend more time researching and writing this each week, going to more esoteric and interesting places. Thank you.

Subscribe now

Bury me under the great shade trees in the market,

I want to hear the drums beating

I want to feel the dancers’ feet.

— the Kuba people

“When the dervish whirls, when the yogi chants, when the sadhu mutilates his flesh; when penitents crawl a hundred miles on their knees, when Native Americans pierce themselves in the Sun Dance, when suburban kids take Ecstasy and dance all night at a rave, they’re seeking the Self. When we deliberately alter our consciousness in any way, we’re trying to find the Self.”

— Steven Pressfield

After three nights of good, long sleep, there’s a tiredness in my bones that is finally seeping out. And yet I’m also feeling refreshed, energised in a way I haven’t felt in what… three years now?

Saturday stretches out ahead of me, blank, agenda-less, free of responsibility. I feel shades of confusion at this uncommon freedom, my memory straining a little: what did I used to do when I had all this time?

Squander it, comes the reply.

For over a week now, I’ve had a return to bachelor life with Lucy and Ren away in the UK to see family and friends. I committed myself to using this rare time well. I have eaten at leisure and slept at length. I went wild camping the day after they left, a short but adventurous odyssey that involved cycling through forests on rough and sandy tracks, long detours around the vast monstrosity that is the Tesla factory and enormous amounts of roads being closed and rebuilt, and a night spent sleeping by a beautiful lake, accompanied by a dream visit from my anima.

I went to an afternoon yoga class. On a whim, I went to the cinema afterwards to see an unusual independent German film. I had another long sleep, free from any sort of wake-up call. And then, this Saturday morning, after a long, lazy coffee at home, I went for a short run, followed by another coffee at my local cafe, free of any distractions. I took a book but didn’t read it. I just sat, noticed things.

And now there’s the question of the rest of Saturday. I had mentioned to Lucy that I might look for a day party to go to, something I’ve talked about doing since I moved here. She nodded enthusiastically, which usually translates as ‘you should stop talking about it and just do it’.

With one exception, a big event in London four years ago, I have not been clubbing in a long, long time. I was always more a guitar-based music fan in my younger years, but house music and even some techno featured heavily too, mostly through osmosis from my older brother. The 90s were a golden age for dance music and clubbing in the UK, and I spent enough time in clubs to feel, really feel, how immersive and intoxicating the energy can be.

Berlin is known for its club scene and nightlife; it’s a European mecca for dance music. Every weekend, and throughout the week too, there are hundreds of night and day gatherings to go to, some lasting from Friday to Monday.

There are the globally famous mega clubs like Tresor and Berghain. There are the many other large and established club nights in venues across the city, catering to all tastes, but mostly techno-infused.

Then there’s the lesser-known, the underbelly of smaller, independent nights and parties across the city. Many of them are free, others are low cost, spread across venues of all shapes and sizes: outdoor patches of disused land, old factory buildings, the sound-proofed back room of a local pub.

Berlin lives for the dance; it subsists on the beat.

So I scroll on my laptop looking at all that’s on offer this Saturday, feeling overwhelmed by the choice and slightly intimidated too: this is not my world, it’s a foray back into a place I haven’t been to for many years. I know none of the DJs and hardly any of the venues.

After an hour or so, I pick a day/evening party run by a South American collective at a small outdoor venue, one that seems to offer a bit more than hard techno music. The description of the night is explicit about a few things: everyone is welcome, there’s no dress code, and no-one will be turned away (as opposed to some clubs that decide if you are ‘cool’ enough for their vibe).

It’s just past 7 pm now as I sit on the bus, the late summer sun starting to cast long shadows and hints of pink and purple on the horizon. I’m feeling excited and a little nervous too. I get off the bus, savouring the ten-minute walk to the club.

As I walk, my mind is busy with a bemusing interior dialogue: Just go and suss it out, maybe have a drink and watch for a bit. You’ll probably be the oldest one there, you know? Not bad, old fella… but you’ll probably be the oldest one. Wonder if people will be looking at you? Yeah, maybe just ease yourself in, stand on the edges and see how you feel. It’s only a couple of hours. If you don’t like it, you can just leave! Yeah, just leave if you’re not feeling it.”

I witness this inner stream of consciousness with some surprise; it reminds me of going on first dates when I was much younger.

I’m almost at the venue now. To call it a club feels like overstating it; it is a club in the Berlin meaning of the word.

Down a narrow road, next to an old art deco petrol station, there’s a series of bars and restaurants overlooking a canal where it joins the Spree river. I walk past these more established places to what seems to be a dead-end of ramshackle wooden fencing, until I peer into the deepening gloom and see a handwritten sign next to a battered garden gate.

I pass through the gate to a long patch of muddy scrubland flanked by plane trees, weeds and the canal. I could hear the beat before, out on the road, but now I can feel it.

I can see three office chairs up ahead, lit by a portable lamp standing on what looks like a high table from a conference centre. Behind them is another wooden fence and a curtain. The sensation of the beat intensifies, as if it is coming from within me.

A young woman comes through the curtain just as I arrive, greeting me with a wide, warm smile. She checks my ticket, stamps my wrist and wishes me a great night. I feel welcome and properly welcomed.

As I pass through the curtain, the scrubland continues, and straight ahead is a simple tented structure with open sides. There’s a long wooden shack to the left, operating as a bar, and to the right, trees next to the canal, adorned with lights.

At the far end of the open-air tent is a DJ booth with the same homemade look, and behind that booth, the wide expanse of the river with the last of the sunlight casting the buildings on the far bank in an orange-red glow.

The music is pumping - crisp, booming, thuds and beats interspersed with fragments of melody and vocals. People are milling around at the back of the tent, but at the front they’re moving their bodies in semi-unison, in time with the beats, feet stamping, bodies gyrating, some with arms aloft.

I order a beer, and find myself smiling as I head towards the throng in front of the DJ. Before I have time to think or pause, I am moving to the beat, my feet moving of their own accord. Soon I find myself moving deeper into the crowd, noticing some urge to be more submerged, more lost in the middle.

There’s no inner dialogue now. Just movement.

Time passes. I don’t know how much. I glance at my watch and momentarily the trance is broken.

Now the interior dialogue returns. Fucking hell, look at you! You’ll be 50 next year, and here you are going clubbing on your own for the first time in your life! Good on you lad, good on you… And look, you don’t care how you look or how you’re dancing, you used to be so self-conscious - but now you know. Now you know that no-one is looking at you, no-one cares, no-one is judging you….

As I smile at this stream of commentary, my body has a mind of its own. It is just moving, incessantly, rhythmically, naturally, in response to something I can’t fully perceive. It knows. It has muscle memory, memory that precedes me. My smile widens.

The crowd is thickening as more people arrive for the final set of the party. There’s some bumping and jostling, and the occasional hand on my shoulder, and someone moves past me. At some point, there are fire dancers and people dressed as alien figures.

The beat is intensifying. I notice myself and the crowd responding, and I look at these DJs, there in their ramshackle pulpit, casting out beats and harmonies for the massed worshippers, lost in their own magic.

Who are these DJs, I wonder, other than modern-day shamans, druids and priestesses, conduits for the rhythms that live inside all of us?

The crowd is in mild frenzy now, as we ascend towards the climax. We’re a pulsing mass, almost singular, allowing ourselves to be absorbed as we give ourselves over to the shared sounds. Even if I’d never been clubbing before, this would not be a new experience; it could only be a remembering.

When I get home an hour or so later, there’s a particular sense of aliveness in me, an energy I’ve brought back. I find myself wondering why I haven’t done this more often.

I’m exchanging messages with Lucy and tell her about my night. I tell her I think we should go clubbing together when she gets back. She replies immediately:

‘Oh my god. Finally.’

What is this, this bizarre urge I’m feeling? I’m a middle-aged man, close to 50, a father; a man who now generally prefers to spend his time lost in books or in the outdoors. But I know what it is, and you know too. Somewhere inside, we all know. It’s the call of the beat.

Dancing pre-dates modern civilisation. As far back as 6,000 years ago, perhaps even further into pre-history, cave paintings and archaeological artefacts depict humans dancing. Why would early humans dance when it expends so much precious energy, in a time when food and shelter required significant work?

Sociology and science tell us some of the answers. Our own hearts tell us the rest. Dancing, like music, serves purposes that are beyond rationality, beyond our modern ideas of productivity and efficiency. Perhaps the primary purpose or instinct was as a means of social connection, a bond formed through moving in unison to a shared beat or sound.

This basic need to move our bodies together then becomes the foundation for other purposes crucial to the business of being human: spiritual and religious rituals to mark important events (like harvest or sunset); celebrations like victory in battle, a birth or a death; a means of healing to ward off death or sickness; and, perhaps most in opposition to the modern fixation on productivity, as a means of self-expression that transcends language (‘transcend’ of course, is the root meaning of the modern dance music known as ‘trance’, the idea that the intentional movement to particular sounds can lead to transcendent experiences).

The Malinke people of West Africa have a culture of rhythm. Daily life, including tasks like milling flour, are considered a form of ‘foli’, the Malinke word for rhythm. This short documentary by two Dutch filmmakers shows modern life in Malinke villages, where the notion of foli is essential and natural, rather than optional. As one of the elders proclaims, “Everything is rhythm!”

What we have done with this essential human act is revealing. My mind often returns to the acid house and rave scene that swept the UK in the mid-80s and on into the 90s. Across the country, young people were using derelict buildings or empty fields to organise parties where they would dance all night, watching the sun come up together, much like their early ancestors.

The institutional and political response to this was stark and brutal. Margaret Thatcher, who famously declared there was no such thing as society, said in response to the growing rave scene, “If this is a new ‘fashion’ we must be prepared for it and preferably prevent such things from starting.”

The parties were criminalised with armies of police raiding warehouses and fields, often with high degrees of physical brutality. This was all very reminiscent of the police violence enacted against striking miners just a few years before, as brilliantly explored in Jeremy Deller’s film ‘Everybody In The Place’.

At the time, the prevailing narrative pushed by the government was that the use of illegal drugs was their concern, but since then, publicly released government memos show that, in fact, they were more concerned about noise pollution, as per this Cabinet Office memo: “Drugs are not the main issue. The parties are a form of unlicensed public entertainment for which people buy tickets. What is needed is a way of hitting at the profits made by the organisers. This should discourage the craze.”

It is also now known that another force behind the swift and vicious response from those in power was the alcohol lobby who had seen their sales plummet overnight. No matter that nighttime violence across UK towns and cities had also plummeted, the beer and spirit makers wanted their profits back.

The UK rave movement itself had partly arisen from the ruins of deindustrialisation and a sense, particularly amongst young people, of wanting to feel and express joy amidst the social decay. As Deller notes in his film, in organising raves in disused factories and steelworks, these youngsters were in a sense dancing on the graves of their ancestors.

John Major, Thatcher’s successor as Prime Minister, continued the obsessive war on raves, with his 1994 Criminal Justice Act which specifically targeted music with a “repetitive beat”.

What has happened since then is what has happened to so much culture in the UK. It was first criminalised, then sanitised, then privatised, repackaged and sold. Not just the parties and the music, but the essential social fabric that they had grown from: land and property rights.

In short, the neoliberal project initiated by Thatcher scorched the earth across the UK, leaving behind a more bland, homogenous cultural landscape designed for profit extraction. Not just music venues, but pubs, playgrounds, green spaces, empty industrial sites. Berlin, with its Clubcommission, has miraculously, for now, held on to this culture, which is why I was able to go to a scruffy yet vibrant club, on a whim, for little money.

In the UK, meanwhile, anywhere that could have been used for spontaneous and free-spirited public gathering, whether dancing or otherwise, has now all but vanished.

This is not new. In the 17th century, with the twin forces of capitalism and organised religion shaping class and power relations, the government began to outlaw anything that could weaken or challenge their authority. The academic and writer Silvia Federici describes this new push: “an attack was launched against all forms of collective sociality and sexuality including sports, games, dances, ale-wakes, festivals, and other group-rituals that had been a source of bonding and solidarity among workers.” They burned witches, and they wanted to torch anything that looked like freedom and collective power outside their control.

If we remind ourselves of the biological meaning of culture, as the medium in which something grows and develops, it is worth considering what sort of world we would have without art, without music, song and dance. If we could not move our bodies in response to sounds we have created, imagine how this might shrink our capacity for expression.

Dancing has long been a form of protest, a way to signal refusal to surrender, to galvanise, to energise and even to ridicule oppressors, with perhaps the most well-known form being the Māori Haka from New Zealand, a dance ritual that has stirred emotion in people all over the world despite having no connection to the people it originates from.

The toyi-toyi protest dance from Southern Africa was part of the uprisings against oppression in Zimbabwe and South Africa, a mixture of march, dance and song. In modern Germany, there is the Tanzdemo (dance protest) with dance as a form of activism, itself originating from the early 90s rave scene. In Los Angeles, krumping became a form of powerful yet non-violent physical expression in the 1990s and was seen during the BLM movement in response to police violence.

Authoritarians, of course, have an unusually strong hatred of things like dancing. Why? Because it represents, in visceral, embodied form, things that they cannot abide: freedom, love, connection, play. The very nature of dance is an activity that takes energy but, in their worldview, has no productive purpose or outcome. It is frivolous, pointless, feminine.

It is also subversive and defiant. A person dancing is someone who experiences the world and themselves as much more than productive labour and the individual accumulation of wealth. A dancer is moving for the sake of it, in response to a deeper urge, opening themselves up to something shared and communal, something that has defined what it means to be human since our earliest time as a species.

“Compared with linear walking, straight ahead, the convoluted movement of dancing represents a luxury; it escapes the achievement-principle entirely.”

— Byung-Chul Han

Even those in power who would see themselves as benign, caring and relatable have an aversion to dancing for the same reasons. You hardly ever see them dance because they are so disembodied and detached from any self-expression that is not carefully scripted, managed and projected.

Because of this extreme self-consciousness, they are terrified of how they would appear to others if they were to dance, what it might reveal, and how they would certainly be mocked by other powerful people.

And that is where the power of dancing lies, in our ability to express ourselves individually and collectively, without caring what anyone else thinks, without fear and self-consciousness, without doubt or purpose.

There are few things more frightening to an oppressive regime than people who express themselves for the sake of it, shouting with their bodies from the primal, beautiful place that everything truly good and human originates from.

About me.

I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.

Contact me to: 

• Make sense of what’s going on with you, your work and your life through my coaching practice.*

• Make sense of what’s going on in your organisation through group work, workshops and strategy sessions.

• Have a real conversation.

At the heart of my work is helping individuals and organisations to figure out what is really going on.

You can also find out more about my work with men & masculinity here.

*I’m taking on one new coaching client. I work with people who are looking to make sense of themselves, their lives and their work, and make extraordinary changes. If that’s you, get in touch, I’d love to chat.

Share

[main image, my own captured at Ipse in Berlin]

Your support means I can spend more time researching and writing this each week, going to more esoteric and interesting places. Thank you.

Subscribe now

“Many groups and organisations have a ‘difficult’, ‘disturbed’ or ‘impossible’ member whose behaviour is regarded as getting in the way of the others’ good work. There may be a widely shared belief that if only that person would leave, then everything would be fine. This view is very attractive, hard to resist and tempting to act upon.”

— Anton Obholzer and Vega Zagier Roberts

In the English market town I grew up in, there was a small Indian Sikh community which my family were part of. Every Sunday we would go to the gurdwara (temple), in a building that used to be a bank and still had echoes of grandness.

The congregation was perhaps a hundred people on a normal day, maybe two hundred for a religious festival, packing the pristine white sheeted floors of the prayer hall. There were always lots of other kids, of all ages, and, after the interminably long service and the langar (the communal meal), we would sometimes run around the large prayer hall and play fight (which is also how my two older brothers happened to break my arm, but that’s another story).

I remember this very fondly (the playing, not the arm break), in part because it felt slightly improper, almost transgressive in such a serious place of worship.

And it was a serious place. Deadly fucking serious. On most Sundays, one of the temple elders would stand and give a long, rambling lecture, seemingly unbothered by the back-aching service we had just sat through and the stifling temperatures (it was always too hot inside regardless of the season).

This talk was not a sermon; the priest had already given one of those. This was one of a handful of men on the temple committee who, knowing he had an audience as captive as a group of prison inmates, would take it upon himself to speak about the ills and sins of our society, usually directed at the youth in the community - me and my young peers. I’d like to say I listened without judgment, but mostly I sat there thinking “I wish this prick would shut up so I can have my lunch.”

What I came to find intriguing about this whole scene was the idea of a committee that was essential to the functioning of the temple, one that seemed to confer immense status on the men who were part of it (and they were always men). They would strut around the temple and the town, chests and chins jutting out slightly, speaking with an assumed authority that even as a kid I found baffling and slightly irritating.

I found this strange little fiefdom even more curious when I learned that there were elections for this committee every few years. And not just elections, but separate parties who would push for control of the temple. Actual separate political parties, warring factions, seeking to run a small temple that served a couple of hundred people on a peak day.

These parties would actually campaign, speaking to people like my mum and dad at the temple and social events, sometimes even knocking on doors to explain their particular philosophy for running the temple; their philosophies are best summarised by that famous lyric from The Who: ‘Meet the new boss / Same as the old boss’. Nothing ever changed, regardless of which party was in charge.

At times, these parties and their ideological differences erupted into open hostility: shouting matches, denunciations, men being restrained. “Ooh, they’ve gone too far now”, some of the adults would say, and my siblings and I would often reflect that the whole fucking thing went too far a long time ago.

I naively assumed all this would fade away once my parents’ generation had to relinquish control as they grew older and passed away. Instead, most of that old guard merely handed down this unnecessarily divisive political system to their sons, who are now the temple elders and are themselves in the process of handing this over to their sons. Some of the old guard are still there, clinging to their meaningless power like daft elderly knights protecting the ruins of a castle.

Looking back, I remember observing these men who obviously appeared physically huge to me as a child and were often of a large stature even by adult standards, over six feet and with broad chests - yet I felt them to be somehow quite small at the same time. There was something I found shrunken and petty about their desire to tightly control our small community, like children fighting over an ant hill.

And how completely misguided. It was a community that, at its best, thrived on love, co-operation and respect rather than rigid orthodoxies. By the end of my childhood, this atmosphere of the collective had faded significantly, replaced by gossip, individualism, self-interest and greed.

There are many reasons for this decline in communitas, but one of them for sure was a petty and toxic desire for control amongst those who had claimed power.

Does any of this sound familiar?

There is a cultural obsession with hierarchy and status that feels unique to the British and to Indians, perhaps entwined by their colonial history. I often joke that you could bring a group of Indians together to do something as simple as make a cup of tea and within minutes, some of them would form a committee and a few minutes later someone would announce an opposing committee.

The fact that these political parties fighting over a small temple even formed in the first place was perhaps the very beginning of my interest in groups and the psychology that forms between the people within them. What happens when several humans join together in some way goes far beyond the sum of their psyches; something larger, more complex and largely invisible exerts an influence on the individuals within the group.

Consider a typical romantic relationship, in which two people bring their love and desire for each other but also all of their baggage, their small and large fears and anxieties, their expectations, their entrenched ideas about things like money and emotions, some of which are deeply embedded since childhood. These will be tested and triggered in a variety of ways as their relationship deepens, from who pays for a meal to how they should raise children.

This requires some work for the relationship to be sustained and grow, whether given the label of ‘work’ or not. Each of the couple will need to become conscious of what they are bringing and how it impacts their relation to the other, as well as what they are collectively creating between them- the third entity of the relationship, which can contain something that is not wholly of either of them. Multiply these dynamics by several more people, and you begin to see the inherent challenges of both leadership and building culture in an organisation.

Anywhere there is a group of people that has come together, they will always be accompanied by the shadow of powerful forces: power, desire, envy, hierarchy, control, fear and more. Most of this will be unconscious, since hardly anyone lives in full consciousness of who they are, what they really want and how they really respond to the world around them.

Some of these will be individual, some will be collective in the sense that they emerge from the group coming together. No matter how well-intentioned or even well-trained people are, this is inevitable. Even highly conscious and self-aware groups of people will participate in unhealthy, dysfunctional and potentially destructive dynamics. Even communities of practising Buddhists have become violent or abusive.

In his early experiments with group psychology, Wilfried Bion did very little other than to bring a group together and then pay attention to what emerged. His accounts are quite fascinating to read. There were challenges to his perceived authority, interpersonal conflict between members of the group, unlikely alliances forming, and hostility towards specific individuals for no apparent reason at all.

From what I’ve heard, some group analysis programmes at the Tavistock continue in this tradition: the group session is opened, the group session is closed, and in between what happens is dictated by the group, with all sorts of strange dynamics playing out.

I’m reminded of ‘Rhythm 0’, the performance art piece by Marina Abramović which she first performed in the 1970s. In it, she stood in a room next to a table with 74 objects of various forms. For six hours, the audience was invited to follow these simple instructions:

There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired.

Performance.

I am the object...

During this period I take full responsibility.

What followed was disturbing and revealing. Gestures were gentle or symbolic at first, but within a couple of hours random members of the public, mostly men, were inflicting violent and perverse acts upon her. As these acts escalated, a group formed around Abramović to prevent her from extreme harm:

‘Faced with her abdication of will, with its implied collapse of human psychology, a protective group began to define itself in the audience. When a loaded gun was thrust to Marina’s head and her own finger was being worked around the trigger, a fight broke out between the audience factions, and the small protective group gathered around her in a circle to protect her.’

The power of the piece for me is how people respond to nothing more than a collection of objects and a passive human. In this liminal space, they reveal their own projections, finding themselves doing previously unthinkable things. The same thing occurs in groups, most visibly in mobs, but also in boardrooms, government offices, even the bland project rooms of consulting firms: decisions and actions that might be unspeakably wrong to outsiders are gradually normalised within the powerful and invisible entity that is the psychology of the group.

In a less visible but still powerful way, I saw this play out in the Sikh temple of my youth, with numerous decisions made that ran counter to the interests of the community and were sometimes harmful in the long-term; yet they were decisions that did serve the interests of the group that made them, the ruling committee, temporarily satisfying their need to feel powerful and important.

The clues to this underlying group psychology are often in seemingly insignificant tics or norms that have formed, revealed in surface-level interactions or challenges. They can be incredibly small and subtle - a tussle over ownership of a document, friction over who deserves more credit for a piece of work, tension in a meeting as two or more people attempt to control the agenda with none of them being honest about (or perhaps even aware of) their intentions.

They can also be larger signs like the desire to expand one’s team or remit solely to project the presence of power and the competing fiefdoms being built within a supposedly joined-up organisation, or a team who jealously guard information or are known for being difficult to deal with by other parts of the organisation.

Perhaps the most familiar example is our own families, where roles and hierarchies are established very early on, sometimes even before we’re born: the parent whose views cannot be challenged, the sibling whose rule-breaking is tolerated because they’re the ‘wild one’, the sibling who is preferred by the parents, the sibling expected to stay quiet and obedient. These are often fixed in place and can be left unquestioned for the rest of our lives or take many years for this unspoken system to be reconfigured.

What is the antidote to the powerful gravity that a group can exert, one that can subvert even our own individual morality and best interests?

How can we harness the power and beauty of the collective without losing our individual judgment and avoiding the extraordinary harm and violence that can emerge?

Imagine an organisation, a group or a family where the members regularly come together to work through whatever needs the light of attention. They meet frequently, sometimes with an agenda, sometimes not, but always they meet to be in relationship with each other and to keep cleaning up whatever needs to be attended to, akin to opening windows to air the house and cleaning the dust in the dark corners where it will have accumulated out of sight.

Imagine these gatherings being not to work on the external goals of the group - growth, profit, or anything else - but to work on the group itself. Imagine a community or country of people doing this.

This should not sound revelatory or far-fetched, yet this is the work most commonly neglected in organisations of all kinds. It is often assumed that a mission, values, a set of policies, processes and employment contracts can do most of the work of ensuring that a group of people operate well together; that they will build strong, trusting and honest relationships with each other enabling them to pursue a common goal and work through all of the tensions, dysfunction and stress that inevitably occur along the way - because of some words on pieces of paper or a weekly team lunch.

It is also the work most commonly neglected in any group of people: a family, a friendship group, a community, a political system.

Amongst all the other things that need to get done in a busy group of people in cultures that fundamentally prioritise output and external results over everything else, it is not hard to see why this sounds like a luxury or even a pointless exercise - but, paradoxically, this open-ended and relational work is in fact the foundation for everything a group of people would hope to achieve together.

This may sound fantastical, but these practices exist and are actually very simple, practices that have been used for centuries all over the world. My good friend and colleague, Dave Bingham, has been doing this work for many years in all sorts of settings from organisations to high-security prisons, continuing in a long lineage that has served people everywhere.

The real work of any group and individual within it is to be able to work towards something without losing their humanity; to pursue a shared goal without losing sight of what is most important of all, the flourishing and protection of life.

About me.

I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.

Contact me to: 

• Make sense of what’s going on with you, your work and your life through my coaching practice.*

• Make sense of what’s going on in your organisation through group work, workshops and strategy sessions.

• Have a real conversation.

At the heart of my work is helping individuals and organisations to figure out what is really going on.

You can also find out more about my work with men & masculinity here.

*I’m taking on one new coaching client. I work with people who are looking to make sense of themselves, their lives and their work, and make extraordinary changes. If that’s you, get in touch, I’d love to chat.

Share

[main image, from sparksresearch.com]

Your support means I can spend more time researching and writing this each week, going to more esoteric and interesting places. Thank you.

Subscribe now

“From the moment that they form part of a crowd the learned man and the ignoramus are equally incapable of observation.”

— Gustave Le Bon

“Unfortunately, although naturally clever, human beings are not innately wise, especially in crowds.”

— William Ophuls

It is 75 years since Solomon Asch conducted his now famous experiments into social conformity. In the most well-known variation of these experiments, he invited eight people into a room, where they were shown a pair of cards: one card had a single black line on it, and the other had three black lines of different lengths.

Each person was asked to identify which of the three lines was the same as the single line. The group were shown eighteen pairs of cards.

There are two details that made this a deeply insightful experiment. First, on each of the cards with three lines, it was obvious which line correctly matched the other card, so the right choice was quite evident.

Second, only one person in the group was a real test subject. The other seven of the eight people were stooges: Asch had briefed them all to deliberately give the wrong answer.

Asch repeated these experiments multiple times with different groups. What he found was that despite knowing the right answer (which line matched), a significant proportion of people (36%) would override their own judgment and answer incorrectly. In his subsequent interviews and research, he found that the test subjects did not want to defy the group and stand out - they preferred to conform to the group norm, which they assumed must be right.

And that was the point of the experiment - to test the power of social norms and pressure to conform, even when not made explicit. Unlike many other well-known social science experiments, Asch’s conformity tests have been repeated over time with similar results.

Asch’s reasoning, which intuitively chimes, is that we override our own perception in order to fit in; we seek to avoid being different in a group to ensure we are accepted and safe within it. We will go as far as rejecting our own judgment in order to avoid risking our place in a group of other people.

There are understandable fears attendant to this: fear of being wrong, fear of punishment or shame, and ultimately, fear of rejection.

So we go along with things.

I have gone along with things many times. And if I were to plot those choices against my overall sense of contentment, peace and joy, I would say there’s a strong inverse relationship.

In the early part of my career, I was often engaged in work I didn’t believe in or cultures that felt wrong in a way I couldn’t quite articulate yet felt very clearly. But I looked around, saw everyone else getting on with it, and attempted to do the same.

It worked for a while, and I don’t mean weeks or months. I spent years ignoring my own judgment, intuitions and even embodied reactions to environments, people and behaviour that I knew was wrong. Eventually it caught up with me, and eventually I began to make more conscious choices. But it was a costly lesson to learn.

We all like to think of ourselves as perceptive, conscious and sovereign individuals making free choices. But this is not only a dangerous fantasy; at some level we are all aware of this delusion.

Have you ever been in a bar or restaurant and changed what you were going to order after hearing what others in your group have ordered?

Have you ever not voiced an opinion in the presence of a group once you’ve realised everyone else has a different view - and you feel it would put you in opposition to everyone else?

Have you ever gone along with a decision or course of action, perhaps at work or in your family, having initially disagreed with it, but assumed it must be right if everyone else wants to do it?

Have you ever been to see a film or a gig, formed an opinion about it, and then found yourself saying something different once you heard what others had to say?

This is the great paradox of over a century of individualism: we are free to make our own choices but only insofar as they are choices falsely presented to us as free by people in power, and choices that are themselves limited in their scope. We cannot choose what we cannot see. And we are at the mercy of the influence of the masses, like a stampede of panicking cattle.

It is in this way that we can easily make choices that act against our best interests: who we vote for, who we give power to, who we work for, who we owe money to, what we are willing to accept in our society. We look around, see that no-one else is really doing anything other than an occasional grumble in the pub, and on we go. Maybe I should just get on with it, we tell ourselves.

Systems, no matter how harmful or vicious, persist and entrench their power when no-one questions them.

It is this lack of consciousness, en masse, that has led us to where we are. Some people - and I am one of them - believe the current state of the world is not best summarised as a poly-crisis, a political crisis, an environmental crisis or a sociocultural crisis, but as a spiritual crisis.

Remarking on our consumerist culture and pollution of the planet, Joanna Macy once said that we cannot throw something away because there is no such place as ‘away’. We are merely sending our discarded waste to some other part of our home.

We don’t believe or recognise this because of our level of consciousness. We do not see ourselves as unavoidably and necessarily entangled in an ecosystem, a complex web of all life on a single planet, that we are routinely and progressively destroying. Even when presented with the evidence that we’re poisoning ourselves, we do not stop polluting our water and food sources, partly because everyone else seems fine with it.

It is why the term ecocide feels so appropriate to me. What other animal deliberately destroys its own habitat to the extent of risking extinction?

Part of being a healthy, well-developed adult is being able to locate ourselves within a group - able to participate and, to some extent, give up our sovereignty whilst not completely losing our identity, morality or ability to make judgments. Truly healthy groups of healthy people are able to hold radically different viewpoints with independence of thought, without descending into chaos, and in fact, thriving because of it.

The blame does not lie with us as individuals, but the work must start there; it can only start there. That’s the unfortunate truth of it, and if we are to become real adults, we have to accept the inequities and unfairness of a predicament like this.

As any parent will know, this is the sort of thing you have to explain to kids for them to grow up: sometimes you need to act to solve a problem you didn’t create; sometimes life presents you with things that seem unfair but still have to be done - by you. That’s the way life can be, so you have to act according to your intellect, your morals and your conscience.

And one thing you would never encourage a child to do is to blindly follow the crowd.

About me.

I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.

Contact me to: 

• Make sense of what’s going on with you, your work and your life through my coaching practice.*

• Make sense of what’s going on in your organisation through group work, workshops and strategy sessions.

• Have a real conversation.

At the heart of my work is helping individuals and organisations to figure out what is really going on.

You can also find out more about my work with men & masculinity here.

*I’m taking on one new coaching client. I work with people who are looking to make sense of themselves, their lives and their work, and make extraordinary changes. If that’s you, get in touch, I’d love to chat.

Share

[main image, from manarch]

Your support means I can spend more time researching and writing this each week, going to more esoteric and interesting places. Thank you.

Subscribe now

“Our fear is no longer a fear of death but of change and mutilation.”

— Sven Holm

“I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”

— Emily St. John Mandel

As the third morning dawns, the crowd are still going strong in the bar. Their numbers have actually swelled, all of them oblivious to what was coming. Well, almost all of them.

The noise inside is relentless, a cacophony. Speaker systems and screens blare thousands of different types of sound: every musical genre you can think of (and more besides), adverts, programmes, speeches, sound effects, and amidst it all, screams. The walls and floor shook from the continuous and ever increasing drone.

“Stick the usual in there,” bellows the fat man, as he places his glass on the bar, his eyes lingering on the barmaid.

The barmaid grimaces before, with great effort, sculpting a smile on to her face. “Cyanide with piss?” she says.

“Excuse me?” shouts the fat man, leaning over the bar and straining to hear above the music and general cacophony. His cheeks are ruddied and glistening, chin slightly damp with saliva.

“Gin and tonic?” says the barmaid.

“Perfect!” says the fat man with a wink. The fat man doesn’t actually look all that fat. Not on the outside.

She fixes his drink and places it on the counter, collecting the fresh notes that the fat man has dropped there. The fat man gives her another glassy-eyed leer and wanders back into the throng before she can offer him change.

The barmaid turns to the old guy sitting at the end of the bar. He’s sat facing the wall opposite, the door to his left, the pulsing throng of the bar further to his right.

“How are you doing, John?” asks the barmaid.

John stares at the wall. At least he seems to, his eyes are obscured by dark glasses. Long strands of white hair dangle from beneath his woolly hat.

The old man pauses and lifts a gnarled hand to scratch his beard as if thinking about the question. “I’m alive,” he says.

“Can I get you anything?”

“Nope,” says the old man, tapping the rim of his clay cup where a strange steam rises gently from within.

Further into the belly of the bar, bodies thrash around in a viscous frenzy. Spittle, sweat, liquor, poison and more have coagulated into a greasy gum on the floor. It stuck first to shoes, then splattered higher up around socks, calves, sometimes as high as the knee, where it has burned skin.

Across the dancefloor (which is almost the whole space), groups of hollow-eyed, hairless men are in a frantic unison, marching at a hundred beats per minute. Their silk neckties swing across their dress shirts, which are sodden with sweat. Their discarded suit jackets and gilets are now a mere mush on the floor, becoming part of the foul slush on the floor.

An acrid smell surrounds them as the soles of their feet burn; none of them knows how to stop. None of them knows this dance.

Snaking between these groups are columns of plastic women, on an endless circuit of the floor, their mobile devices held in front of them, capturing them, capturing the scene, capturing it all, every moment, always. They strut in agony, but their perfect smiles never waver, their brilliant teeth always dazzling.

The fat man is heading for the back of the bar. For right at the back of the strangely cavernous space, there are small booths, separated by velvet ropes and curtains so that the inhabitants can only be seen in glimpses. Behind those booths are others that can’t be seen at all, cocoons embedded in the walls.

Every now and then, in the front booths, hands can be seen moving. Plump, fleshy, tanned hands, glinting with adornments. They move in secret and furtive gestures, exchanging things, grabbing things, shaking things.

People enter the booths periodically, sometimes summoned, sometimes choosing to enter with impossibly white smiles. None of them ever leaves again.

The fat man hovers around the outside of the booths with other fat men who also don’t look all that fat. They drink, and snort, and chuckle, not one of them telling the truth.

Some of the fat men lean against iron cages that are scattered around the dance floor. The women crouching inside these cages come in all varieties. Some are very young, some are very old. The ones who have been there longest look dishevelled, their clothes tattered and filthy. The newer ones scream and clutch at the bars; the older ones are mostly silent. They have given up. Instead, they simply watch and point.

The dancing continues everywhere, somehow it never lessens, always intensifies. How can it get more frantic? Yet it does, a frenzy of violent movement, so fast, so blurred that it becomes hard to distinguish the individual people. Moisture flies off their bodies and instantly sizzles in the air. Sweat - no, not just sweat, but the very water and liquid from their organs. A few spray only blood.

Food is constantly brought to the floor. Automated machines anticipate needs and glide around with cartons of semi-organic matter, some of which is devoured and the rest is dropped to the floor, where it joins the thickening toxic sludge. Faces are smeared with this food, the fuel consumed as quickly as possible. The eaters shit where they stand, blissfully unaware of their befouling.

From within a deep crack in the wall, a child in rags scampers out to gather some of these scraps of food. She stuffs discarded crusts into her filthy vest, along with shreds of meat, half-eaten dishes, takeaway cups of various shakes and sweet drinks. One or two of the fat men aim a kick at her, but mostly no one notices. The girl rapidly retreats to the dark hole where several pairs of hungry eyes await her.

The screens continue to blare, excruciatingly loud now. Some people bleed from their ears but do not notice, or notice but do not care. The sound is worth the pain. The sound is needed. The sound is vital to them.

Amongst them all, somehow untouched, wander a man and a woman. They walk separately and silently, their paths never crossing as they weave through the chaos and melee all around. Their bodies are naked and unadorned, their hair long and pristine white.

Their feet squelch in the mulch underfoot but remain untouched by the poisonous waste. As they make their infinite and careful strides, their gazes fall on no one in particular, their eyes cast downwards and ahead. They weep. Endlessly, they weep.

Outside the bar, there is a howling wind. It has been growing louder, wailing like a banshee, a typhoon hurling the elements at the outside of the bar, but no one can hear it.

Or can they? John smiles to himself as another ferocious gust batters the front of the bar. Is that a crack in the window he sees? Some dust and debris fall in front of the old man’s face, landing in his lap. His grin becomes a small chuckle, not of amusement but resignation.

One of the hairless marching men bursts into flames. He screams as his shoes and trousers first catch fire, the conflagration fuelled by the booze and oily coagulant on his clothes, and spreading instantaneously to his torso, engulfing his head. His mouth gapes open in a now silent scream, yet his march continues, keeping time with the others as flames devour his body.

And still they keep dancing.

The door to the bar suddenly swings open. Gusts of wind rush in from the deep darkness outside. From the gloom, a tall woman, Amazonian in stature, steps in, shaking rain off her coat. Each drop is a different colour, a kaleidoscopic shower.

She surveys the scene in front of her for a few seconds. John nods towards her. And then she speaks.

“You have to get out,” she says, her voice deep and firm, arising as if from a canyon.

No-one notices. She repeats herself. “You have to get out.”

Still, there is no reaction. The woman takes a heavier breath - and then bellows, her voice a banshee.

“YOU HAVE TO GET OUT - NOOOOOOWW.”

The dancing, the noise, the frenzy continues. Not a single person turns in her direction. Except the barmaid who looks quizzically in her direction, and John, who meets her gaze.

“You?” says the tall woman to John.

He shakes his head sadly and taps the rim of his cup. The woman looks once more at the mass of the bar and then turns on her heel. As she opens the door, animals from around the bar rush out into the howling tempest: dogs, cats, mice, rats, birds. A few snakes slither out in a hurry. And then the door slams shut again.

The fat man returns to the bar for another drink. The party is undisturbed. The party goes on. The party must go on.

Outside, a vast and unfeeling void awaits, indifferent to the bar and the patrons. It just waits.

About me.

I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.

Contact me to: 

• Make sense of what’s going on with you, your work and your life through my coaching practice.*

• Make sense of what’s going on in your organisation through group work, workshops and strategy sessions.

• Have a real conversation.

At the heart of my work is helping individuals and organisations to figure out what is really going on.

You can also find out more about my work with men & masculinity here.

*I’m taking on one new coaching client. I work with people who are looking to make sense of themselves, their lives and their work, and make extraordinary changes. If that’s you, get in touch, I’d love to chat.

Share

[main image, ‘Deep’ by Mario Sanchez Nevado]

Your support means I can spend more time researching and writing this each week, going to more esoteric and interesting places. Thank you.

Subscribe now

A kind of travel journal, written on my phone so excuse typos etc.

Friday

We arrived at a campsite in Bourg Saint Andeol last night where we’re staying for two days. The cabin I’ve booked has no air conditioning and it was over 30C today.

At night time, it hadn’t cooled down much and felt hotter inside than outside which left us with choice of windows open and an open invite to mosquitoes, or windows closed and bake. We opted for the former.

We lay in bed, hot and exhausted, finding humour in it all:

“Is your pillow like a balloon? I feel like I’m sleeping on bubble wrap.”

“You mean you don’t like sleeping on plastic sheets after a day of cycling in scorching heat?”

(Laughing)

“I’m off to get my PVC duvet.”

(More laughing).

A few minutes later. “It’s like sleeping in a Tupperware box.”

(Giggling.)

We eventually fall into an uncomfortable sleep. In the middle of the night, I wake up cold and pull random items of clothes out of my rucksack to keep me warm. I have to do this several times, and when I finally wake up, feeling like I haven’t slept at all, I notice there’s a thick blanket next to my bed.

We’re taking a rest day today. We do as little as possible with a toddler, making a picnic lunch, going to the swimming pool, playing cards (we manage to teach Ren a simple version of Uno). It’s a refreshing change to not have to pack or leave or be on the move, although I notice myself almost wishing we were.

This morning, a gardener is trimming the grass on the campsite with a handheld mower. He’s under a tree and the grass is very dry, so clouds of dirt are billowing up from the parched earth which is then caught in the sunlight between the tree branches. It creates a surreal scene, as if he’s surrounded by dozens of beams of light coming up from the ground.

Saturday

The weather can solely determine the nature and mood of a cycling day. So far on this trip, we’ve had a tailwind at our backs from the north. Today our luck changed.

The moment we leave the campsite, heading south again, we’re met with a persistent gust. It’s perhaps only 15-20km per hour in strength but this makes all the difference when your average speed is 15km per hour. We were in for a grind.

It reminds me of a day many years ago on the Californian coast. On that occasion, somewhere near Brookings, we were heading south into a 20mph headwind that lasted all day and was coupled with a route that included long hills. It was eased somewhat by the sight of Pacific breakers breaking onshore to our right and dense gigantic redwoods to our left.

We’re soon in farmland again. Somewhere to my right in the trees, there’s a manic and high pitched birdsong that I’ve never heard before.

Soon after that, there’s giant agricultural machinery, a row of crop sprayers with their enormous stanchions and wheeled towers controlled by radar. The giant truck-treaded wheels are stationary and coated in thick sandy dust. It reminds me of rust belt America.

We’ve seen a lot of agriculture in this part of France, perhaps no surprise next to a river as old and reliable as the Rhône. Today we see long fields of pumpkins, tomatoes, corn, berries, peaches and pears. There’s also sunflowers, some greeting us like perky and upright sentries, and others turning their faces away from us and drooping in the heat, as if ashamed - or dying.

We take a coffee stop next to a Saturday morning village market. We try teaching Ren the French for thank you very much. He repeats it back: “Merci baboo.” Close enough.

As we set off again, we notice the air has thickened even more and there’s a smell of rain in the air. As we cross back over an old bridge, the headwind suddenly makes sense: half the sky to the south is covered in angry purple grey clouds. I can see rain falling over the hills on the horizon. A storm is on the way to us.

Turning south, the headwind whips into us again, whistling in my ears. With the load I’m towing, it’s hard riding. We decide to try to make it to the next town and we get to a small supermarket on the outskirts just as the rain arrives. Two cyclists, a German couple, are already sheltering inside.

We make some cheese and salad sandwiches and sit on the floor outside the covered entrance, watching as the thunder and lightning get closer and stronger.

Suddenly the rain is teeming down, bouncing off the tarmac. As always, the metallic smell in the air takes me straight back to childhood. Ren is watching with us and eating one of the delicious local peaches, juice dripping down his chin.

Another cyclist arrives and takes shelter, a young guy on what looks like a homemade and semi-motorised bike. He’s wearing a skateboarding helmet and pulling a ramshackle wooden trailer behind him, and on his handlebars there’s an EU flag and a small bunch of flowers.

As the centre of the storm arrives, a lightning bolt hits something in the car park in front of us, either a car or a power box. The thunder that accompanies it is deafening. My toes tingle and I feel the windows of the supermarket reverberate behind me.

The temperature has dropped but it’s still sticky and hot. The rain intensifies, small rivers now flowing through the car park.

We need to wait this out. Lucy buys a box of ice creams from inside and we share them with the other cyclists. Customers try to dodge the deluge as they rush into the supermarket from their cars, most of them smiling at us with a hello or wishing us luck.

People have been messaging me about the wildfires in Spain and France, checking that we’re ok. I don’t know what they mean so go online and check the news which I find disturbing in all sorts of ways. Fortunately I don’t have time to swell on it today.

After an hour or so, there’s a break in the weather and everyone begins to pack their kit up. We wish the others good luck and set off.

The sun has broken through again and the roads give off clouds of steam. It’s cooler but only briefly and soon it’s hot and humid again. From nowhere we’re caught in a rain shower which threatens to soak us but only lasts ten minutes or so, enough to make us wet as well as sweaty.

The headwind has eased so we make good time towards Orange. Ren and I sing songs together and every time we go under a bridge we whoop and roar for the echo effect.

It ends up being an easy end to the day although Lucy isn’t feeling well and has battled through it.

Later, I’m heading to the grocery store in the centre Orange and walk down a weathered and quaint looking shopping street. As I pass one of the shops, I hear music from a speaker, a jazzy American cover version of ‘Your Song’ by Elton John. A few metres after the shop I realise I can still hear the song, as if it’s following me. I reach the end of the street and I can still hear it, now feeling like a strange soundtrack to my walk. I realise then that there’s small speakers above the shops along the whole street, all playing the same song.

Later we watch the thunderstorms roll in again. The sky is streaked with lightning and it pours down once more. Ren is transfixed by it.

Sunday

A rest day in Orange today. We have a slow start to the morning - coffee, breakfast, some games. There’s some troubling news about illness in our extended family which we talk about.

Lucy still feels unwell and needs some rest so Ren and I head out together. We’ve walked for five minutes when he declares he’s hungry and fortunately we’ve just arrived in a pretty little square in the centre of town, lined by cafes and restaurants and shaded by plane trees.

A restaurant owner gives us a friendly hello and manages to coax a high five out of Ren. I initially tell him we’re going to check out some options for lunch but then I wonder why I’d bother and we take a table. We play a little Uno and then Ren has a pizza while I drink coffee.

The men serving us are unfailingly friendly. Ren finishes with an ice cream, we settle up and make it five metres before he spots a little merry go round. I part with three Euros and he jumps into a mini fire engine for a few minutes.

He asks for a playground next so we head a few minutes out of the centre to a small one which has hardly any shade and little to play with. It has a slightly sad quality to it for me but Ren seems happy enough.

There’s two quiet and friendly sisters playing on one of the small structures. Ren wants to go on it but not while they’re there so we stand and wait for a while. We eventually go on the swings instead. He is often very reserved around kids he doesn’t know in public spaces and I find an old frustration rising in me, something I discuss with Lucy later.

There’s so many small judgments to make in parenting and so much of your own shit that needs to be acknowledged and parsed out from the stuff that actually needs addressing.

There’s a huge Roman amphitheatre in the centre of Orange and we visit the small museum next to it. The work of an artist called Albert de Belleroche catches our eye, with an unusual life story starting in Swansea born to French aristocracy, taking in Paris, boxing clubs, Oscar Wilde, Emile Zola and Sussex, before ending in Nottingham.

There’s a piano on the top floor that visitors are encouraged to use. Ren sits down, bangs on the keys and demands that Lucy and I dance, so we oblige with jerky interpretative movements. We remark later that one the joys of being a parent is the permission to act the fool in public and not care one bit - with the afterthought that the permission isn’t actually needed.

Later, after Ren has gone to bed, Lucy and I enjoy a beer on the small concrete balcony attached to our apartment. Across the road, there’s a man who I’ve noticed sits on the tiny corner underneath a tree with two camping chairs. Yesterday his cat was sitting in one, today it’s two older women. As apartment dwellers, I like how they’re using the street as their garden, a very Mediterranean practice.

There are large and loud crow murmurations all around us. They take off and gather again in the various plane trees around us. The cacophonous cawing has a very Hitchcockian feel to it. I wonder what they know.

Monday

Standing on the balcony in the hot early sun this morning, I see a couple, perhaps in their fifties, walking down the street hand in hand. They are both blind or partially sighted and using long sticks to navigate the pavement and roads. When I was younger, I might have felt a misplaced pity, now I feel grateful and reminded of my fortune. Perhaps when I’m older I’ll feel something different again.

Our ride today is only 35km and very flat. We cover over half of it in an hour and stop for lunch in a spot on the riverbank flanked by bamboo, tall grass and water flowers. It’s the first time we actually had chance to be in the Rhône.

I wade in a little to enjoy the water on my feet before we have our picnic. Ren spends some time collecting stones and waving a tall piece of bamboo. It’s even hotter today, somewhere around 36C, still and humid. Uncomfortable now we’re not on the move.

We consider taking a proper dip in the river but then Lucy checks the water quality and reads that it is not advised; the Rhône has been polluted for years by heavy industry along the river and is now partially toxic with various chemicals and heavy metals. We’ve noticed this along our route, dozens of big industrial plants with pipes running into the water: concrete factories, mining, paper mills, automotive parts. Fish from the river is now banned in France. What are we doing??

The rest of the day is almost an anticlimax. We cover the rest of the distance with ease, cruising into Avignon over one of the ancient bridges. We feel a pang of sadness as we return our rental bikes. Being on the move has been the central feature of trip and although it’s nice to know we’ll stay put for a few days, I also notice I already feel a little confined. Almost domesticated.

We celebrate our 280km journey with ice creams in one of Avignon’s very picturesque old squares. There’s dinner later in another old square and afterwards we’re approached by an older French woman with short grey hair who politely asks if she can draw Ren, who is asleep in the trailer. After managing to understand what she’s asking, I say no and she immediately turns on her heel and marches off before shouting a few angry words over her shoulder at me.

It’s a confusing reaction. Lucy thinks she was perhaps just an artist practicing. My instinct is that she would want money for her drawing, but regardless, to me it feels strange to ask to draw a stranger’s sleeping child. Perhaps something was lost in translation.

Tuesday

It’s my turn to be up early with Ren this morning. Our hotel is right on the edge of the old town so as soon as we’re dressed, we head out for a walk. The streets of the old town are very quiet, most shutters still down, some shops and cafes beginning to open. I love walking in a city before it has properly woken up.

We amble around the streets, Ren carrying a balloon which I later swap for a small inflatable beach ball which we kick around the narrow stone streets.

Eventually I find a cafe that’s open and we stop. Usual order - croissant and babycinno for Ren, black coffee for me. We sit outside and play a little Uno. I can feel the sun starting to heat one side of my face as it creeps around the corner of a side street. It’s frighteningly hot already.

There’s quite a few people on old shopper bikes zooming around now, presumably to work. It reminds me of Berlin a little. And there are several people actually walking through the streets with a fresh baguette under their arms.

A young punky looking woman comes out of the cafe just Ren asks if we can play football. I tell him yes, after we finish our drinks. She stops with an exaggerated gesture: “Dude, you’ve made it. This is the life! You finish your -“ She pauses as she peers into Ren’s cup “- steamed milk and then you head off to play football! It doesn’t get any better than this!” We exchange a few laughs although Ren seems oblivious to it all.

We finish up our drinks and head off again, kicking the ball in front us. Being a beach ball, it swerves unpredictably, often into the path of other pedestrians. At least half a dozen of these strangers smile at us and join in with a little kick or flick of the ball. It’s delightful.

Lucy meets us a little further up the road, outside a tarot shop that is next to a Brazilian coffee shop. It’s a narrow street, only a little wider than a vehicle and flanked by tall old buildings. We’re kicking the ball around when we’re joined by a middle-aged French Arab woman and an elderly man, either her father or someone she cares for. Before we know they join in with glee. The elderly man is hunched and moves with difficulty but is grinning and occasionally shouts “Allez! Allez!” Some shopkeepers who know him come out to watch calling his name, Davide.

A couple of minutes later, two French women in their sixties join in. They’re waiting for the coffee shop to open and the ball swerves their way. They pass it back and join the circle in this narrow street increasingly packed with morning commuters and tourists.

Ren is kicking the ball with gusto and to warm encouragement and applause from the adults. At one point, one of the French women attempts to pass it her friend and kicks it straight into her head. They both giggle and carry on. Various passers by join in too, with a few shouts of “Allez Les Bleus!” and laughter.

I’d assumed this would be a brief encounter but it continues for at least fifteen minutes until the coffee shop opens. The two French women wave goodbye and wish us a good day. Davide and the French Arab woman, who speaks a little English and has been ignoring her phone which has been ringing in her handbag, thank us for the game. We thank them too, a unique moment with a group of strangers, all brought together by a makeshift football and a toddler.

There’s more to the day but Lucy and I both agree this is the highlight.

Wednesday

Our last day in Avignon before we leave tomorrow. We’ve taken to this place. It has the rustic charm of southern France without being too flashy and it is endlessly beautiful. Turning any corner can present you with a scene straight out of a postcard: a tiny square with cobbled streets and huge trees, somehow crammed with several bistros and bars doing a roaring trade.

We take a guided tour of the city on a small train that somehow navigates the incredibly narrow streets. Much of it centres on the old papal palace in the centre of the old town. It is mentioned as an aside that people’s homes and windmills were demolished to make space for the palace.

Later in the evening, we have beers in a cave bar by a river that runs between the buildings. It seems to be a hangout for locals so has a buzzy yet laidback vibe to it. We’ve not been there long when the grey haired woman who asked to draw Ren approaches our table. This time she has already done a pen drawing of the three of us. She places it on the table and it’s a nice, simple sketch. The woman doesn’t seem to recognise us.

Lucy has no change in her purse and I’m briefly reluctant after the reaction I had the other day but I fish my wallet out. Were it not for the drawing she’s done and that I’m not in the mood for any hassle, I’d probably not. She very grateful for what I give her and leaves to sit on the kerb sketching again.

She returns a few minutes later, this time with a sketch just of Ren. She hands it over without asking for any money. She heads to her sketching spot again and I notice her approaching other tables.

Half an hour or so later, Lucy and Ren are away from our table when she returns again. This time she has another sketch of the three of us, and she has drawn a decent likeness of my scruffy beard and cap, my gaze into the distance somewhere. I’m about to reach for my wallet when she says in English, “The last one. For free, please.”

I show Lucy when she returns. I’m puzzled by this series of interactions with her and notice I warmed to her after she presented the first drawing. Clearly I misjudged something about her although Lucy points out I was right to assume she might want money. Anyway, it’s nice to be proven otherwise and we have three small hand drawings as souvenirs and a story to remember.

As we leave, she shouts out goodbye from her vantage point. I walk back with Ren to offer her some more money. She reluctantly accepts but is more keen to have a small handshake from Ren to which he obliges.

We’ve left dinner very late this evening but chance upon an Afghan restaurant and the food is delicious. My spinach and rice dish is very similar to Punjabi saag.

The heat is intense, now in the high 30s and stifling. We’ve talked about it a lot and with the wildfires and our general awareness of the accelerating effects of climate breakdown, I can’t help but feel a huge sense of dissonance. At times it even feels strange or wrong to be on holiday, as if we’re pretending there’s not something seriously wrong.

Tomorrow we head back to Lyon. We both agree it’s been an incredible trip, the type of adventure we wanted and full of varied experiences. It has, for me, involved much of what I find enjoyable and essential about good travel: being on the move, being outdoors and in contact with the world, meeting lots of new people, trying different foods, visiting places off the beaten track, and the element of randomness and uncertainty, spanners in the works that make the whole thing that bit more thrilling and memorable.

About me.

I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.

Contact me to: 

• Make sense of what’s going on with you, your work and your life through my coaching practice.*

• Make sense of what’s going on in your organisation through group work, workshops and strategy sessions.

• Have a real conversation.

At the heart of my work is helping individuals and organisations to figure out what is really going on.

You can also find out more about my work with men & masculinity here.

*I’m taking on one new coaching client. I work with people who are looking to make sense of themselves, their lives and their work, and make extraordinary changes. If that’s you, get in touch, I’d love to chat.

Share

Your support means I can spend more time researching and writing this each week, going to more esoteric and interesting places. Thank you.

Subscribe now

A kind of travel journal, written on my phone so excuse typos etc.

Friday

Sitting on the train to the airport, I remember something I read recently that suggested punctuating one’s day with small moments of remembrance of the bigger picture, briefly contemplations that take us away from mundane daily activities - like one’s own death. The moment I do this, I find myself suddenly entranced by the shadows cast on the floor, flitting and moving as the train moves rapidly past the trees outside in the hot July sunshine. ‘One day I will wish I could sit here and observe something so simple’, I think to myself. I instantaneously feel grateful for my fortune and foolish for ignoring life around me for most of my waking hours.

We eat some snacks on the train and I make a pun about eggs which I’m quite pleased with. Lucy doesn’t respond though so I assume she hasn’t heard it and say it again, and I’m met with silence again. A minute later she says “Did you just repeat your joke in case I hadn’t heard it?”, which makes me laugh especially when she remarks that I said it quietly the second time, as if ashamed.

Our flight is delayed and the airport train in Lyon is out of service so we arrive at our apartment much later than planned. Lucy has to collect the key from somewhere inconvenient a short taxi ride away so Ren and I wait outside the apartment, sitting on a bench overlooking the Rhône. It’s almost midnight and I read books to him by the light of street lamps, occasionally pointing to trams on the lit up bridge. Somehow, after nine hours of travelling in sticky heat, he’s still fully awake and in good spirits.

When we finally get into the apartment, the heat is even more intense than outside, and more humid too. It’s a big old apartment block with thick walls and high ceilings but on the fifth floor it feels like a sauna.

There’s two cats in the apartment. Ren is a little hesitant at first. I’m not particularly fond of cats either but that seems to be changing. I squat down and offer my hand to the cat. Ren squats next to me and holds on tightly to my leg. “Hey kitty,” I say gently. The cat comes closer and inspects my hand and arm with her nose.

“See, she’s friendly Ren,” I say, “She’s just smelling me to check I’m safe.”

I’ve no idea where this statement comes from, it’s possibly complete nonsense and I know very little about cats but Ren puts his hand out and the cat sniffs him too. A few minutes later he’s following the cat around the apartment calling “Hey kitty.” The cat looks much more nervous than he does now.

Saturday

Ren is up at his usual time despite going to sleep four hours later than normal. We lift him into our bed and indulge in the fantasy that he’ll have a lie in with us.

After ten futile minutes or so, we’re up. When I enter the kitchen, the floor is so hot that I’m convinced there’s underfloor heating on, and then realise it’s not. It’s just the heat from outside and below. I’m sweating just standing still.

After coffee for us and breakfast for Ren, we encourage a swift exit by promising him a fresh croissant. We’re staying in a neighborhood that seems to have several bakeries and cafes on every street, so shortly after we leave we’re in cafe watching Ren tackle a sticky croissant. We have a taste too; lately Ren has developed the endearing habit of insisting on sharing his food and drink with us.

Outside a local supermarket, there’s a man sitting on the street. Our eyes meet as he asks me, I think, for money. I apologise in my basic French and then inside the supermarket I feel guilty because I know I have some loose change. I fish some coins out and resolve to give them to him when we leave. When we come back out though, the man seems disinterested in us and for some reason I lose my nerve, perhaps worried about insulting him in some way.

After lunch back at the apartment, we attempt to get Ren down for a nap, certain that he must be knackered by now. Instead we spend half an hour tussling in bed in a semi doze. Lucy is playing audio versions of children’s books on her phone, in an attempt to lull Ren to sleep, and I must have dozed off at some point because the stories change, and merge into a weird fever dream where the Gruffalo, Stick Man and a witch all exist in the same place.

We head out for a walk in the old town and Ren ends up sleeping in the bike trailer while we sit and enjoy a beer in an outdoor cafe. We have forty-five minutes of uninterrupted bliss, catching up on life and talking about the excellent books we’re both currently reading. Across the road there’s a flea market and the sounds of jazz and reggae drift over from the vinyl stall as we chat

There’s much more to the day but this time for the two of us and the time we’ve all had together already feel nourishing enough. I almost feel greedy.

Sunday

Bikepacking trips are rarely straightforward, and that is part of the pleasure they offer. Planning for them is essential, but always with the knowledge that you will, at least once during your journey, rip up your plans once you’re on the road due to something completely unforeseen.

Today demonstrates the principle. Our bikes are scheduled for pickup at 11.30 with a short train ride afterwards to avoid a busy main road at the start, meaning we have an hour or so of cycling and should arrive fairly fresh at our B&B mid afternoon. None of those things will happen.

Relieved to leave our boiling hot apartment, we head for a leisurely morning coffee, figuring we can run slightly late to collect our bikes. We are just finishing up at 11.45 when Lucy remembers the bike shop closes for lunch for two hours from 12pm.

So a new plan. Lunch, collect bikes, get on the later train. I book train tickets after three attempts with a glitchy website. Then the guy at the bike shop tells us the train is unlikely to allow our trailer on board.

Another new plan. He recommends an alternative cycling route. “A couple of hills but short ones” he says. “No shade though.” We decide to go for it.

After the inevitable faff of adjusting our bikes and other equipment, we leave the shop at 3pm. We don’t know it but we have over 6 hours of cycling in baking heat ahead of us.

After 50km of gruelling heat and steep hills, we cross the Rhône towards Vienne, feeling somewhat triumphant as the sun begins to dip behind the western hills. We stop on the bridge and I read some messages from our B&B owner who is aghast that we were going to attempt to reach her hilltop property on bikes.

“It’s not possible on bikes,” she says in a message. “Maybe e-bikes but definitely not standard bikes.” I haven’t even mentioned the 80kg of toddler, trailer and luggage we are towing along.

She sends me another message. “Stay there. I’m coming to get you.” Ten minutes later, she arrives in her 4x4, a look of shock on her face as she sees our set up. She even puts her hands to her head in a cartoonishly Gallic gesture.

She has enough boot space for our bags thankfully although not us, our bikes and trailer. Then, translating through phones again, she says “Follow me.”

For the next forty-five minutes, we wind our way up four kilometres of steep hills that would be a challenge with just a road bike but are completely brutal with our added weight at the end of a scorching day. I dare not stop with such a heavy load, it can be fatal on such a taxing hill.

Yet the mood stays light, embellished by stunning red and purple sunset views of the rolling hills of Vienne, and the sound of Ren chattering excitedly into Lucy’s ear from his rear seat, like Yoda on Luke Skywalker’s back. Given she doesn’t do regular long distance cycling, I’m stunned by Lucy’s endurance and strength.

After cresting the very top of the hill, we finally arrive and somehow find the energy to set up Ren’s bed, shower and put him to sleep with one eye on the World Cup final which plays silently in the background. I foolishly stay up for extra time too before falling into a fitful sleep.

Monday

The second day of a bikepacking trip is when it feels like it really starts: your bike is all set up, you know where your kit and clothing is, you begin to get into a groove of morning routines and mealtimes.

We leave mid morning, roll down the steep hill, ringing our bells and whooping. Pretty soon we’re on the cycle path next to the river, blissfully flat and empty. The morning heat is pleasant, almost cool.

It’s a mostly uneventful day cruising along the river and through woodland, except for two things, the first a trivial argument over a luggage strap between me and Lucy which briefly threatened to escalate and become disproportionately affecting.

The second is at a small local bakery where we stop for lunch. As we’re about to leave, one of the two cyclists behind us, a young man, calls out to me in French, wishing us luck I think. When I tell him my French is terrible, he switches to English.

“I love this little constellation you have” he says, gesturing towards our bikes, trailer and Ren, a family on the move.

He asks where we’re from. I tell him England but we live in Berlin. His eyes light up.

“No way! I was born and raised in Berlin!”

“Where?” I ask.

“Kreuzberg.”

“Ha, we live just next to there and he was born in Kreuzberg” I say nodding at Ren.

“No way!”

Lucy chips in with the name of the hospital Ren was born in.

“Me too!” says the young guy, and then adds the delivery room number, a fact he is proud to remember.

It turns out he lives in Switzerland now and is cycling the Via Rhona with his uncle. We chuckle at the serendipity of it. It’s a pleasant exchange, the sort in which there’s an easy warmth because of the shared endeavour we’re participating in.

As we’re about to part for a second time, he says something I don’t quite understand and ask him to repeat.

“Bon route!” he says with big grin. “It means good journey!”

Tuesday

We’re staying in Andancette in an incredible gîte right on the Rhone. It’s a huge old house that has been partially renovated by the owner, who lives in one wing of it and currently has her teenage grandchildren with her. She keeps cockerels and tortoises in her vast and immaculate garden, which also has a swimming pool overlooking the river. There’s a sauna tucked away in one corner. All for less than the price of a budget hotel.

As I’m coming in from the garden last night, something in the gloom of the wide hallway catches my eye. At first I think it is collections of twigs in jars, hundreds of them in an old floor to ceiling wooden display cabinet. As I peer closer, I see miniature wooden sculptures of the crucified Jesus inside a variety of glass bottles in different sizes. I recoil and feel momentarily spooked.

At check out this morning, the owner, a French woman perhaps in her 70s, asks if I’m from India. I tell her my parents were. “I have been to India several times,” she says proudly. And then adds, almost as an aside, “on a motorbike.”

I’m about to ask where in India she’s been to when this last bit registers with me. “On a motorbike??”

“Yes,” she says in her heavily accented English. “I toured around, in Kerala, in Odisha, all over.”

I say something that broadly expresses I think this is fucking cool, and she says “Come, come, I show you something” and this short grandmother leads us to her garage where she shows me her beautiful Royal Enfield motorbike and her other large touring motorbike “just for France”.

Making chit chat as we’re about to leave, Lucy asks her plans for the day. “I’m going to buy some chickens,” she declares. “Yes the foxes have taken some unfortunately. And also I want blue eggs.” Then she adds with a smile. “Because I’m a bit mad.”

This morning a dragonfly hovers ahead of my front wheel for a while, before zipping away again.

Later, I ask Lucy if we had a conversation about cutting our family’s toenails. When she says we didn’t I realise I must have dreamt it. I’m not sleeping well.

Wednesday

Your body does strange things after several days of the same activity. There comes a point where all it wants to do is the main thing you’re doing. On a bikepacking trip years ago, after several days of hard riding that had left us almost crooked and very sore, one of friends said “I feel like my bike is the only place I’m comfortable now.”

And it was true. I’m full of lactic acid and my muscles are so stiff that I feel them when I’m sitting still. But as soon as I mount my bike and start pedalling again this morning, it has a magical effect; the pain vanishes as if my bike and body have been waiting to resume my natural mode.

We leave a small but lovely town called Valence after breakfast, now experts at packing up quickly and efficiently. On the way out of a father is cycling with his two daughters, who look no older than eleven or twelve. All of them have bikepacking bags strapped to their bikes and are spinning along at a steady click. He’s riding behind them and chatting encouragingly, positioned out into the road a foot or so to protect them from traffic. It’s an endearing scene. I wish him good morning as we pass.

We’ve shortened our route today, taking a train from halfway to avoid a road closure and big hill. After 150km of heavy riding, we feel we’ve earned it.

Cruising through some farmland, we see a murmuration of swifts in field of corn up ahead, flying close to the ground. They take off again just as we approach and sweep across the road before looping away to the left again.

After a short train ride, we arrive in Montelimar in time for lunch. At the station Ren and I playfight and chase each other in circles while Lucy finds somewhere to eat.

It occurred to me yesterday that if you’d asked me ten years ago what I wanted my life to look like, I would have described exactly what I’m doing now.

The town has that Mediterranean toasted white sand aesthetic to the buildings and streets, an encouragement to go slow in the heat and enjoy the shade. We chance upon a little Sicilian cafe for lunch and tuck into some delicious food. Ren runs laps around the table asking us to be German ticket inspectors to which we oblige.

There’s a couple who sit down at the table next to us. They seem to have nothing to say to each other but the woman looks over at us frequently and I find myself looking back. She occasionally says something to her partner after looking at us and he speaks quietly back without looking our way even once. It makes me feel uncomfortable and slightly irritated although I’m not entirely sure why.

After lunch, we see cockerels roaming free around the park in the centre of town. Their plumage looks magnificent. The origin of the cockerel as unofficial emblem of France dates back to the Romans and a pun involving ‘gallus’, a Latin word both meaning Gaul and cockerel.

There’s a short visit to the modern art museum to see an exhibition of the work of Nicolas Bouvier, a Swiss artist who travelled through the Levant and Asia in the 1950s ending up in Japan for a while and later New York. Too much to say on that.

Later, as I’m heading back to the hotel to get something, a man in a car park speaks to me in French. I have a sense he asking for money and tell him my French is bad but I can speak English.

“Can you spare a few coins for me and my dog?” he says, in perfect English. I dig out some change from my bag and we chat a little as I’m doing so.

On the way back, I’m about to pass the man again. A small group walk past him and I see he asks them the same thing in French. They shrug that they don’t understand. “Maybe English? Can you spare a few coins for me and my dog?”

One of the group shrugs again and says “German”.

“Ah Deutsch….” says the man with the dog and switches to fluent German.

I don’t see how the rest of this encounter pans out but I’d love to know the story of this guy with a dog.

Thursday

It’s never quiet on the bike. Even away from urban environs and into the green places alongside the river, there’s lots to hear. The cicadas are almost constant in the woodland, at times a cacophony (Ren told them to be quiet at one point).

Then there’s the swishing sound of the tall grass alongside the fields and the thick rustling of the trees in the wind, particularly loud today with a strong easterly that offers some cooling relief from the heat. Every now and then, the familiar chirping of birds in the trees. And of course the comforting sound of a whirring gear cassette on my back wheel.

A sparrow and a pair of dancing white butterflies in front of my wheel today.

We spend the late afternoon looking for a place to dip into the river and eventually chance upon a creek that has runs into the Rhône. With Ren fast asleep in the trailer, we get out of our sticky cycling gear and wade into the middle. There’s water is refreshing although not quite as cool as I hoped.

Small fish immediately cluster around my feet, a few of them taking a little nibble at my skin. It reminds me of a fish spa I went to in Kuala Lumpur, not an experience I enjoyed but this time it feels pleasant.

As I sit back and float with only my head and shoulders above water, a bright green leaf drifts past me. I watch as it gently swerves its way down the stream, moved by invisible currents. I used to spend hours doing this as a kid.

Just ahead of us, two navy blue butterflies flutter just above the surface of the water. As we sit in the river, Lucy and I chat about the art of good travel and how much we’re enjoying this trip, the long days spent outdoors on the move, the many things we’ve seen, the people we’ve met and the quality playtime we’re having together.

About me.

I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.

Contact me to: 

• Make sense of what’s going on with you, your work and your life through my coaching practice.*

• Make sense of what’s going on in your organisation through group work, workshops and strategy sessions.

• Have a real conversation.

At the heart of my work is helping individuals and organisations to figure out what is really going on.

You can also find out more about my work with men & masculinity here.

*I’m taking on one new coaching client. I work with people who are looking to make sense of themselves, their lives and their work, and make extraordinary changes. If that’s you, get in touch, I’d love to chat.

Share

Your support means I can spend more time researching and writing this each week, going to more esoteric and interesting places. Thank you.

Subscribe now

“Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also — since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself — unshakeably certain of being in the right.”

— George Orwell

“We select certain things and separate them from others – for convenience, at first. Later we give this separation great importance. We set up separate nations, which is entirely the result of our thinking, and then we begin to give them supreme importance.”

— David Bohm

On my way to drop my son off on Tuesday morning, I bumped into a German friend whose two boys go to the same kita. She struck up a conversation about the World Cup. We exchanged chit chat about England’s quarter-final win on Saturday, and then she asked if I was aware that there was, amongst the fans of other nations, a united front in supporting England’s opponents and a hope they wouldn’t win it.

This was news to me, and she was surprised I wasn’t aware of it. I, however, was not particularly surprised to hear it, and I told her so with a shrug. “Our fans have been going all over Europe, fighting and smashing places up for decades now. So, fair enough.”

I told her how I arrived in Marseille for the European Championships in 2016, just after England fans had rioted and smashed up the port. The footage is horrible, violent pitched battles with police and locals all around the historic old port. I told her how one restaurant owner in the port refused to serve us once he realised we were English. I told her England fans had rioted there before, during the 1998 World Cup.

I told her too, how I arrived in Lisbon with friends for the 2004 European Championships a few days before the England v France game, and immediately witnessed a mass riot in Rossio Square sparked by drunken England fans attacking a Portuguese family carnival parade.

What I didn’t get a chance to tell her is that this perverted sense of national identity has followed England fans around for my entire life, always enmeshed with a need to create enemies of other nations and establish a sense of nationalistic and racial superiority. Every major opponent the England football team has faced over the last 50 years has become the object of xenophobic sentiment: Germany (especially), France, Argentina, Italy, Portugal.

This is always reliably and relentlessly stoked up by the English newspapers, who will hark back to some historic grievance (the World Wars, the Falkland Islands) or fall back on lazy stereotypes (cheating Latin cultures).

In 2020, even Denmark fans (Denmark!) became a focus for violence, with families attacked by England fans at Wembley before and after England won the game.

Now, before any England supporters get agitated about my use of ‘fans’, yes it’s a small minority I’m describing here who travel for organised violence - but, having been amongst it, it’s not as small as you think, and it is certainly large enough to create damage of all sorts, including for many people around the world, a lasting distrust and animosity towards England fans.

Football fans and violence isn’t really what I want to talk about, though. What I want to explore is where all this emerges from and what it represents.

My interest in this goes back at least as far as high school, when I wrote an essay on the history of British football and became fascinated by its origins in industrial towns and cities, and the deep roots it has in working-class culture. I was inevitably interested in 1980s hooligan culture too, given how closely aligned it was with nationalist and racist ideology at the time: football fans were fertile recruiting territory for the National Front, BNP and Combat 18, whose racist ideologies I experienced on the streets.

At university, my undergraduate thesis about the commercialisation of modern football explored how this was excluding and alienating those supporters for whom the sport is much more than a spectacle and has deep social significance. This was not a new idea but remains underappreciated in the discourse about our current society, namely that there few better examples than modern football of the rampant enclosure and commodification of our culture.

Football in England is, perhaps uniquely and certainly uncommonly, a microcosm of national identity; it reflects how many English people see themselves and see others. Even now, one of the most popular chants amongst England fans speaks of ‘not surrendering to the IRA’, reflecting an underlying animosity towards the Irish and a sense of exceptionalism which itself is rooted in British colonialism. Most of the fans singing it were probably not born when the IRA were last active on the British mainland.

What I propose is this: this strangely angry sense of national identity stems from two places, and both are key to making sense of it. The first source is the historic narratives and mythology that are necessary for any collective sense of identity based on nationality, many of which are embellished, partially or wholly untrue. In England, this is rooted in stories around the two World Wars, being the birthplace of football and steam engines, and the power of the British Empire (although in a selective way).

The second influence on national identity is, I would argue, more important but much harder to notice. It is what is not there: the hidden narratives, the artefacts buried in the collective unconscious, the historic facts that are taboo.

Psychoanalyst Samuel Kimbles described these as “phantom narratives”, the invisible and obscured experiences that shape a shared culture - intergenerational trauma for example.

In England, I’d suggest these phantom narratives include the unrecognised deep trauma from ‘winning’ the World Wars, the unprocessed grief from the decline of the British Empire, and the denial of the harm that has been inflicted on others: colonialism, inventing concentration camps, participation in slavery. There is a reason why some people get so furious at attempts to surface these narratives - they puncture the carefully maintained but increasingly fragile national ego.

These two sources, the national myths and the phantom narratives, overlap. To take World War II, for example, I grew up with the idea that the British alone defeated Nazi Germany, a notion I gained not only from history lessons but also from mainstream culture, with films that portrayed British heroism whilst lampooning or diminishing other nations. It was only in early adulthood that I learned the full extent of US involvement, without which the war would have been lost.

It was later still that I learned the extent of resistance forces across Europe and that the Soviet Union suffered more casualties than any other in defeating the Nazis, with 25 million people perishing. It was even later still, fully into my 30s, that I learned that Commonwealth soldiers were crucial to the war effort, including somewhere around 2.5 million soldiers from India, the largest volunteer army ever assembled, which included my ancestors.

A tiny example of how phantom narratives operate can be seen in the Imperial War Museum web page ‘India in the Second World War’. Not only are the details very brief, you also will not see the total number of Indian soldiers anywhere. The main article concludes that the Indian war effort was a “key argument for securing independence in 1947”.

Independence from whom? From what?

To understand what English or any national identity is, we need to look for what is not there - we need to sense what is absent and lurking in the shadows, what has not been properly recognised and acknowledged, what is notable by its absence.

Sometime in the early 1990s, in the small English market town I lived in, a McDonald’s opened on the high street. I can vividly remember the buzz of excitement around the town, particularly heightened amongst us teenagers. The local newspaper made it front-page news. It was as if we’d been connected to the outside world, our little Midlands backwater somehow magically twinned with the great bastions of American culture we’d seen on TV. The arrival of McDonald’s represented progress in our minds.

The town now has four McDonald’s, and several other similar franchises: Burger King, KFC, Subway and so on. The high street, once the busiest area in the town, is ghostly with the now usual array of fast food outlets, charity shops and empty units. It has been in decline since the large retail park was built on the other side of the town, close to the dual carriageway and centred around a series of huge retail outlets, a supermarket and the town’s first multiplex cinema.

The old town centre suffered another blow when the weekend markets closed down, the death of the very reason the town came into existence. Family-run fruit and vegetable sellers could not compete with the mass volumes and discounts offered by the large supermarkets. And so it has continued there, and thousands of other towns and cities like it.

All of this - fast food chains, retail parks, multiplex cinemas - could be summarised as one single force that has changed English identity: Americanisation.

This is the most powerful foreign invasion that has influenced English culture, and it was largely embraced without question. Even as a child, I noticed how much we seemed to look across the Atlantic longingly, as if envious of our rich cousins, and I watched as more and more English culture seemed to emulate American culture.

It seems that on the flimsy assumption that America, being majority white and historically Christian, is therefore just like England, we have adopted almost without hesitation their economics, their political ideologies, their consumer culture and their individualistic sense of what it means to be a citizen.

But perhaps I am being unfair and inaccurate to label it as American. What I’m describing really is the voracious and rampant consumer culture that has completely taken hold of the country in the last 50 years; the centrality of the idea that we in England are what we buy and own, rather than the strength of our relationships, communities and human values.

What I’m also describing is the capture of English society by capital: the privatisation of the commons, the purchase of land and enclosure of public spaces, the atomisation of human experience into segments that can be outsourced, monopolised and exploited.

It’s the ravaging of a nation by the interests of corporations and private capital owners, the financialisation of the English mindset that has been so effective that we consider nurses overpaid and public libraries a waste of money.

One of the effects of this has been to push the rich indigenous culture of England to the margins: folk traditions, rituals and connection to land, local food and music, even our agriculture. Some of it was buried long ago, and much of it has been supplanted by the endless supply of glitzy, postmodern and rootless transatlantic culture.

What, after all of that, does it actually mean to be English?

This, I believe, is the underlying question that is so loaded with anxiety and anger. Many people talk of the loss of community with a grief and longing they cannot fully express; they know something is missing but cannot understand what and why. They intuitively recognise a society that has an absence of care, which has no tangible profit or gain for the owners of capital. There is a deep despair, a sense in many places, of having been walked away from by those in power.

And this has truth to it. The country has been sold off, and the citizens left to deal with not just the practical consequences of this deprivation, but also the social and spiritual wounds. This fabric of social cohesion has been so thoroughly worn down that it becomes easy to exploit national identity as a solution.

And then of course, it is easy to point fingers at who is to blame: those people who have arrived here whose culture is different to ours.

The English lament of the loss of community now cheaply blames immigrants and minority groups and their lack of integration, rather than recognising the economic forces over decades that have entrenched an ‘every man for himself’ attitude in the English psyche. I’ve heard it suggested that part of the anger towards immigrants is, in fact, a deep envy of their community cohesion and a sense of self and identity larger than the boundaries of their individual bodies. I can believe this.

In this sense, it should not be a surprise that there is a great deal of anger inherent in national identity, not just in England but also in so many other nations that have experienced these same forces. And football, of course, especially the national team, becomes an acutely focused arena in which to place and express all of this emotional energy: a shirt to wear, a flag to gather behind, symbols that briefly hold some meaning and energy, however transient and thin.

If nation-states are to persist, and we believe that national identity, loyalty to land boundaries, is an essential construct, then we might begin by asking what it actually means to be a citizen of any country. What is English? What is American? What is French? What were these identities before so much was stripped away by financial and political interests?

I suspect that any inquiry of this nature, done for long enough, would arrive in similar places: a unique sense of connection to the particular land we inhabit, a realisation that this ecological relationship is shared with many others, and that we are, therefore, indelibly connected to each other and much more alike than different.

About me.

I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.

Contact me to: 

• Make sense of what’s going on with you, your work and your life through my coaching practice.*

• Make sense of what’s going on in your organisation through group work, workshops and strategy sessions.

• Have a real conversation.

At the heart of my work is helping individuals and organisations to figure out what is really going on.

You can also find out more about my work with men & masculinity here.

*I’m taking on one new coaching client. I work with people who are looking to make sense of themselves, their lives and their work, and make extraordinary changes. If that’s you, get in touch, I’d love to chat.

Share

[main image from TripAdvisor]

Your support means I can spend more time researching and writing this each week, going to more esoteric and interesting places. Thank you.

Subscribe now

“Sacrifice the things you used to believe, and the ways you used to be. Learning leaves a trail of little deaths.”

— Derek Sivers

“When you cling, what you offer the other is not love but a chain by which both you and your beloved are bound. Love can only exist in freedom.”

— Anthony De Mello

My son smacks his lips if I’ve just offered him something to eat when he’s hungry, like a cartoon dog offered a prime cut of meat. And in this moment, I’ve just offered him a snack, and he stands expectantly in front of me as I retrieve it from my bag, his face smudged with dirt and his hair in disarray. His playground play was briefly paused as he heard the magic words “cheese sandwich”.

Now, even more cartoon-like, he stuffs his mouth with the whole thing using the palm of his hand, and before he’s begun chewing, he turns towards the playground slide and trots away without looking back. In that moment, for the millionth time in my three years as a dad, I feel heartbroken.

All the cliches are true; the love you feel for your child is a unique feeling, a thing in its own right different to any other. I feel it as heartbreak because every moment of love as a father carries with it the knowledge that what I am bestowing is ultimately in service of letting go of the person I care most about: one day, one way or another, he must leave me.

Is there any sweeter agony than that?

And so the moment, like so many others, is savoured as sweet and bitter, another part of an absurd yet endlessly glorious ordeal that we put ourselves through as parents, nurturing and loving a child, knowing that it cannot last as it is.

In just a few years, he will be much more independent, perhaps less keen to hold hands and cuddle, much more keen to play with friends or alone. A few more after that, and his self-reliance will have evolved further, interests and relationships far outside the family unit, days or even weeks spent away.

Add a few more years, and he’s a teenager, a proto-adult flooded with hormones and keen to stamp his independence on his runway to one day leave home and spread his wings. All being well, the love is still there, and the relationship is still strong, but the shape of it will have changed; there is less dependency, much less attachment and the centre of gravity shifts until he eventually leaves our orbit altogether.

Love and grief are enmeshed in parenting, a series of initiations for child and adult, calling us both to change and adapt. To let go too early is fraught with risk, although far less common. To let go too late is to stunt the very person you love most, to clip their wings. Letting go, in all cases, is essential.

A few weeks ago, our cellar unit in the basement of our apartment block was broken into. We’d already had a break in a couple of months before and, foolishly, we’d had the door repaired but not removed the most valuable items. They came back and this time took my snowboard bag, filled with all of my gear: snowboard, bindings, boots, goggles, helmet, gloves, avalanche kit and more.

My heart sank when I realised it was gone. The first sting was the value of what had been taken, somewhere around two thousand euros of high-quality equipment accumulated over many years.

The second sting, that came quickly and surprisingly after that, was the sentimental value of the kit: the beautiful and remote backcountry adventures it had served me through, the many rock faces around the world that had shredded my gloves and the gaffer tape that was holding them together, the wild and dangerous days in a Pyrenean snowstorm where both pairs of my goggles became completely useless, even the thick and hardy snowboarding socks an ex-girlfriend had given me many years ago.

I’m not particularly attached to ‘stuff’, so this threw me, and it took a day or so for the feeling to fade. And then I realised what else hurt: I was unlikely to replace this gear. I’d bought it in the years when I had plenty of money and free time, both of which are in short supply now.

But it was not even that; there was another layer underneath that one. I had already begun to feel uncomfortable with the idea of flying to mountainous places, knowing my travel was damaging the very thing I cherished; I couldn’t ignore the dissonance of burning jet fuel in the atmosphere in order to slide down glaciers that retreat every year.

The last trip I’d planned was three years ago, by train to Austria, and I had to cancel it when the first-ever nationwide train strike in Germany was announced just before my departure. It felt like a message, and a sad one. The snow-line across European mountains gets higher every year; by the time my son is an adult, some glaciers will have melted entirely.

When I saw my snowboard had been stolen, the deeper, more painful thought in my head was this: ‘Will I ever ski or snowboard again? Perhaps this is it?’

A luxury problem you might think - and you’d be right - but my days in the high mountains around the world rank as the happiest memories of my life, the place where I feel most alive.

It was the visceral sense of loss I was feeling, however frivolous or unimportant it might be in the bigger scheme of things. It revealed my attachment to a pursuit and an identity that I may need to let go of forever; that day is or was always going to come.

Which brings me to football, more specifically, playing football. After books, football is my earliest and longest love, beginning on the day I joined in a game at junior school, got stuck in goal and comically air-kicked an approaching ball only to then backheel it into my own goal - I kid you not.

I didn’t realise it at the time, but I’d fallen madly in love with something. I played and played, practiced and practiced, and gradually improved. I’d spend long summer and winter days outdoors with my friends, forgetting my hunger and returning home covered in mud and with bloodied knees.

By the time I was 13, I made the school team, something I was immensely proud of and determined to prove myself. And since then, I have played some sort of organised football, more or less non-stop. 35 years in which I’ve broken bones, torn countless ligaments and muscles, split tendons, and had surgery four times, leaving me with metal and screws holding parts of me together.

Each time I ended up in A&E or in the operating room, friends and family would say to me, often in earnest tones, “Do you think it’s time you quit?”

“You don’t understand,” I would reply.

And it has caught up with me. Fragile ankles, collapsed arches, knees that ache in every season, hips that make me wince when I stand, and new back problems every year. It’s all worth it. I wouldn’t change any of it. It’s ridiculous, I know, but then love is.

A few months ago, a friend introduced me to an indoor football game here in Berlin. It’s perfect: Tuesday evenings, a good standard, a nice group of guys, and intensely competitive without being unfriendly. After the first couple of weeks, I returned home feeling thrilled, joyous and alive in a way that only team sports can make me feel.

Then the injuries. Strained groin muscles, a torn hip flexor, more back problems. I had to drop out a couple of months ago, focusing on recovery and now building up the conditioning to go back with targeted exercises. Which makes no rational sense at all: I’m 48 and riddled with injuries, all of these guys are in their 20s or 30s.

But I’ll go back again, like a moth to a flame, because I’m in love and because I’m not ready to let go. A grown man unable to face the music, to accept his decline, to take the last dance - all the fucking cliches are true in me.

I’m too in love with something that is, in the greater arc of my life, utterly meaningless. Perhaps I’m too attached to the identity too; perhaps I’m not yet ready to be someone who ‘used to play football when he was younger’.

Attachment is not love, is what I’m trying to say. Happiness is not love. Stasis is not love. Sentimentality is not love. Love is change, love is letting go, love is loss, and love is also sadness and grief.

It is not about killing the joy or being an unfeeling robot. Quite the opposite: it is about fully feeling the entirety of what we love, including in its decay and death. It is feeling the discord and friction of what must change, the pain of what must end or leave us. It is knowing when things must end, however excruciating that might feel.

In the inevitable changes, losses and endings that mark being human, love is always there, but in a different form, still entangled with the heavier surface feelings, but just out of sight.

It is the fullness of our feeling rather than the avoidance or denial of it that enables us to close chapters and open new ones, with the wisdom that only grief can provide and the energy that is only released when something has come to its proper end.

However painful it might seem, there is love in wholeheartedly accepting and honouring everything that is ending.

About me.

I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.

Contact me to: 

• Make sense of what’s going on with you, your work and your life through my coaching practice.*

• Make sense of what’s going on in your organisation through group work, workshops and strategy sessions.

• Have a real conversation.

At the heart of my work is helping individuals and organisations to figure out what is really going on.

You can also find out more about my work with men & masculinity here.

*I’m taking on one new coaching client. I work with people who are looking to make sense of themselves, their lives and their work, and make extraordinary changes. If that’s you, get in touch, I’d love to chat.

Share

[main image, ‘Letting Go’ by Melanie Meyer]

Your support means I can spend more time researching and writing this each week, going to more esoteric and interesting places. Thank you.

Subscribe now

“If you’ve been around indigenous cultures, the way you get a name, the way you get named… First, you can’t name yourself. And second, the people that know anything in that culture, watch how you behave. And they watch how you behave when you think no one is looking. That is the name you get. So it’s very rarely sweetgrass woman. It could be man who was late to collect his children from school on Monday.”

— Martin Shaw

“[Sufi mulla] Nasrudin goes into the bank with a check to cash and he hands the check to the cashier. And the cashier studies the check and the check looks wonderful, but Nasrudin looks like a complete derelict. And the cashier says, “Sir, this check looks fine, but can you identify yourself?” Nasrudin reached into his pocket and pulled out a mirror and he said, “Yup, that’s me.””

— Ram Dass

One of the many things I appreciate about Berlin culture is that people are much less interested in what others do for a living. When I lived in London, it never felt far from the forefront of a conversation and was sometimes the first question a person would ask when meeting me. Here, the question sometimes takes a long time and many conversations to come; often, the question is never asked.

A couple of weeks ago, the question did come from one of the parents at my son’s kita that I’m friendly with. We often see each other in the playground or around the neighbourhood, and have known each other for months. When she eventually asked what I did for work, I winced inwardly, a reflex. I have a well-worn way of describing what I do, and I love my work - but I dislike the question immensely.

This is partly because I find it unnatural to squeeze myself into labelled boxes, however much they might be roles that feel true and important to me. It is also because I am much more than these roles, yet inevitably I will get remembered as ‘the guy who coaches people’ or ‘the man who runs men’s groups’.

And lastly, I felt this reaction because I don’t really know what I’m doing. A few years ago, I gave up on all ideas of a fixed strategy for my work or life, realising this felt inhibiting rather than clarifying, and that in reality I am being swept along by something larger than my ‘plans’. This is still a relatively new way to inhabit life for me, so I perhaps feel defensive in reaction to a question that pulls me back into the linear, orderly way of organising my identity that society so often seems to demand.

Identity formation is a paradoxical endeavour. As infants and children, it is healthy and essential to develop an ego, an outward-facing manifestation of who we are, mediated by various personas. As we grow older, we form and discard personas - the teenager swiftly buries the interests and obsessions that once seemed permanent as an adolescent, and the young adult often does the same with the preoccupations of teenage years.

This process continues further into adulthood, accelerated again when we enter a profession or workplace. There, we are required to form a version of ourselves that is acceptable to the environment, an unconscious conformity in order to fit in and succeed.

Over time, this persona can become our dominant one, something I see a lot in people who spend decades in corporate environments. Somewhere in the first half of our lives, we have successfully built what James Hollis calls the “provisional identity” - precisely the thing that needs to be interrogated, remade or even dismantled if we are to live a truly meaningful and happy second half of our lives.

In my teenage years, I would cycle through different identities, briefly trying them on to see how well they fit. Outward manifestations, like which music I listened to, what clothes I wore, and what my favourite films were, were signals about my emerging identity.

I thought I was choosing, and sometimes I was, but mostly I was either responding to my real preferences or under the influence of those around me: becoming a football obsessive was a real and almost unlikely passion; becoming a fan of indie guitar bands was due to the influence of my friends and a reaction to my brother (who was a raver and house music fan).

Ram Dass often described being born into “somebody training”. As the son of very successful Jewish American parents who expected certain things of him, as did the culture, he cultivated the personas that would facilitate his acceptance by others. He invested great energy into becoming somebody, an outward identity, who could only see other people also as outward identities, as their ‘somebodyness’.

Like most people, I too felt a desperate need to ‘be someone’ when I was younger, and there’s now a deep relief I underappreciate in no longer pursuing that mission. It was an exhausting business.

Being a man was an added layer to that pursuit of identity. And not just any man, but a British Indian man. And not just any British Indian man but a British Punjabi Sikh - the perfect cocktail for a man who is ultimately judged not by who he really is or how he lives, but by what he does, and what he accumulates: wealth, power, status. The more of each, the better the man.

Pride and shame were the underlying cultural norms, inseparable twin forces that had me contorting and self-policing myself into someone I wasn’t meant to be.

When I started working as a management consultant in my 20s, my mum asked me what my job title was for the sole purpose of being able to tell other people. I told her I was a ‘consultant’, and although my description of it made no sense to her whatsoever (understandably), she memorised the word.

Years later, my sister told me that our mum had been chatting to someone in her community who asked what I did for a living. When my mum said I was a consultant, they replied, “Oh, a doctor!” My mum did nothing to disabuse them of this misconception and simply moved the conversation on.

For a thankfully brief number of years, I became or attempted to become the serious corporate guy, viewing all of the world, including social interactions, as domains to be analysed, strategised, competed over and dominated. It was never really me, and fortunately, the energy and suffering involved in maintaining that version of myself became too great to ignore.

At the time, though, it was confusing and painful to acknowledge because it invited a terrifying question: Who am I really? I’m living the answer to that now, and yet the full answer is still revealing itself; in fact, it may never be fully known.

“This is what the French call déformation professionnelle. Seeing life through one’s profession is one of the results of professional training. The scribe is orderly, the bureaucrat indecisive, the tailor sees the stitching not the man. One becomes identified with the role one plays, the persona one wears; outside moves inside and determines outlook.”

— James Hillman

This is one of the unanswered questions that haunts so many citizens of developed, wealthy nations. It is a question we have been taught to ignore, steered away from at such a young age that we forget it exists, and stripped of the tools and rituals that might support our journey towards resolving it.

There is a great and tragic irony that so many of our educated classes are pursuing lives that are not theirs, not anyone’s really. Millions of young people emerge from colleges and universities with the privilege of elite education and then proceed to take roles in a profession that slowly chokes the life out of their souls. All that supposed (yet illusory) freedom and choice, and yet this is how it goes for so many.

In my corporate consulting days, I would often hear people say things like “I’m really passionate about supply chain optimisation” or speak enthusiastically about the “exciting” conference they had just been to on information security standards. Whenever they did, a small voice in my head would say, “Really? That can’t be true?”

Almost simultaneously, another voice would say, “Why aren’t you passionate about something like that? You’ll never get ahead if you don’t find that.” I believed, in part, that I was defective for not having the kind of zeal for work that often felt devoid of any real meaning. Everyone else seemed to have found their vocation, and I was just faking it.

Does anyone really dream of being the countless robotic and arid-sounding professions that modern life offers - not just the job, but the person that goes with it, too?

I am not suggesting that these roles and titles do not offer anything. On the contrary, they offer just enough of several things to keep most people from considering the bigger question of who they really are. Over time, the inquiry seems frivolous and childish.

They can offer mastery too, the opportunity to learn and become expert at something, which can offer a real sense of fulfilment. Looked at closely, though, this is really an attachment of the provisional identity, a sense of pride that inflates the ego.

Mastery alone can only last so long; it is a poor substitute for real meaning and eventually burns out in a way that exacerbates the pain. In the words of Thomas Merton, “People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.”

Now, you might say we can’t have a world where everyone is pursuing their dreams or doing their ideal work. And that might be true. But the question I’d invite you to consider is this: what is the full and real cost of a society so commonly populated with smart, privileged and capable people straining to succeed in work that they don’t truly care about?

What is the aggregate effect of so many of us accepting roles and identities handed to us by our culture and unquestioningly taking them up, spending a lifetime maintaining an identity that is not truly ours?

I propose it is huge; a vast and almost invisible drain on our individual and collective potential. It is a spiritual crisis in the sense that we routinely and thoroughly condition young people to abandon their dreams, their intuitions, their soul calling in favour of succeeding according to an external set of rules we’ve never questioned, with the goal of validation from others and material gain.

Who are you really? That is a question so simple yet so vital that it terrifies most adults. It’s a question they stopped exploring long ago in exchange for the comfort of an off-the-shelf identity. Children don’t need to answer this question; they simply are who they are until they’re told otherwise.

For most of us, midlife invokes this question more starkly, sometimes triggered by an existential life event like severe sickness, divorce or bereavement. The question then becomes unavoidable and even more terrifying, especially as so few of us have the resources and support to navigate such terrain.

To attempt to approach this question requires letting go of almost everything we know. All that painstakingly accumulated knowledge, the intricate edifices of our personalities, roles and job titles, the fetishising of material goods, even the relationships we have grown. All of them must be re-questioned and, sometimes temporarily and carefully, relinquished like fully undressing and walking into a dark forest, naked and alone.

There is a reason so many religious and spiritual rituals involve strict fasting and other forms of abstinence: we must remove as many of our identity attachments as possible if we are to stand a chance of encountering God.

And by God, I mean our real selves, our souls, or whatever we want to call it that represents us in our pure, true, unadorned and most beautiful form; the person you were before the identity and the job title took over, the person hoping to be discovered again, the person you are waiting to become. Don’t leave it too late.

About me.

I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.

Contact me to: 

• Make sense of what’s going on with you, your work and your life through my coaching practice.*

• Make sense of what’s going on in your organisation through group work, workshops and strategy sessions.

• Have a real conversation.

At the heart of my work is helping individuals and organisations to figure out what is really going on.

You can also find out more about my work with men & masculinity here.

*I’m taking on one new coaching client. I work with people who are looking to make sense of themselves, their lives and their work, and make extraordinary changes. If that’s you, get in touch, I’d love to chat.

Share

[main image, ‘Untitled’ by Ramon Keimig]

Your support means I can spend more time researching and writing this each week, going to more esoteric and interesting places. Thank you.

Subscribe now

“It is time to change, and if we do not change something stronger than us is going to do it for us. We know this from experience.”

— Arkan Lushwala

“Democracy is a problem that capital is always trying to solve.”

— George Monbiot

Last autumn, whilst back in London for a family wedding, I went for a pub lunch with my wife, our son and a friend. I arrived a little after the others and went to the bar to order my meal. Seeing an array of beer pumps in front of me, I decided to treat myself to a pint. It was Sunday afternoon, and we were on holiday after all.

After I paid, I gawped at the receipt the barmaid handed me. My pint of beer cost £10 pounds. TEN POUNDS. This was a pub on a nondescript and busy south London road, between two ordinary suburbs. A nice, welcoming pub for sure, but not a fancy joint in the heart of Mayfair or Chelsea.

Since I don’t drink much these days, I think of having a beer as a treat, almost like ordering a dessert. But even so, I’d baulk at paying £10 for a dessert. Here in Berlin, the equivalent would be paying €12 for a large beer, something I’m not even sure is possible to do, unless there’s a 6-star hotel hidden somewhere.

TEN POUNDS!! As you can probably tell, I still talk about it now, even though I’m quite certain my wife is bored of hearing about it. And yet, although it was a shock, it was not a complete surprise.

When I left London, it was at the back end of the Covid pandemic. As pubs and restaurants re-opened, I’d noticed the sudden jump in prices; a beer in one of my local pubs, on a backstreet in another south London suburb, had leapt up to £6.50. My old consulting mind rationalised it - hospitality venues needed to cover their costs and recover income, having been closed for so long. The price of raw ingredients for things like beer had also increased for a number of reasons.

Almost five years later, in that pub for lunch, more had changed. Wars, ongoing climate breakdown, and the impact of Brexit had all combined to make many things more expensive. But still, seeing the jump in price was like ice water in the face. When I mentioned this to my friends in London, they seemed unperturbed and shrugged it off.

Now let me talk about chocolate bars. We all know they were not only much cheaper when we were kids, but much bigger too. A common business school or interview question is to ask how a company can maintain or increase the profit on a penny sweet if the cost of making it has gone up. You can’t increase the price without at least doubling it; it is then also no longer a penny sweet. The answer, of course, is to slightly reduce the size of the sweet so it costs less to make.

Years ago, I met a man whose job title had a euphemistic quality to it, something like ‘FMCG Optimisation Consultant’. When I asked him what that meant in plain English, he explained that his role was to solve the penny sweet challenge for food companies. In practice, this meant things like not only subtly reducing the size over time, but also changes to production processes and switching ingredients to cheaper, often artificial, alternatives.

All of this would happen gradually, and most consumers would either not notice or notice a small difference but not be sufficiently bothered to change their buying behaviour. A Snickers bar in the UK is now roughly half the size it used to be when I was a kid, and no doubt filled with cheaper ingredients too.

Now, let me talk about TV football rights. Stay with me, I know you’re playing the role of my patient wife here, and this does go somewhere. In the UK, the broadcasting rights for professional football were effectively privatised in 1992. Live games that had previously been shown on terrestrial (non-cable) TV would now be shown on the new satellite TV channel, BSkyB (now Sky). This meant the top league would no longer share revenues so widely with lower leagues, and would sell broadcast rights independently, maximising their income.

At the time, there was much furore amongst football fans about what this would do to the game and their access to it, something I was too young to fully appreciate (although I later wrote my undergraduate thesis about it). In brief, something predictable happened. At first, a selection of games was shown on Sky. One single monthly subscription meant you had access to these games, although it was bundled with hundreds of other channels, which you also had to pay for.

A few years later, a second ‘package’ of Premier League games was sold to another broadcaster, meaning a second subscription. Anticipating the complaints from football fans and subscribers, the league insisted that only a small number of less popular games would be shown on this channel. Once again, this changed. The league began to sell multiple packages of TV rights in an auction, each of which had a growing number of games within it - and, importantly, the popular and less popular games quietly began to get mixed across these packages.

The same thing happened with European football competitions. Where once, English teams playing in the Champions League were broadcast for free, these games gradually began to be auctioned and shown on paid-for channels. Now, the Champions League is only shown on subscription channels, and this year, for the first time ever in the UK, the European Cup final, the biggest club game in the world, was not shown on a free-to-air channel.

So, a little over 30 years after the inception of all this, watching an English football team play domestically and in Europe now means no less than four separate subscriptions, totalling well over £1,000 a year.

Now let me talk about airport baggage trolleys. Last year, we travelled back to the UK, landing at Manchester airport. Although we pack light when we travel, a rucksack and various toddler paraphernalia begin to feel heavy on a long walk through an airport. I saw a row of baggage trolleys and was about to dump some bags on them when I noticed I would have to pay £1 for the privilege of using a baggage trolley for a few minutes. Inexplicably, the charge in Euros was double the amount.

“They can fuck off”, I said to my wife, hoisting my rucksack back onto my shoulders. Once again, I commented on it frequently over the next few weeks (every now and then marvelling at my wife’s willingness to listen).

The “they” I was referring to was not some generic entity. It was, and is, the business models which continually seek ways to atomise everyday human behaviour, privatise it and charge people for something that was once, and should be free. Airport operators are huge businesses, which are usually shareholder and private equity owned, meaning they continually need to find ways to extract profit from people moving through the infrastructure they now own, such as the simple act of pushing your heavy bags on a trolley.

I could bore on with many more examples: drinking water, domestic energy, trains, healthcare, the price of food, and more. All of them are victims of gradual declines in quality and reliability, whilst the cost continually rises.

All of them are central to a basic standard of life, and in many cases, essential. As hard as it is to believe, water companies are often owned by private equity companies in foreign countries.

Back in 2006, the behavioural scientist Dan Gilbert wrote an op-ed about global warming in the L.A. Times. One of the several reasons he gave for our inertia on tackling it was our inability to see it as a real threat.

The problem, he memorably wrote, is not that the planet is warming too fast but not fast enough, and we are unable or unwilling to anticipate long-term consequences: “we see it as a threat to our futures - not our afternoons... Because we barely notice changes that happen gradually, we accept gradual changes that we would reject if they happened abruptly.”

The question here is about what we notice and what we’re willing to accept. We’re all susceptible to becoming the boiling frogs; it is no coincidence that some of what I describe above I noticed only because of gaps in experience, like living somewhere else for a while.

In our not noticing and in our inaction, rests a huge amount - our very survival, in fact. Each time we shrug and ignore things, there is a small but powerful capitulation. There is a tiny giving away of our rights, of fairness, a subtle but compounding effect of lowering our standards.

It is very easy to accept each seemingly small change, to just rub along, grin and bear it, swallow the cost. Each time, we are too focused on the individual, seemingly discrete change, and blind to the bigger dynamic. It is what the change represents rather than what it means right now.

If we focus on the principle and the trend instead of the individual change, we’re able to perceive something that was obscured. And how we respond to the principle signals what we are willing to tolerate. If we stop buying the penny sweets or protest the rise in water prices because we know we’re being slowly ripped off, something different is possible.

Who are we signalling to? Those who hold the power and capital that shape our lives. The people who truly understand this are the activists and protestors who, throughout history, have fought on the basis of principles, especially when they are not yet directly impacted by them. They can see that to accept something small now, however tempting, is to take a fork in the road towards an undesirable fate.

This is the principle Pastor Niemöller understood too, that what we are willing to tolerate for others, is eventually what we must be willing to tolerate ourselves.

If it’s acceptable for our rulers to visit brutality on the people ‘over there’, then we must recognise that one day brutality will be visited on us by the same people. The principle has been established through our passive acceptance of it.

Whether we like it or not, each of our choices, actions or inaction is a vote for a certain type of future.

About me.

I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.

Contact me to: 

• Make sense of what’s going on with you, your work and your life through my coaching practice.*

• Make sense of what’s going on in your organisation through group work, workshops and strategy sessions.

• Have a real conversation.

At the heart of my work is helping individuals and organisations to figure out what is really going on.

You can also find out more about my work with men & masculinity here.

*I’m taking on one new coaching client. I work with people who are looking to make sense of themselves, their lives and their work, and make extraordinary changes. If that’s you, get in touch, I’d love to chat.

Share

[main image by Kristi McCluer/Reuters]

Your support means I can spend more time researching and writing this each week, going to more esoteric and interesting places. Thank you.

Subscribe now

“Death is no longer as imminent as it was in medieval times: we scarcely see its face or talk about it, and we imagine living long into our distant eighties or nineties. As a result our awareness of the rare value of existence has been diminished, and with it the ability to immerse ourselves in the present and suck all the marrow from life. We busy our brains with future plans and anxieties and find ourselves tolerating tedious jobs and watching hours of television. It is as if we are waiting around for the moment when our real lives will begin. The prospect of death no longer drives us to savour the human adventure.”

— Roman Krnazic

After my son was born three years ago, sleep became a rare and precious commodity. It is so valuable that my wife and I began to guard it jealously, including from each other. Most of the arguments we had in that first year revolved around sleep, one way or another.

Our lives have been reconfigured around sleep without us knowing it. Dinnertimes for us as a family, bedtimes for our son, choices about whether to go out in the evening, planning when and how we travel. We don’t watch much TV, but when we do, the choice is often determined by how long something is - anything over half an hour makes me suck my teeth.

Sleep has become a kind of religion in our household, our worship true yet erratic, and our lapses in reverence regularly punished by the angry gods of sleep. We are rarely fully rested and never at the same time as each other. The sleep gods keep us in desperation and need.

So to willingly give up sleep whilst feeling chronically under-rested requires something extraordinary, something that occupies the rare space of being entirely optional yet feels urgent. I found just that thing on a fly poster opposite our local park.

It was promoting an annual midsummer 10k run that takes place in a park in north-west Berlin, timed to coincide with sunrise. A vague memory floated back to me, of a friend who had mentioned this to me a few years ago, before my son was born, and sleep became a perennial obsession. The way she’d described it sounded like a lot of fun.

I looked at the poster again. The run started at 4.42 am. Allowing enough time to brush my teeth and an hour to travel there and drop off my bag, I’d need to get out of bed at around 3 am.

Something tugged at me, some deep appeal to be outdoors, moving as the sun rose over my shoulder, witnessing dawn give way to day.

On the other hand, it sounded absurd given I was so fatigued that I’d sometimes lie on the floor of my home office for ten minutes in the middle of the morning.

I went back and forth like this for a couple of days, all the while knowing I’d sign up eventually. So I did. I paid my entry fee, put it in the calendar and told my wife. She smiled in a way that said: “Good for you, you mad fool.”

I began to look forward to it, a familiar old anticipation of adventure, however small a sliver it might be. A challenge, a test, a break from something that I didn’t know I needed.

Then, a few days before the run, the event was postponed due to an infestation of poisonous moths in that particular park. The risk too great, apparently. I was crestfallen - until it occurred to me that I didn’t need an organised event to do this.

I thought about the best places in Berlin to watch the sun rise, and the answer was quite obvious: Drachenberg, an artificial hill in the west of Berlin that overlooks the city, and sits next to Teufelsberg (Devil’s Hill) with its iconic abandoned CIA listening station. It is about an hour’s cycle from home, meaning I could be there for sunrise and back before Lucy and Ren woke up.

“What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for.”

— George Mallory

So last Sunday, I slept in our spare room, set my alarm for 3.15 am, overslept slightly and then found myself strangely alert, albeit dizzy once I was up. I’d prepared my clothes and bike the night before, so I was ready and out with ease, embracing the unusual summer chill from our recent cold spell.

Oversleeping by ten minutes meant I was running late for sunrise. I raced west on deserted city roads as the dawn gloom began to brighten. The only people I encountered were a few handfuls of clubbers, crawling home from a night out, oblivious to my presence as I tried to cover the 20km as quickly as I could with creaking legs, still sleep stiff and tired. All the while, the sun rose behind me, the very air seemingly beginning to glow.

I arrived at the top of Drachenberg, a plateau of scruffy scrubland, five minutes after sunrise. It didn’t really matter, as that particular morning, the city was partially blanketed by cloud, and the sun wasn’t visible.

The skyline and the view over the whole city, west to east, were grubby and bleak. A chilly wind blew permanently across the plateau, and I was glad of the extra jacket I’d brought with me.

But I felt exhilarated as I sat down and lay back on my arms, my bike to one side. I’d brought coffee and snacks, but didn’t feel I needed either. So I sat and watched the clouds and the sky change colour as the sun rose above a flat city of concrete and trees.

I looked up and noticed the clouds above me were tinted pink and red underneath as the rising sun caught their underbelly. To the north-east, a break in the thick cloud was allowing beams of golden sunlight to pour through the purple grey clouds, like fingers from heaven. And it was blissfully silent apart from the gentle rush of the wind. Before my eyes, bleakness had become beauty.

After a little while, maybe half an hour, I rode back down the hill, stopping halfway to meditate in the forest. I carried on to Teufelsberg to enjoy the short road climb there, a cyclist hungry for some uphill, however brief.

And then home. First through Grunewald forest and then through completely unfamiliar neighbourhoods of villas and lakes, and quaint old squares in the monied quarters of West Berlin. The sun was higher, beginning to light up the tops of buildings and sections of the road on still deserted streets, the scene like an Edward Hopper print.

The birds were in full song now, the afterparty of the dawn chorus: Eurasian jays, nuthatches, blackbirds and wood pigeons. Their symphony mingled with the only other sound I could hear, the whirring of my bike’s cassette, something a friend once memorably described as the sound of man and machine in harmony.

What joy. What simple joy.

Me, alone out here. Hardly the wilderness and yet a certain kind of wild and liminal time - before the city has risen, before the cafes are unshuttered and before even those earliest of risers, dog walkers and runners. I felt like a fugitive on some secret mission, an explorer of some alternate reality.

As I neared home, the familiar streets looked different. I was seeing them in a new light, literally and metaphorically. Some satisfaction began to rise within me. I would sleep a while when I got home, cosseted by the knowledge that I had covered forty kilometres to climb a hill, gliding through the golden hour in solitude.

I turned the corner onto my street, and I could swear it had changed. Sun was breaking through the thick foliage of the linden trees, casting dusty beams upon the road. It looked mythical, ancient.

Had I really been away? Was I really out here?

I tiptoed into our apartment, the light was different there too, as if I’d walked into an oil painting. I could hear Ren beginning to rouse with his early morning mutterings, and Lucy rising in response.

A warm shower and then bed beckoned, entering sleep with a rare kind of satisfaction behind the weariness; I know this feeling from ventures through mountains, on hikes, on snowboards, on bike packing trips, and long-distance running. A rest needed and deeply earned.

“Routine as protection and defense, always feels merciful and protective to begin with, while slowly, over time, narrowing our character and our sense of possibility, all the while closing down our freer relationship with time itself.”

— David Whyte

The explorer Erling Kagge invoked the great philosophers when he suggested that humans should be willing to burden themselves in order to be free. Truly living life, he proposed, is not about avoiding adversity and challenge. “If you always choose the path of least resistance,” he wrote, “the alternative that offers the fewest challenges will always take priority. Your choices will be predetermined and you will not only live un-freely, but also lead a dull life.”

To always be comfortable and safe when we have the option to occasionally be otherwise is a certain kind of soul death. It is an atrophying habit that sets in without us realising, as we organise our lives around routine and predictability. In the background meanwhile, is a quiet kind of yearning, a subtle dullness that aches away for something with more risk, something at the wilder edge of life.

I felt this ache a long time ago, almost 20 years now, sitting in a small, semi-cubicle in a consulting office. A recurring thought would come to me: ‘This cannot be the entirety of my life, sitting here in this building, tapping away at my laptop’.

Not long after that, a friend and colleague of a similar sensibility asked if I’d be interested in signing up for an 8-mile running event through the wet hills and muddy bogs of a military vehicle testing site. “Fuck yes”, I said. I’d never run anywhere before except chasing after a football. So began a lifelong relationship with seeking adventure, however small it might be.

I suspect this is a common experience amongst white-collar professionals and perhaps why so many participate in arduous physical sports and challenges, as evidenced by the extraordinary boom in ultra-marathons, triathlons and Iron Man events over the last few decades.

Looking at that poster for the midsummer run, I felt the same urge as I did in that office cubicle. Some part of me was withering inside the confines of routine, imprisoned in predictability and comfort.

This happens all too easily, as we are worn down by work and responsibility, seeking efficiency and ease wherever we can. And yet it is just as easy to break out of.

Take a different route to work. Be outdoors at an unusually early or late time. Go to a different cafe. Go somewhere you’ve never been before, like that park or green space that is really close to your home but not on your normal roster of routes.

Take the path that looks rougher, scruffier, less sanitised. Sit down on the edge of the pavement and watch the world from a different vantage point. Go the long way round. Do something - anything - that is not the most efficient or sensible thing to do.

Some routine is good; too much routine is to reject the essence of life. We are not here to be efficient and predictable.

About me.

I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.

Contact me to: 

• Make sense of what’s going on with you, your work and your life through my coaching practice.*

• Make sense of what’s going on in your organisation through group work, workshops and strategy sessions.

• Have a real conversation.

At the heart of my work is helping individuals and organisations to figure out what is really going on.

You can also find out more about my work with men & masculinity here.

*I’m taking on one new coaching client. I work with people who are looking to make sense of themselves, their lives and their work, and make extraordinary changes. If that’s you, get in touch, I’d love to chat.

Share

[main image from Wikiart: ‘House at Dusk’ by Edward Hopper.]

Your support means I can spend more time researching and writing this each week, going to more esoteric and interesting places. Thank you.

Subscribe now

“People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.”

— James Baldwin

“I had just grown tired of all of this. More pertinently, on a personal level, I had grown tired of spending my time fighting those battles in the country of my birth. Naïvely wishful as it seems, I had thought that there would by now have been a better public understanding of why so many immigrants seek to come to the United Kingdom. I had thought that there would be a greater level of awareness about the British Empire and its historical role in shaping the world as we see it today. But I was wrong, and to that extent I had to admit some form of defeat.”

— Musa Okwonga

**Note: there’s a racist term in this post. Just so you know.

In that sweet spot of childhood, old enough to start forming memories but not quite old enough to create the events that precede them, experiences are stored without enough context to understand their significance. You see a replica World War 2 plane fly very low over your back garden and think it’s a normal event that happens to everyone (this really did happen to me).

In those fuzzy days of the 80s, my life in a middle English town was like that easily portrayed on television and in films. Rows of tightly packed terraced houses, curved and heavy Ford cars on the streets, corner shops selling paper bags of sweets and the local pub, rarely more than five minutes walk, selling cheap pints of lager and bitter.

My dad would go to our local pub often, a few pints with his mates after work, especially at the end of the week. Turn right out of our house, walk about two hundred paces, turn right again, and you were there. An old British boozer facing out from the corner of two roads, brass fittings, wooden furniture and all that.

On more than one occasion, my dad unexpectedly appeared at home midway through his evening at the pub, marched into our kitchen, grabbed his old hockey stick and stormed out again.

Now, I never saw my dad play hockey. He was over six feet tall and strong, the kind of strong you become when you only do manual work, but I never thought of him as sporty. In fact, I never saw him play any sport or do exercise of any kind other than work and walk.

So I’d wonder, in the way a seven-year-old does, why he was coming home for his hockey stick in the middle of the evening. The next day, one of my brothers would tell me. “There was a fight at the pub, someone started on dad and the others. That’s why he came home for his hockey stick, to beat them up.”

I was slightly puzzled by this because the hockey stick was a sorry-looking thing, the white tape grip tape peeling off from the top, and the wood all faded. Still, it was solid timber transported all the way from northern India along with my dad, so I supposed it carried some purchase when swung in earnest.

The undertone to all this, sometimes made explicit, was that my dad or one of his mates would have been racially abused in the pub. Being Sikhs and being working men too, this was not something they were going to turn the other cheek to. Pride at stake, dignity at stake, safety at stake too.

I just assumed that all this was the norm, and to some extent it was, throughout my childhood. You’re walking down the street, you get called a Paki (or something just as malicious), and you either stand your ground or you run. I always did the latter. I had no hockey stick, nor any instinct to use it, and I wasn’t much of a fighter.

It’s hard to say for sure how things like this shaped me, only that they certainly did. Kids in these situations develop a strong radar for dangerous situations and people, and I certainly did. That’s not to say the radar isn’t sometimes oversensitive or gives false readings, but you get pretty good at reading people, their real intent, the ‘vibe’ they give off.

I was no different. I can smell malicious intent a mile off, particularly when it’s relating to race. Growing up and living with racism imbues you with an education and instincts you would prefer not to have, things like spotting subtly coded racist language or noticing the double standards in which stories are told in the media and which are absent or obscured.

Nowadays, this intent is increasingly dressed up in sophisticated narratives about things like migration, national identity, and religion. And once again, there are always things worthy of debate in these theme but what modern racists do quite well is create binary arguments or false intractable choices: if you don’t believe immigration is only a problem then you must be someone who believes in open borders; if you don’t denounce all migrants for the actions of a few, you’re someone who’s ok with violent crimes.

I say this messaging is sophisticated, but it’s not really. It’s convincing enough if you’ve never really explored the history of countries like the UK and the US, or questioned why they have so many migrants from other parts of the world. It’s persuasive too if you’ve never looked at some basic data about migrant contributions to UK society or questioned things like why almost a quarter of NHS staff are born overseas (clue: shortage of British doctors & nurses - UK tuition fees, student debt & housing costs vs the salaries the NHS pays).

This is not to say that things like immigration are not up for debate; they absolutely are when done in good faith and based on some actual reality. It is, quite understandably, easy to blame the Other or outsider when things get really hard, especially when you’ve been drip-fed hateful narratives for decades. To people like me, though, we can not only see that the Emperor is wearing no clothes but also that he has some quite unpleasant slogans tattooed on his body.

Something new is happening now, though. In the last year, I’ve had three conversations with people who told me that they think the far-right activist and violent criminal, Tommy Robinson, has some important ideas and is worth listening to.

All three of these people would comfortably fit the description of middle-class, educated and materially successful. Two of them, one of whom has never lived in the UK, suggested I should take off my blinkers and be less prejudiced about someone like Robinson.

I’m fairly certain that none of these people knew much about Tommy Robinson five years ago. I’m also fairly certain they were unaware that I’ve known about him since around 2012 because he sits at the intersection of several things I’ve long had an interest in: football, politics, racism and hooliganism.

None of these people would think of themselves as endorsing racist views, which only adds to the curious situation in which they’re openly supporting the views of someone like Robinson. This is a man who is known by a fake name (‘Tommy Robinson’ is a name he adopted from a notorious Luton Town football hooligan; his real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), has eight criminal convictions including two for violent assault (the first of which was kicking a police officer in the head), has become popular for expressing and platforming hateful views about Muslims, migrants and asylum seekers, and is taking money from far-right sources in the US, Russia and Israel.

So even setting aside his views for a moment, part of me wants to scream, “This is your guy? This is the guy you think is leading the charge to save Western civilisation, the one who spread a conspiracy theory online about a 15-year-old schoolboy, leading to him and his family having to leave his school and town, and he later had to admit in court it was a lie? The guy who was arrested for leading a brawl of 100 football fans? The guy who was arrested for using a fake passport and convicted of mortgage fraud? THIS IS YOUR GUY??”

So something else is happening here, and at least part of it is how people consume information and what it has done to their ability to reason and make judgments. All three of these people referenced YouTube videos they had watched, ones that portray Robinson as a heroic figure leading a crusade against the corruption of European civilisation. A reminder here: these were middle-class and middle-aged people I was speaking to.

This is how hateful ideas really spread, especially in the world of algorithms and social media. It is not just a hardcore of ill-informed, homogenous and oblivious people pushing a single narrative; it is millions of narratives, constantly mutating and adapting to speak to different audiences, with highly selective emotive triggers delivered through rational arguments.

These plausible and intelligent-sounding pieces of content are absorbed by people who think they are learning something special that helps them see through the noise; it reinforces the idea that they are smarter than everyone else.

Which is how it came to be that a white middle-class woman told me that I should wake up and join the revolution that Robinson is leading, seemingly blissfully unaware that if she spent any significant time in the company of him and his retinue, she’d most likely be utterly repulsed and possibly worse.

One of the many lesser-told stories of British history is how the UK flirted with fascism in the 1930s when Oswald Mosley was in Parliament. As an MP, he openly courted Hitler and Mussolini, expressed antisemitic views and founded the British Union of Fascists political party.

Mosely had support in high places: wealthy industrialists, the upper classes and members of the Royal Family amongst them. In October, it will be 90 years since he and his Blackshirts marched on East London, eventually being ousted by counter-protestors in the Battle of Cable Street. It was only after the UK went to war with Hitler’s Germany that his party was outlawed and Mosley was briefly imprisoned.

That was not the end of it. Less than thirty years later, Enoch Powell MP made his Rivers of Blood speech in the House of Commons, showing once again that hateful, violent rhetoric was flowing from the very top of British society - and the last 20 years have shown that these views and narratives have not gone away; they have instead mutated and returned with even greater force.

I was of the generation that experienced Powell’s legacy. Before I was even 10 years old, I knew of the British National Party, the National Front and extremists like Combat 18 (the number denoting Adolf Hitler’s initials). These were the spiritual descendants of the hate that Powell promoted. I would hear terrifying stories of hate crimes committed by these and similar organisations, brutal and random attacks on the streets, stabbings, murders and relentless abuse.

One day, my eldest brother, the gentlest of all of us, came home with a huge, swollen lip which was split and bleeding down the middle, and a badly bruised cheek. He had been walking down the street when a stranger, a white guy, had decided to punch him in the face. My brother was 12 years old, and I was 8.

So I don’t need to watch Tommy Robinson’s Oxford Union Speech. I don’t need to sit down and consider Nigel Farage’s views on migration. I have no interest in listening to Rupert Lowe, Elon Musk, JD Vance and all the other merchants of hate out there claiming their ideology is one of care and love for the native community. I know who these people are. I have lived the consequences of their ideas. They are dangerous, nasty and utterly dishonest individuals.

As I write, race riots have erupted in Belfast and Glasgow, sparked by a violent crime and fuelled by a steady stream of online misinformation, hate and incitement to violence, from the usual sources. Gangs of men broke into the homes of people of colour, regardless of their citizenship or nationality. These have rightly been described by some as pogroms, derived from a Russian word meaning devastation or the wreaking of havoc.

It has all reminded me once again of the Oscar-winning short film, ‘The Long Goodbye’, which depicts the logical conclusion to this direction of travel. It seemed uncomfortably plausible to me when I watched it six years ago and even more so now.

This is getting worse. Poison is dripping into our society. It has been for some time, and the ugly effects of it are now showing up in everyday conversations where well-meaning people are naively promoting the views of a violent racist and his grotesque ideology, all whilst thinking they are nobly engaged in saving Western civilisation.

I have no neat conclusion or suggestion for how to counter this, other than to do what you can. Engage people. Listen to their real concerns. Be aware that it is mostly a small number of powerful people seeking to spread darkness. Counter this with knowledge and empathy.

I saw a street sign in London last week that read: ‘Stay alert. Trust your instincts.’

About me.

I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.

Contact me to: 

• Make sense of what’s going on with you, your work and your life through my coaching practice.*

• Make sense of what’s going on in your organisation through group work, workshops and strategy sessions.

• Have a real conversation.

At the heart of my work is helping individuals and organisations to figure out what is really going on.

You can also find out more about my work with men & masculinity here.

*I’m taking on one new coaching client. I work with people who are looking to make sense of themselves, their lives and their work, and make extraordinary changes. If that’s you, get in touch, I’d love to chat.

Share

[main image, the local pub my dad used to frequent.]

Your support means I can spend more time researching and writing this each week, going to more esoteric and interesting places. Thank you.

Subscribe now

“Wheat seedlings remember that they’ve gone through winter before they start to flower and make seeds.”

— Annaka Harris

“The power of memory is prodigious. It is a vast, immeasurable sanctuary. Who can plumb its depths? And yet it is a faculty of my soul.”

— Saint Augustine

On the Feld, I can feel the all-encompassing embrace of the summer sun like a warm cloak. In this corner, there is no shade, just a huge and flat expanse of grass that is, for now, voluptuous and green. It is a June scene, all kinds of people scattered and lounging in the open; time is behaving differently here.

Ren is scampering around, his giggling interspersed with shrieks of glee. He wants me to throw the football as high as I can, “High up in sky!” he demands.

I pick it up, enjoying the familiar fullness and weight. “Ready?”

He grins.

I crouch down, swing the football back between my legs and then launch it upwards as high as I can, up towards the cloudless cornflower sky. It spins, catching the brilliance of the late afternoon sun, briefly hangs in the air at the apex, and then begins to arc downwards towards the ground again, quickly gathering speed.

Just before it lands, something passes through me, a sense of having been transported somewhere. And then, in that fraction of a second when the football makes contact with a satisfying and deeply familiar thump on the turf, dozens of memories flash through my mind.

Half memories, not so much the details, but the feelings, the embodied sensations of those times and places. Sunkissed school fields, the smell of freshly mown grass, an illusion of complete freedom - of youthful abandon, uncomplicated companionship, a future so vast as to be unfathomable, the thrill of pointless play. And a football bouncing, chased, and kicked by a ragtag of boys with reddened cheeks and shiny eyes.

And then it’s gone. And I’m back on the Feld, ever so slightly disoriented, watching Ren squealing as he sprints after the ball and scoops it up.

“Noch mehr, Papi!” (even more Daddy)

“Okay, here we go.”

_________________________

There was a period, several years ago, when I would have recurring daydreams of jumping out of the window of a tall building and taking flight. These momentary fantasies usually came when I was at work in a modern office building. They did not come in moments when I was alone, or whilst sat in silence, they would come unbidden in the middle of a meeting or whilst I was at my desk working on a presentation. They would catch me off guard, the vivid image and fleeting urge to actually get up from my seat and defenestrate myself, and what was most peculiar was the intensely pleasurable feelings that came with it.

I eventually came to realise that these images were a profound longing to free myself from the particular setting I had imprisoned myself in again. I was at that time a freelance consultant, but working inside a large corporate consulting firm. I had a high degree of freedom, particularly from the relentless performance review and promotion cycles, but I was still somewhere I shouldn’t be - I didn’t fully know this, but some deeper part of me did.

The daydreams were not suicidal in a traditional sense, the clue perhaps in the glee at taking flight, but they were a desire to lay some part of my life to rest; to ‘kill off’ an increasingly redundant identity, to finally end this part of my life and leap into the unknown. Which I eventually did, although it required the push of a global pandemic too.

Those of an archetypal psychology bent will know that dreams are worth paying attention to, rich as they are in the imagery of the unconscious. Often overlooked is the notion that daydreams, memories and fantasies are also worth paying attention to, for they offer clues to something we do not yet fully know or understand.

This is especially true in midlife when the ‘provisional identity’ begins to crumble and, hopefully, something of the soul, something more true can emerge. When people I’m coaching mention an ideal life or some specific dream, they often do so dismissively, waving it away as if it were an irritating fly in the room. Their reasoning often seems sound: I cannot afford to pay attention to such fantastical musings.

Yet I usually encourage them to do so, inviting them to consider what the fantasy is - not necessarily so that it can be enacted but as a potential source of what is most important for them to consider right now, a message from the unconscious. It invites the question of what might be known but is not yet in awareness.

A fantasy of leaving one’s family and backpacking around the world might be saying something about feeling confined or restricted in one’s life. It might have nothing to do with the spouse, children or domestic life, but is instead a response to a life lived in self-imprisonment. It might require a different job or vocation, a reframing of what is most important, or perhaps simply some travel or adventure that fulfils the wanderlust.

Likewise, a fantasy of selling one’s business might be an indication that this particular journey is complete, and it is now time to exit. Or it might be an indication that the thing that once brought the most joy as an entrepreneur has been lost under layers of managerial duties and administration. It might invite the question of why the business was launched in the first place, where the magic lay and how it might be recaptured through a change of role or reorientation of the organisation.

“Many - far too many - aspects of life which should also have been experienced lie in the lumber-room among dusty memories. Sometimes, even, they are glowing coals under grey ashes.”

— C.G. Jung

Memories can serve a similar function as emissaries of a deeper knowing. It is not just what we are remembering but also when we are remembering it. Why is this echo from the past coming to me now? What are the attendant feelings or insights from this particular memory?

There is a potency to memories that can be startling or even overwhelming, freighted as they are with what those past moments meant and what they mean now. When I first worked with a therapist, I found myself constantly surprised at the memories that came rushing forward, incidents and times that I was not even aware that I knew. The more I shared, the more that seemed to be released as if a dam was being gradually cracked open.

At times, I had to sit in silence, reliving the memory and unable to do anything other than let it wash over me. Often, there was a sense of awe in the experience, and I’d find myself gratefully helpless at the mercy of memories that were rarely pleasing; I knew there was treasure being given to me, and even in the midst of it, I often experienced relief.

I’ve had a similar experience in writing the memoir that I’ve been eking out for several years now, noting the extraordinarily unpredictable and surprising acts of remembering parts of my life buried under decades of experience.

Yet memories, just like dreams, must be interpreted with care. They are a biographical record that is constantly shifting and changing, due to the nature of time and the nature of how we store memories. A memory is never truly fixed or certain because we are never fixed or certain. Each time we revisit the same memory, we are arriving from a different place in the present, with different knowledge and understanding, with different sensibilities even.

The memory of a difficult event that seemed entirely clear-cut in our 20s can be experienced entirely differently in our 30s or 40s, almost certainly in our 50s and 60s. The heroes and villains of the story might even change place, and we can be surprised at how our feelings have transformed because our capacity to interpret those moments has expanded.

I have noticed this quite starkly in writing my book. I’m now on my third draft, one that is entirely different from the first version, and quite different to the second one too. Each time I have gone back to moments from the past, I’m excavating something new, however subtle.

My first draft was almost wince-inducing in its rawness; the anger in particular was too loose, yet to be processed, as the stories from the past had not been properly understood. The drafts that came over the next few years reflected different depths of interpretation, revealing things that had previously been obscured as I approached them with greater empathy and awareness. The raw first draft was essential as a foundation, providing material to be worked over, mined and refined into something meaningful.

I can think of few more rich or even profound ways in which to understand oneself than to write your own biography. It need not be a weighty book; in fact, the volume and medium matter less than the process of walking through the story one has lived so far.

In this, we can find a much more resonant understanding of who we are and the story we are living in the present - or as I sometimes like to put it, we “find out what we’re really up to”.

Memory is a deeply unreliable narrator yet simultaneously a unique and irreplaceable guide, a way of locating ourselves in the present against the waymarks of the past.

Yes, that journey of remembering is fraught with the potential for misunderstanding, for pain and discomfort, for inconvenient revelations and self-discovery; but also for unexpected joy, relief and a fresh sense of certainty. And besides, isn’t all of that the essence of a well-examined life?

About me.

I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.

Contact me to: 

• Make sense of what’s going on with you, your work and your life through my coaching practice.*

• Make sense of what’s going on in your organisation through group work, workshops and strategy sessions.

• Have a real conversation.

At the heart of my work is helping individuals and organisations to figure out what is really going on.

You can also find out more about my work with men & masculinity here.

*I’m taking on one new coaching client. I work with people who are looking to make sense of themselves, their lives and their work, and make extraordinary changes. If that’s you, get in touch, I’d love to chat.

Share

[main image, ‘The Persistence of Memory’ by Salvador Dalí]

Your support means I can spend more time researching and writing this each week, going to more esoteric and interesting places. Thank you.

Subscribe now

“Better it is to live one day virtuous and meditative than to live a hundred years immoral and uncontrolled.”

— Buddha

“The standard which I accept is this: one’s life should be a compromise between the ideal and the popular morality. People should admire our way of life but they should at the same time find it understandable.”

— Seneca

There are a lot of swifts in my neighbourhood. You can spot them instantly with their sickle-shaped wings sweeping backwards and their seemingly erratic high-speed zigzags. From our kitchen, it’s an almost daily occurrence to see one of them dive bombing to the courtyard floor, a blur of brown on a suicide mission until it pulls up at the last moment to snare something in its beak.

In the evenings, particularly now, I see them darting around in the sky as they catch insects in the late heat of the day. The speed and suddenness with which they change direction is stunning. Sometimes they chase each other around, like air force pilots in a dogfight, perhaps in a tussle for food.

They eat, they play, they fly home. I sometimes think birds have the most freedom of all species, unencumbered by almost any terrain and able to roam and land wherever they wish. Free, even, to shit wherever they please.

Perhaps second to birds are domestic cats and dogs, fed and watered by humans and obliged to do little except have fun. A couple of days ago, I was at a local cafe and bumped into a friend with his baby and dog. As we sat down in the shade away from the searing heat, his dog promptly wandered a few feet away to bask in a patch of hot sun, eyes blinking open occasionally as someone stepped over her, content with this state of undemanding bliss.

I often look at a cat or dog in this unbothered condition and wonder why I can’t be more like that. Why do I do anything that I don’t have to do?

Humans, as far as we know, are the only species that are not content with meeting their basic needs and desires. Most other species focus on food and shelter, for themselves and their offspring, and then, once these needs are met, spend the rest of their time playing or doing nothing at all.

Bonobo monkeys, in their matriarchal societies, spend a lot of time having sex purely for pleasure. Bear cubs will play fight and explore with no particular goal in mind. Once fed, a pride of lions will do absolutely nothing for hours on end.

Beyond hoarding food for winter and procreating, it is hard to imagine any other species worrying about future trivialities: their next promotion, how on trend their clothing is, what the neighbours think of them and how large their pension pot is.

Modern humans and the accompanying consciousness seem fundamentally discontent with this state of affairs. Not only do many of us have far more than we actually need to live in happiness and health, we also organise our lives around this pursuit of excess as if it were a law of nature, paradoxically compromising the very happiness and health we seek. We rarely question this endeavour, even as we notice the true cost of it in our own lives and throughout our societies.

In modernity, want has superseded need. We are so completely captive to this idea that to only fulfil our basic needs and then rest or play is considered strange or lazy. So deeply buried is the memory of life beyond work and productive labour that many of us seem to anxiously fill our time in some form of toil to avoid being confronted with any void, however small, that invites something different - unproductive, purposeless, unstructured time to simply be.

I recently heard an interview with Peter Mertens, a Belgian politician and General Secretary of the Workers Party. As the conversation began to explore morality in politics, he shared, with a candour I found refreshing, the details of his salary. He is paid €8,000 a month as a politician, a sum he described as a “crazy amount of money”. So he pays himself €2,400 a month, which is the average working-class salary in Belgium, and donates the rest to the party.

It was what Mertens said as an explanation for this that I found most interesting. Our external actions must be aligned to our inner values; otherwise, over time, our values will change to catch up with our actions.

Mertens believes that surplus wealth is unnecessary and is best redistributed and put to use elsewhere - and he doesn’t just believe this as a political theory to be implemented for others, he practices it in his own life.

The practice here is congruence, a consistency between the morals and values we believe we hold and the way we actually live. There is a seductive appeal here, one of goodness and values, living a good, moral life and being a good, moral person. It follows quite logically that having more alignment between our inner and outer lives will lead to a happier and more peaceful sense of self.

It is somewhat trickier than that, though (enormously), something I’ve been able to explore in a fascinating series of recent group conversations run by philosopher and teacher Pranay Sanklecha. The insights, conundrums and paradoxes from those inquiries are something I’ll maybe share another time, but there are a few themes that emerged for me that are, as someone suggested in the group, a lifetime’s work.

The first is something around duty and what or who we feel a sense of duty towards. Our immediate family and loved ones feel obvious, but what happens when duty beyond this weakens or feels more tenuous? What duty do we have to our neighbourhood, our city, our country and the people suffering in a country thousands of miles away?

It is not clear. And this lack of clarity, I feel, is where much of human society is right now, adrift from a sense of belonging or duty beyond our immediate interest, the result of over a century of individualism.

Duty, though, is complicated by real obligations. We have our own needs to take care of and the needs of others - partners, children, extended family, friends. To what extent should one be balanced with the other? There is a philosophical line of thought about morality that proposes that once our basic needs are met, we should share or give away all surplus, unless or until it compromises our obligations or some other failure of morality.

Then there is the notion that we should maximise our productive capacity, whether monetary or otherwise, whilst minimising harm. If we are able to work, we should. If we’re able to earn well, we should. If we’re able to fight for justice, we should.

Then there is the question of where this begins and ends, the question of how morally we can live in a culture that is low in morality. Where does our morality come from, within, without or both? How do we determine what is moral if there is no shared or common understanding of it?

All of this has seemingly intractable conundrums. If our child falls out of a dinghy in rough seas and our choice is saving our own offspring or the other eight children in the dinghy, what is the moral choice? Which has the greatest good?

If we give away all of our surplus, how do we judge what is enough? The Netflix subscription is an easy one to cancel, but how many books should you have? Are they educational or entertainment? And is entertainment not ok?

To what extent do you have obligations to yourself? How do we locate ourselves in all of this?

And there are shadows to this, too. The concept of duty is used to manipulate and coerce people into everything from arranged marriages to going to war. How do we distinguish what duty is justifiable?

Whole books have been written about these topics. Notions like morality and goodness have occupied great minds for centuries. And these questions themselves arise only because of our unique human consciousness, which gives us our incredible ability to ponder our existence - and the burden of this contemplation. I cannot imagine a swift gives a flying fuck (pun intended) about its obligations to a better world or the suffering of factory-farmed cows.

Here’s the thing. I doubt anything I’ve put forward here is a truly new thought for you. I’d go further and suggest, like me, you probably live with this background tussle of trying to be a moral and ‘good’ person, yet also come up short in most areas, over and over again.

We’re all aware of great suffering; we’re aware of those in far more need than us, yet we do not do everything we could possibly do - or even reasonably do - to alleviate this state of affairs. Why is this? We’re not monsters, but something is going on.

What is the gift of our consciousness if it is not to wrestle with and transcend these profound questions?

I guess the question I return to is this: what is the point of existing as a human? Why are you and I here, this particular arrangement of atoms, that not only takes up a certain amount of the finite energy on earth, but is also possessed of this insanely powerful ability to contemplate?

This is surely a question worth asking, one that must be asked if we are at any level seeking to live a good life. Not because we’re likely to find the answer, but because it is likely to enhance the way we live and the quality of our morality.

Questions, questions, questions. If you find any answers, please let me know so I can stop daydreaming about becoming a swift.

About me.

I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.

Contact me to: 

• Make sense of what’s going on with you, your work and your life through my coaching practice.*

• Make sense of what’s going on in your organisation through group work, workshops and strategy sessions.

• Have a real conversation.

At the heart of my work is helping individuals and organisations to figure out what is really going on.

You can also find out more about my work with men & masculinity here.

*I’m taking on one new coaching client. I work with people who are looking to make sense of themselves, their lives and their work, and make extraordinary changes. If that’s you, get in touch, I’d love to chat.

Share

[main image from the RSPB]

Your support means I can spend more time researching and writing this each week, going to more esoteric and interesting places. Thank you.

Subscribe now

“We construct our models of progression on a gradient. We move on up, or sink back down. It is harder to do the former than the latter, but that makes it only more admirable. One does not, under any linguistic circumstances, progress down. Most religions operate on a vertical axis in which heaven or their analogue of that state is up, and its opposite is down. To ascend, therefore, is in some fundamental way to approach divinity.”

— Robert Macfarlane

“I wonder what it would be like for us to linger a little bit longer in the richness of darkness. I know darkness is not easy. It can feel oppressive and isolating. But I want us to reimagine darkness as a place of imagination, of gestation, of silence, of mystery. Something happens in the darkness that all of life depends upon.”

— Francis Weller

I’m attending a spoken word event this evening. The theme is the metaphor of mountains - climbing something, facing challenges, overcoming the odds. I’ve put my name in the hat to read in the open mic section of the evening. If my name is called, this is what I’ll be reading:

It was a blazing hot, sunny day five years ago in South London when I first spoke to a therapist.

I was pushing my bike through a landscaped park filled with young sunbathers and families, Londoners who rush to the nearest public space and strip off at the merest sign of sunlight, like sea lions basking on a rock.

I had arranged to speak with a few therapists, ‘chemistry calls’ as we call them in this line of work, and I was about to have the first of them. For some reason I can’t remember, perhaps a lack of thought altogether, I decided a public park would be an ideal place to have this conversation, a casual chit-chat as I walked around some trees.

Yet all it took was one question to break me open. “So”, began the therapist, “Why did you want to speak with me?”

And it all came rushing forward then, an unstoppable torrent of things I’d never said out loud, never said to anyone. Decades of pain and confusion, pouring out of me.

And with those words, like some movie cliche, came a flood of tears. I stopped walking, leaned my bike against a tree, leaned against the tree myself, doubled over and wept. The more I talked, the more I wept and with each rush of tears came a fresh wave of relief, an unburdening.

But allow me to rewind briefly. A few weeks before this moment in the park, I had been dating someone for a few months. She was smart, fierce, beautiful, and, as I was to discover, possessed a spooky level of intuition. I loved spending time with her - but I had also realised there was no romantic energy, no magic spark.

When we finally kissed, I knew this for sure, and I felt a great wave of sadness, with a sense of a door closing for good on a future I longed for. When I later told her that I didn’t think ours was a romantic relationship, she replied, “No shit. I’ve never had a kiss so devoid of passion.”

And then she said, “When you walked away, you looked like you were carrying something. Grief. You were carrying grief.”

Plato once said that the experience of hearing something truly wise is not like you’re hearing it for the first time but as something you already knew and had forgotten. Hearing those words “carrying grief”, this was how I felt; some deep truth was revived in me.

And that was the moment that, amongst all my other self-work, all of my own work as a coach, I knew there were corners of myself I could no longer avoid. Places that I needed help to explore.

My conversation with that therapist, in that park, was supposed to last fifteen minutes. But for almost an hour, I stayed leaning against that tree, sobbing and talking as tears fell from my face and into the dry and dusty earth beneath me. As I watched them falling, the droplets twinkling in the sunlight, it was as if I was seeing them clearly for the first time.

After a few months, when my therapist told me our work together was done, I protested. “I don’t feel finished,” I said.

She smiled patiently. “You’re trying to complete yourself, thinking you’re not ready,” she said. “The rest of this work you will do inside a relationship.”

We said goodbye, and four months later I met - another cliche - my soulmate, the woman who would become my wife. Five months after that, I moved to Berlin to live with her. Ten months after that, we got married, and six months after that, she gave birth to a baby boy, and I became a father.

That was three years ago now, and my therapist was right. The ascent continues, but now I have a climbing partner.

Rock bottom, I realise now, had been decades ago in all those troubled times that I’d buried and tried to forget, times spent in a darkness so persistent I’d begun to believe it was normality. Ascendancy was a mere fantasy then.

I’d been climbing out of that place for a long, long time, and now - finally - I’d broken through the clouds to a place I’d heard about but never imagined possible for me.

Not a peak or a summit, but a plateau, a Shambhala, a green upland where I was becoming more whole and more fully in contact with life.

I am, like all of us, perfectly incomplete, strong yet flawed. I’m an experienced climber, pilgrim and guide at the same time.

About me.

I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.

Contact me to: 

• Make sense of what’s going on with you, your work and your life through my coaching practice.*

• Make sense of what’s going on in your organisation through group work, workshops and strategy sessions.

• Have a real conversation.

At the heart of my work is helping individuals and organisations to figure out what is really going on.

You can also find out more about my work with men & masculinity here.

*I’m taking on one new coaching client. I work with people who are looking to make sense of themselves, their lives and their work, and make extraordinary changes. If that’s you, get in touch, I’d love to chat.

Share

[main picture: me, my brother and some friends on a ridgeline in the French Alps]

Your support means I can spend more time researching and writing this each week, going to more esoteric and interesting places. Thank you.

Subscribe now

“We have grown accustomed to living with that knowledge without feeling dizzy every morning, and instead of moving around warily and tentatively, in constant amazement, we behave as if nothing has happened, take the strangeness of it all for granted and get dizzy if life shows itself as it truly is: improbable, unpredictable, remarkable.”

— Solvej Balle

“A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

On Sunday night, I arrived back in Berlin from a few days in Athens. It had been an unusual few days, hard to summarise beyond having been at a kind of conference for organisations and businesses seeking to make the world a better place, that left me feeling somewhat underwhelmed and - perhaps - deepened my cynicism about the systemic issues in the world.

I’d had a lovely few days, though, mainly because one of my closest friends was a speaker there and hosted an event involving fifteen respected philosophers. He’d kindly given me his free guest ticket too, which meant I felt a little churlish grumbling about the event.

We had several long and unencumbered stretches of time together, the kind that is rare amongst middle-aged adults, even rarer amongst fathers. We did nothing in particular other than walking around the city and chatting, covering a wide range of high and low brow territory that amused us both. This, I think we are both aware, is a great joy and one that our friendship is built upon.

I’d missed my wife and son while I was away, too, feeling their absence more acutely after an extended trip in the UK to see family, and that invited an unfamiliar short-term loneliness in me. So I was arriving home with several kinds of dissonance.

On Monday, I was unusually delighted to get up early with my son, who sprinted and clung to me when I opened his bedroom door. However hackneyed it may seem, it’s a special kind of joy to receive that unbridled love. I made some toast for him, coffee for me, and we read books, cuddled up together until Lucy, my wife, woke and came into the kitchen.

After she took our son to kita, I realised I was quite exhausted and I did little for the rest of the day, except some exercise and replying to a few messages that needed my attention. I fell into a familiar trap of choosing to have a slower working day, yet not properly taking time to rest or for leisure, so found myself frustrated at having idly sat at my desk for most of the day, caught between two worlds and not committed to either of them.

Later in the day, Lucy noted that I had come back from my trip with a renewed openness and sense of relaxation, which I felt to be true whilst also feeling a lingering and general despondency.

By Tuesday, I felt the openness fading, and I was in a tussle with my inertia. I was up early with my son again and greedily pleased to receive a similar sort of excited welcome in the morning.

I replied to a few more messages, including one informing me of the postponement of a talk I was due to deliver next week. An artistic project that I’ve been collaborating on for a few months reached an exciting point, with the arrival of actual physical artefacts from the printers.

In the afternoon, I had a good call with someone about running a men’s retreat later this year. I’d promised myself a nap afterwards, but ended up going for a run instead.

I spent a fair amount of time reading long-form analysis of El Niño and the conflict in the Middle East, which only deepened my certainty that very tough times lie ahead. For a brief period, how to actually respond to it all felt somewhat clear to me.

Once again, I found myself exhausted at the end of the day. The novel I’m currently reading reached a very sad point, one I knew was coming but nonetheless caught me off guard.

Wednesday felt the hardest. Despite sleeping well, I woke feeling physically tired and needed to muster some motivation. There was a less enthusiastic morning greeting from my son, to which I felt a trace of disappointment and then needy and ungrateful.

In the morning, Lucy and I had a great call with someone from a well-known and interesting cultural organisation about doing a workshop for them, with quite an exciting brief. We went to our local cafe for coffee afterwards, which ended with a short argument about our approach to the work, and that itself led to what felt like some important clarity.

At lunchtime, I was part of a small group gathered by a philosopher friend of mine for a dialogue about our response to the world, which felt incredibly timely. We shared deeply personal stories and perspectives, eventually coalescing around a theme for our inquiry together over the next few weeks. It felt easy and needed, offering some slightly different provocations for me.

Just after that, I had a call with a potential coaching client, which felt quite choppy. I had a sense the person wanted support with their current predicament, but was resistant to what coaching actually entailed, although I was pleased to actually name this quite clearly.

By the end of the afternoon, I felt in quite a funk, drained in all senses. The clarity I’d felt the day before about responding to world events felt precarious and uncertain. Between various other things, my wife and I messed up dinner plans, and although we always have leftovers in the freezer for easy midweek dinners, I left it too late to eat before joining a group call, the current men’s Circle I’m co-facilitating, so I joined feeling quite grumpy and hungry.

I also arrived feeling heavy and a little flustered, although grateful that it was exactly the sort of space I could be open about that. An hour and a half later, I left, as I often do, feeling a great sense of lightness from the intimate and honest conversation we shared as a group of men.

The theme of friendship had thrown up an unexpected memory of a childhood friend, Daniel, who I first met in primary school. Our very first encounter was him using a racial slur towards me, and yet we somehow became best friends for a couple of years.

He had a troubled family situation, was obviously fiercely intelligent even at that age, and had a sense of danger about him that I was drawn to. We eventually drifted apart, and then he moved away. Years later, I heard from someone else that he’d ended up sleeping rough in London and had died of a drug overdose.

I hadn’t thought about Daniel for a very long time, maybe a decade or more. After our call ended, I spent a little while searching online trying to find some trace of him but just as the last time I’d thought of him, my search yielded nothing. If his life had ended back then, it was a few years before widespread internet, online news and social media.

I slept heavily and woke this morning to my son pulling my eyelids open. Although I really didn’t want to get up, I couldn’t suppress a smile at his antics, which made him laugh and pull my eyes open even more, so any prospect of a lie-in vanished then. As we headed into the kitchen, Lucy was whispering at him to give me an envelope, which he did whilst simultaneously trying to open it.

I was still sleepy and quite confused when I finally opened the card, which was a mock-up of our family as my son’s favourite book characters (my face appeared on the head of a yak). It was a Father’s Day card which caught me off guard as I had no idea it was today in Germany.

After my morning essentials (meditation and coffee), Lucy went to a yoga class, and my son and I found ourselves alternating between Lego and rolling around on the floor. When Lucy returned, we headed out to a surprise destination which turned out to be a charming restaurant in a villa, next to a picturesque park, that had the feeling of an old British pub (complete with heavy rain outside).

Perhaps still in a state of fatigue, I merely shrugged and agreed when my wife noted how strange it was that we’d been given a table for six. Five minutes later, her cousin, who we consider part of our family, arrived, which was a welcome surprise. Five minutes after that, two close friends and their baby daughter arrived too, and it dawned on me that we were having a Father’s Day lunch, which felt somewhat new and very nice at the same time.

The rain had stopped by the time we finished lunch so we spent the rest of the afternoon ambling around the park. My son climbed rocks and trees, and I enjoyed holding our friends’ baby and helping her to clamber onto a small boulder.

We headed home, weary but full in every sense, and after dinner I replied to a couple of messages that had some urgency to them. Tomorrow, we may or may not go to an art gallery. For now, my sense of needing to prepare for impending doom has dissipated, but no doubt it will return at some point.

It’s been quite a week, but in reality, no different to any other week.

How’s yours been?

About me.

I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.

Contact me to: 

• Make sense of what’s going on with you, your work and your life through my coaching practice.*

• Make sense of what’s going on in your organisation through group work, workshops and strategy sessions.

• Have a real conversation.

At the heart of my work is helping individuals and organisations to figure out what is really going on.

You can also find out more about my work with men & masculinity here.

*I’m taking on one new coaching client. I work with people who are looking to make sense of themselves, their lives and their work, and make extraordinary changes. If that’s you, get in touch, I’d love to chat.

Share

[main image from my morning run towards the Acropolis in Athens]

Your support means I can spend more time researching and writing this each week, going to more esoteric and interesting places. Thank you.

Subscribe now

“He was struck again by the strangeness of people, their mystery, but also their recognisability. He felt he knew these people immediately, which to him suggested a certain homogeneity among humankind. A general familiarity. As if there were only ten different varieties of soul after all.”

— Sebastian Barry

“The ancient Greek word for slave - andrapodon - was derived from the word for cattle and essentially meant “animal with human feet.” Once you have dehumanized others to that degree, you don’t have to worry about killing or enslaving God’s children, because God’s real children are supposedly limited to you and your tribe or clan.”

— Sebastian Junger

Last weekend, we celebrated the 100th birthday of my wife’s grandmother. Four generations of family converged on the small North Yorkshire town where Dorothy has lived her entire life, gathering in a snug village hall a few doors down from her house. On the front of that village hall is a foundation stone bearing the name of my wife’s great-grandfather, a patron of the building, and a date sometime in the late 19th century.

The celebration was quite something to behold, not because it was elaborate or flashy (quite the opposite) but because of what was represented. As I looked around this old village hall, I was struck by the people, representing almost the entirety of the living family - children, grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren, one of whom was my son.

They had come from all over the UK and around the world: as far south as Cornwall, Hampshire and Sussex, from London, from Copenhagen, from Mexico City and two parties from Berlin, us and my wife’s cousin. Many lived locally too, one of my wife’s uncles and his son still running the family farm, land they have worked for at least 500 years.

Another strand of the family, meanwhile, originates from Colombia, my wife’s uncle having lived there for years and met his wife. Their three children, my wife’s cousins, consider themselves both European and Latin American, and one of them is mother to the other great-grandchild, a sweet 18-month-old boy who toddled around the room smiling.

And so I sat there witnessing this scene, somewhat awestruck. My son, himself a descendant of centuries of heritage from Indian Punjab and Yorkshire, is running around the hall with a toddler also descended from Yorkshire and from Colombia. Around me, I hear different strains of northern English accents, some southern and Midlands ones too, and the occasional gorgeous burst of Spanish, loving words from one family member to another.

Whenever I looked at Dorothy, she had a beaming smile, eyes wide and shining with life as she sat facing a room filled with the rich tapestry of life that originated from her in some way. Throughout the day, she expressed what sounded like disbelief and wonder that we had gathered to celebrate her.

I had a sensation similar to that one has when contemplating where the universe ends or how long the Earth has existed. The gathering was a very literal and physical reminder of the remarkable fact of our existence, of the stories we carry within us, and the history we ultimately all share.

“It’s quite a thing isn’t it?”, I kept saying to my wife. “It’s quite a thing.”

We all walked out of the African continent somewhere around 90,000 years ago, spreading out across the then joined up landmasses of the planet, and before that, we crawled out of the sea onto the land of modern-day North and East Africa, something memorably satirised by Stewart Lee.

Perhaps our original wound as humans is that first migration out of Africa, like members of a family leaving home never to return. Since then, we have divided ourselves, separated ourselves in endless ways, as we are alien to each other.

It feels like it’s never gone out of fashion to form hierarchies, to define in-groups and out-groups, to create Others. It’s certainly all the rage now. There’s endless suspect or outright bad science out there telling us how this is all natural, how we are all inherently violent and competitive, as if perceived inferiority of a fellow human is some form of natural selection.

I have a feeling this particular strain of science serves narratives, one of which being that it is civilisation and culture that provide a socialising influence, without which we’d all be murdering each other. I can see why this feels essential to understanding humanity, and I’m fully on board with the idea that we are partly products of our culture.

But look closer, and this idea is quickly perverted into something darker, for instance, the idea that some cultures are more ‘civilised’ or superior to others. We know where that leads.

This view also makes propositions about human nature that not only intuitively feel wrong, but are also supported by quite shaky evidence. Take, for example, the idea that we are inherently violent. While we’re all descendants of violence, that’s not quite the same as being innately violent.

If we were predominantly wired to slaughter each other, how would we have got this far? The truth, both intuitively and supported by evidence, is that we are mostly descendants of co-operation and compassion.

As the world continues to burn itself down, it is easy to overlook that this is the real essence of humanity. Take a look around your own neighbourhood, town or city. It runs on people who, in small, invisible and infinite ways, help each other out. Easy, you might say, in a stable, safe and civilised population.

What happens in moments of crisis or emergency, times when we might expect to see the worst of human nature if we were so inherently bad? I recently heard human geographer and researcher Luke Kemp describe the largest marine transportation of humans in history. It’s not Dunkirk (that was my first thought), it took place after 9/11 in New York.

As people sought to flee the Manhattan peninsula in the aftermath of the terror attacks, the overwhelmed US Coast Guard put out a call for citizens to aid the effort. The people across the Hudson River responded: half a million New Yorkers were evacuated from Manhattan by private boats and yachts, owned by complete strangers who were willing to come and get them.

Half a million people taken to safety by strangers. Half a million people rescued by others in the most individualistic, capitalist and polarised country on the planet. It’s quite a thing.

If you’re a cynic, you might be thinking this is only members of an in-group or tribe helping each other. I’d say two things to that. First, those five hundred thousand people and those who came for them would have spanned every identity characteristic you can think of. Second, I was living in London during the 7/7 bombings, and I witnessed the same response there - a human spirit that is naturally inclined towards helping others.

I once heard Jane Goodall describe the moment an elder chimpanzee she had been observing in the Gombe rainforest finally came close and gently held her hand with two of his fingers. As she looked into his remarkably human eyes, she described an experience of communication that was pre-verbal, a deep connection that transcended species, something felt and shared in a way that defied language.

We should be more awestruck at what joins us, shouldn’t we? Life, the privilege of existing and sharing a home, is not all the layers of identity we cloak ourselves in; it’s the joint endeavour of over 8 billion humans and trillions more lifeforms.

It’s quite a thing, isn’t it? It’s quite a thing.

About me.

I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.

Contact me to: 

• Make sense of what’s going on with you, your work and your life through my coaching practice.*

• Make sense of what’s going on in your organisation through group work, workshops and strategy sessions.

• Have a real conversation.

At the heart of my work is helping individuals and organisations to figure out what is really going on.

You can also find out more about my work with men & masculinity here.

*I’m taking on one new coaching client. I work with people who are looking to make sense of themselves, their lives and their work, and make extraordinary changes. If that’s you, get in touch, I’d love to chat.

Share

[main image from The Academy of Achievement, by Hugo van Lawick]

Your support means I can spend more time researching and writing this each week, going to more esoteric and interesting places. Thank you.

Subscribe now

“When we know that that person is not capable of handling, of taking care of the suffering in him or her, we realise that they have become a victim of the suffering, and that we are only victim number two or three.”

— Thich Nhat Hanh

“Our failure to know joy is a direct reflection of our inability to forgive.”

— Charlotte Joko Beck

In 1963, Nelson Mandela was imprisoned by the South African authorities for his activism in opposing apartheid. He ended up spending 27 years in prison, in brutal conditions: torture, beatings, severe illness. He was not allowed to attend the funeral of his mother or his young son, who died in a car accident.

Only when the South African apartheid regime came under enough international pressure was Mandela released in 1990. I remember watching the TV news footage, aware that something important was happening without fully understanding what, somewhat puzzled by the significance of a slow-walking, diminutive and slightly frail-looking man.

The regime feared that Mandela’s release would unleash violence and bloodshed, that he might even stoke up tensions in a bid to claim power for the black people. We know now that not only did this not happen, but Mandela had no intention of creating further division and suffering. His freedom was the freedom to seek peace for his nation, which could only come from a peace within him.

He later remarked, “As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.”

When he wrote and spoke about his time in prison, Mandela expressed how he treated the jailers and prison administrators as fellow human beings, how he forgave them for what they did and refused to hold on to the resentment that could fuel hatred within him.

His jailers spoke of the respect and tenderness they were met with from Mandela. One of them, a young guard called Christo Brand, later spoke of how Mandela had become a mentor figure to him, saying, “He was my prisoner. But he was my father.” What Mandela demonstrated was that forgiveness was not only possible in the most extreme settings, but the only true path to healing.

As a younger man and as a boy, I did some things that might objectively be called terrible. These were acts that were harmful to others, part of a much more selfish existence and an ignorance that was partly cultivated and performative. My day-to-day life was a mixture of an unconscious or deliberate performance of apathy. I didn’t allow myself to properly feel the suffering of others because I hadn’t yet recognised the extent of my own.

In romantic relationships, I did some truly awful things. I was never unfaithful to anyone, but I inflicted plenty of pain on to girlfriends and partners, mostly through a self-centred attitude. In all of my relationships, professional or social, I was regularly dishonest, mostly in small ways but untruthful nonetheless.

There are events I’d prefer not to describe fully, not because I am still ashamed but because, to simply drop them here, stripped of all of the surrounding context of who I was then and why, would make me sound monstrous. I suspect this is true for most of us - take the worst thing we’ve ever done, remove it from any wider understanding of the person, and it would probably sound unforgivable.

I have slowly, over many years, forgiven myself for these acts, and not on the cheap. Some required making amends, many were too far in the past to do so, requiring instead a patient reflection on what I did, the impact it might have had and a scouring search for any residue of this person in my current being.

This was never a pleasant process but an essential one to properly put to rest the harms of the past, and truly allow myself to be done with them.

A few years ago, in the middle of a Vision Quest, I wrote down all of the people or acts I still needed to make peace with, resolving in some cases to contact them later. I lit a small fire at the top of the Cumbrian fell I was camping on, and gradually fed these pieces of paper into the flames, remembering the harm of each one and acknowledging how I would forgive myself for it.

The feeling of freedom was truly palpable, something becoming lighter in my body as the ashes of each scrap of paper floated up and away.

“Forgiveness happens naturally when you see that it has no purpose other than to strengthen a false sense of self, to keep the ego in place.”

— Eckhart Tolle

One of the things to go into the flames was something I did to someone when I was five years old, the memory of which had continued to plague me all these years later. I will never find the other person involved, but to full-heartedly remember, to say a silent but deeply felt sorry, and to acknowledge what I had been taught that I would carry forward was a tremendously powerful ritual. Afterwards, I felt truly free - not of the memory but of the energy it had absorbed in my psyche for so long.

That list, however, also included people who had inflicted great harm on me, including people whose actions had wounded me so deeply that it had taken decades to heal. It was time to release myself of the burden of those resentments, the anger and the pain that they continued to fuel.

How I arrived at this place of forgiving myself and others for the most harmful experiences of my life was a simple realisation: in both cases, I was imprisoning myself in a place of hurt, however small it might be.

There was another realisation too, one that had come years earlier with the help of a therapist: the person you are forgiving doesn’t need to know you’ve forgiven them. In fact, they don’t need to know anything at all. I have close relationships that have and continue to be transformed by my own work in forgiving.

This is a hidden secret within the act of forgiving, that it frees us more than it frees the other person, who may remain blissfully unaware of the act. Forgiving is not forgetting; it is deciding to let go of the hurt and the suffering within the memory.

And if we’re honest about it, the obstacle is often one that originates in our egos - that we don’t want the other party to feel relieved or grateful in any way for our willingness to let go. We’d prefer instead to imagine them imprisoned by their own guilt, by the presence of animosity or by the absence of goodwill. The irony is that in holding on to our refusal imprisons us too.

We’d prefer, perhaps even demand, that it is they who do the work required to heal the wound since it’s they who inflicted it. Why should we have to find the time and energy?

Yet we must, it’s one of the timeless lessons that I forget and remember over and over - that only we can change, and all the things we wish for, feel we deserve or feel we are owed, always come back to us doing the work ourselves. I know, annoying isn’t it?

“Forgiveness releases you from the clutches of the past. When you forgive someone else, you release yourself from them. When you forgive yourself, you release yourself from the past. You allow yourself to evolve, to grow. It takes humility.”

— Adyashanti

This is true regardless of how petty or great the original offence was, and also independent of how acknowledged the hurt actually is. I wonder how many relationships have slowly petered out because one party upset another without realising it, and rather than expressing this or forgiving it, instead the wounded person silently withdrew, ensuring the withering and death of something once important.

Even when a relationship has run its course, to avoid giving it the closure it deserves is cowardice. I know, because I’ve been that coward in the past, and all it has done is create more need for forgiveness.

I find myself at this juncture again, questioning what I need to let go of, what attachments I’m holding on to that are polluting a close relationship. If I were to tell you that it sometimes feels exhausting, that would be the younger part of me speaking. The older, wiser part instead says, “Yes. And now this.”

Few of us will emulate the superhuman levels of Mandela’s forgiveness, but we can all start small and start somewhere. What haunts you in the idle moments, what uncomfortable memories and feelings catch you unaware when there is space in your mind?

Spend a little time thinking about your irritations, your envies, your judgments, your anger, perhaps even your hatred, and you will soon find some places you need to truly and completely forgive. If only for yourself.

About me.

I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.

Contact me to: 

• Make sense of what’s going on with you, your work and your life through my coaching practice.*

• Make sense of what’s going on in your organisation through group work, workshops and strategy sessions.

• Have a real conversation.

At the heart of my work is helping individuals and organisations to figure out what is really going on.

You can also find out more about my work with men & masculinity here.

*I’m taking on one new coaching client. I work with people who are looking to make sense of themselves, their lives and their work, and make extraordinary changes. If that’s you, get in touch, I’d love to chat.

Share

[main image from Jurgen Schadeberg, Getty Images]

Your support means I can spend more time researching and writing this each week, going to more esoteric and interesting places. Thank you.

Subscribe now

“You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done…you are fierce with reality.”

—Florida Scott-Maxwell

“The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

— Albert Camus

It’s a grubby morning here in Berlin. Filthy weather, as we say in the UK, relentless and heavy rain splattering the pavements, throwing street detritus all over the place.

I walked my son to kita, both of us in raincoats and Wellington boots, both of us smiling with glee. We sought out the muddy puddles, running from one to the next, jumping into them with both feet, some of them ankle deep with mucky water.

The temperature has dropped too, and after a few minutes, I noticed my hands were wet and cold. After I dropped my son off, a mundane thought crossed my mind, ‘I should have brought my gloves’.

Then another thought crossed my mind, ‘Jesus wept, man. It’s not like you’re on the Arctic tundra, you’ll be home in five minutes! And isn’t it a delight to feel the elements for once, instead of being completely protected from them?’

I chuckled to myself, someone who has sought out adversity and extreme conditions in the high mountains, in the frozen backcountry, on rocky cliff faces, sodden bogs and windswept moors - someone who has felt most alive in those places.

Have I become soft? Yes, in some sense. I relished going out in the rain this morning, I revelled in it yesterday too, arriving at an evening event with sodden clothing after a walk in sheet rain. But part of me was seeking the small comfort of having warm hands while I did so.

There’s nothing wrong with that, I suppose, not when it’s really cold. But it reminded me that there’s something glorious about feeling the discomfort of the elements and then noticing the change, particularly when you know it is only temporary. Attempting to keep my hands at the same temperature regardless of the environment or conditions is an act of clinging a little too hard to comfort.

If you were to ask me now, when I’ve felt most cold, I could tell you in an instant. The first memory that comes to mind is from thirteen years ago, when I was preparing to cycle the west coast of the US.

And by ‘preparing’, what I actually mean is I’d bought a bike with clip-in pedals and figured I should do one long bike ride on it before I flew to Seattle. So I decided to cycle from London to Brighton with some friends.

With no training or cycling experience, this is foolhardy in any circumstances: this route has over 50 miles of very hilly terrain. On this particular day, it was somewhere around -5C and snowing lightly. Notwithstanding how hard I found the ride, including falling into a ditch as I tried to cycle up a steep hill, I had never been so cold in my entire life, frozen to my core, my hands and feet completely numbed.

We arrived to friend’s house in Brighton, who made us tea and toast, which I could barely hold. I sat by his log fire for a full forty-five minutes before I felt like my body had thawed out, a painful experience but a delightful one too, as I felt the blood returning to my icy limbs.

Several years later, I cycled from coast to coast across the north of England, starting in Seaton in Cumbria and ending in Whitby in East Yorkshire. It was gloriously sunny as we dipped our bike tyres in the Irish Sea on the morning of our departure, and the sun blazed on us again as we entered Whitby two days later. In between, it rained heavily and nonstop.

This was coupled with howling wind, testing our wet weather gear to the point of failure. At one point, one of the lads went to a car repair workshop and procured some disposable rubber gloves to wear under our normal cycling gloves, which turned out to be a stroke of genius.

Halfway through this ride, and nearing the remote pub we were staying in for the evening, I was soaked to the skin and freezing cold. In the middle of nowhere, and with at least another hour of cycling to go, I had a choice to make: cycle faster, which meant getting there quicker but would also increase the wind chill, or going slower which lessened the chill but meant longer outdoors. Along with one of the other guys, I opted for the former, and we upped the pace, charging through the driving rain like our lives depended on it.

I can vividly remember the stretch of country road I was on in the Yorkshire Dales when my teeth started to chatter, and my body began to shiver. No point slowing down now. When we reached the B&B at the pub, my hands were so numb that I couldn’t use the key to our room, and my pal had to do it instead.

We turned on the shower to the hottest setting, he went in first while I sat fully clothed with my back against a radiator. When it was my turn, I stood under the scalding hot water for a long time before I was able to properly use my hands and arms.

If you asked me if I wanted to experience that excruciating discomfort right now, as I sit wrapped in a blanket on a comfortable chair, I’d probably say no. But if you asked me if I wish that experience had never happened, I’d definitely say no.

And if you asked me if I wanted an experience like that again, the entirety of it, the deep discomfort as part of a challenging and adventurous endeavour, I’d definitely say yes.

My point is this: the glory of riding down into a coastal town with the sun on your back is sweeter when you know you’ve been somewhere and done something tough, you’ve endured an experience, and been through trials.

This last week, I found myself unexpectedly struck by grief for my dad, who died 35 years ago on Sunday. Even in the depths of it, I found myself not wanting to change it, not for a second. The sadness and sweetness of it were inseparable. Grief and love go hand in hand, so too do grief and gratitude.

We’re not meant to just experience the good stuff, the light, the sweetness. If we really want to taste all that nectar, it comes with the grim and bitter opposites, too. The real light and joy come with the heaviness and darkness; they are twins. Together, like the yin yang symbol, they make up the whole, and it is wholeness that is real, true and lasting.

This is the unavoidable truth of developing as a human. There’s no shortcutting this stuff if you want to mature and outgrow your problems, as Jung put it.

You can’t keep your shoes clean forever, you can’t jump from peak experience to peak experience, the highs are only really highs when they’ve been earned, when we have the broader awareness and capacity to recognise that they are part of a richer tapestry - if we just pull these strands out, we are left with an patchwork picture and a bundle of disconnected threads.

And guess what? If you are fortunate enough to reach the rare promised land where you are fully free of your own darkness and suffering, your job is to seek out those who need help in navigating theirs. Fortunately, this often happens by itself because, in truly working through your own stuff, you develop a deep understanding of what this entails, and both the resilience and desire to aid others.

There’s absolutely no shortcutting if you want to live life fully. It all counts, all of it. The adventure of being alive is the knowing that the highs and lows, the summits and valleys, have to co-exist. Though we do not always know it at the time, there is grace even in our suffering.

Perhaps I could have summarised this whole thing with that old and simple idiom: you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs.

About me.

I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.

Contact me to: 

• Make sense of what’s going on with you, your work and your life through my coaching practice.*

• Make sense of what’s going on in your organisation through group work, workshops and strategy sessions.

• Have a real conversation.

At the heart of my work is helping individuals and organisations to figure out what is really going on.

You can also find out more about my work with men & masculinity here.

*I’m taking on one new coaching client. I work with people who are looking to make sense of themselves, their lives and their work, and make extraordinary changes. If that’s you, get in touch, I’d love to chat.

Share

[main image from koreus.com]

Your support means I can spend more time researching and writing this each week, going to more esoteric and interesting places. Thank you.

Subscribe now

“To be of few and quiet words is to be natural: high winds don’t blow all morning, and heavy rains don’t last all day.”

— Lao Tzu

“Our purpose is really to communicate coherently in truth, if you want to call that a purpose.”

— David Bohm

There is a nondescript stretch of road in the middle of England that I know like the back of my hand. It connects the two biggest roads in the UK (the M1 and the A1), and I know it because the town I grew up in sits slap bang in the middle of it.

A mid-sized town in the middle of a grey A-road, in the middle of England, which all feels fitting as a description of where I grew up in; middling, unremarkable, safe, and sleepy.

Back in the 1990s, when I first started to drive a car, the A14 was my gateway to the rest of the world, a kind of concrete wormhole that led me to the M1 and M6, and that mystical place I knew as The North.

Driving this bland dual carriageway, you could easily miss the sign marking the site adjacent to the road of the Battle of Naseby in the 17th century, the decisive battle of the English Civil War, where Cromwell’s army defeated the Royalists. Back then, I was more likely to notice the signage for McDonald’s.

In these university years, at the beginning and end of every term, I’d hire a white van to ferry my belongings to and from home. Looking back, I recall how much I enjoyed the solitude of those long drives, with expansive stretches of English countryside on either side, and only the radio or a couple of CDs to keep me company (for younger readers, CDs were an ancient and magical alien technology; small, shimmering discs that carried high-definition audio sounds accessible only through a special scanner).

Whenever I was heading south and reached the A14, I knew I was almost home. I knew by heart every turn-off and lay-by, every low hill that would emerge, every speed camera, and every rise and dip in the road.

I also knew that halfway along that road was a piece of graffiti on a bridge overhead. Sometime in the mid-90s, someone had taken a can of spray paint, dangled over a busy carriageway and sprayed in huge and shaky letters across the width of the bridge: ‘IT’S TIME FOR A CHANGE’.

Each time I saw this huge lettering, something stirred in me. I would always wonder what the artist meant by it - a political stance? an existentialist invocation? a personal reflection? - but what it meant always depended on me.

I’ve never forgotten that rough piece of graffiti. It said so much with hardly any words. Perhaps it speaks to my unlived life as an artist or creative; back then, I was so captivated by the power of words and storytelling that I wanted to study journalism or advertising.

I was reminded of that graffiti again a few weeks ago when I went to a film festival in Berlin, which was hosted at the iconic Babylon Kino, an old brutalist-looking cinema. Across the road from Babylon is the imposing Völksbuhne (People’s Theatre), another early 20th-century building with an Eastern Bloc feel to it (it later became a centrepiece of the GDR capital).

Almost running late for the start of the film, I half-jogged towards the cinema entrance, glanced up at the Volksbuhne and then did a double-take. Emblazoned across the top of the building in giant letters was: IRGENDETWAS IST PASSIERT, meaning ‘SOMETHING HAS HAPPENED’.

I stopped for a second, feeling the impact of the statement, so loaded with possible meaning. It had a pleasantly unsettling effect, as if I was able to see something that everyone else was oblivious to, something put there for only me to witness.

The next day, I happened to be back on the same road, passing the Volksbuhne. The lettering, all 20 metres or so, was gone. When I got home, I told my wife about this unusual experience, which had only intensified my sense of a message put there for me. I later found out that it’s the name of the play currently hosted at the theatre.

Berlin is an incredible place for the power of words. It’s impossible to walk more than a few feet without seeing some graffiti, an activist fly poster or a sticker on a lamppost promoting some niche cultural group. Into these small, random canvases, there is immense creativity that has crafted a handful of words into a thought-provoking message or an attention-grabbing statement.

On the wall of the main entrance to our apartment building, someone has scrawled ‘Infinity is nothing’ in shaky but permanent letters. Others have added responses below.

One of the most common tags I’ve seen graffitied around the city is ‘MUY BIEN’, which my basic Spanish can translate as VERY GOOD. There’s something about this that really appeals to me, a seemingly mundane assessment, emblazoned everywhere in big, bright letters.

The bold format, coupled with the words themselves get me thinking about the message in a different way. Why is ‘very good’ so seemingly normal? What if ‘very good’ was good enough? If things were ‘very good’, that would be great, wouldn’t it?

In the 1988 allegorical film ‘They Live’, a drifter finds a box of unusual sunglasses in an alleyway which give him the ability to see the world as it really is. What he sees is an alien species living amongst humans and controlling us with subliminal messages hidden everywhere - billboards, newspapers, on TV. The messages are slogans like ‘OBEY’, ‘CONSUME’ and ‘STAY ASLEEP’.

Eventually he encounters the small resistance group (who the sunglasses belong to), led to them partly by a message he sees scrawled on the streets around the city: ‘THEY LIVE. WE SLEEP.’ It is, to me, a fitting slogan for modern life and our current predicament.

Great speakers know the power and impact of these short, bold statements. Earlier this year, the politician, minister and civil rights activist, Jesse Jackson, died. In the clips that circulated in remembrance, I was reminded of his incredible ‘I Am Somebody’ speech, a call and response litany based on a poem by another preacher.

In it, he runs through a series of circumstances ending with the invocation that your personhood is still real and valid: ‘I may be poor, but I am - somebody. I may be on welfare, but I am - somebody.’ Watching him run a group of kids through it on Sesame Street made my neck hairs stand on end.

At a UK music festival last summer, the musician Seun Kuti, son of the great Fela Kuti, admonished the young crowd for their misguided activism. I’m paraphrasing here, but it went something like this: “I know you all want to go and save the world, you want to free Palestine… you want to free Congo… you want to free Sudan… you want to free Iran. It’s a new one every week.”

He pauses and raises his fist to the crowd: “Free Europe… Free Europe from right-wing extremism, from fascism, from racism. Free Europe from imperialism. When you do this, all those other places will be free.”

The inversion of the well-meaning rescuer to the blind and oppressed is brilliant, genius even. How can you free others if you’re not free yourself? What if the home that you think of as free actually isn’t free at all? What if you’re part of the problem? And all of that condensed into two words: Free Europe.

It is easy to underestimate the power of simple, clear statements made with honesty. I love language, I love poetic imagery, I love nuanced words and etymology, I love complexity. But when it comes to actually saying what we mean and communicating clearly, there is nothing more powerful than saying exactly what you want to say with the fewest words possible. The thing that comes from truth and gets to the point, without being dressed up.

In my coaching practice, I often have a sense that the person I’m in conversation with is circling something. As we probe a little deeper, they get closer to saying the thing they really need to say, sometimes feeling they have actually said it, but in a kind of code. Eventually, they will say the thing that really matters: “I am good enough for this role”, “I’m a people pleaser”, “I need to leave this company”, “I want to be an artist”.

When they say the real thing, they hear and feel themselves expressing something from a deeper and truer place. In that moment, many things can be felt: relief, invigoration, sadness, joy, but most often a sense of something that has been unlocked, a door being fully pushed open. Now there is something clear to work with.

This practice of clear communication sits at the heart of Way of Council, an ancient form of dialogue I practice with groups. It has four simple yet powerful principles, two of which are to Speak from the heart (say what feels true to you from that place), and To be lean of expression (meaning saying only what needs to be said).

You could work with just those two principles for the rest of your life, yet quite quickly see a profound shift in the way you communicate and relate to other people.

I’ve been fortunate to have learned from great teachers, carriers of Council, including my wise and good friend Dave Bingham. In my early training, and even now, I’m constantly reminded that to practice these principles is as much an art as it is a science.

To speak plainly and honestly seems so simple, yet is so uncommon in modern life. To get to the heart of the matter, as they say in Council, is a transformative personal trait to develop.

Whether it is existential graffiti, slogans for change or an insight into our inner landscape, the thing said plainly carries great heft.

Recently, my almost 3-year old son has taken to proclaiming “WE HAPPY!”. He usually does this when both my wife and I are with him, and he is seemingly expressing his joy in our presence. Although he’s able to form full sentences, this particular formulation has stuck and become something of a family motto.

What if we were able to speak like this more often, saying the thing plainly, without adornment?:

I’m scared.

I’m excited.

My heart is broken.

This feels bad.

It’s a genocide.

I can’t do this any more.

I love you.

Imagine a relationship, work meeting or family conversation where everyone is practicing communicating with each other in this way.

What would become possible then?

About me.

I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.

Contact me to: 

• Make sense of what’s going on with you, your work and your life through my coaching practice.*

• Make sense of what’s going on in your organisation through group work, workshops and strategy sessions.

• Have a real conversation.

At the heart of my work is helping individuals and organisations to figure out what is really going on.

You can also find out more about my work with men & masculinity here.

*I’m taking on one new coaching client. I work with people who are looking to make sense of themselves, their lives and their work, and make extraordinary changes. If that’s you, get in touch, I’d love to chat.

Share

[main image from haikudeck.com]