Complexity and mess. Month two's invitation.

After a month of focusing on self/feelings/sacredness/work, we’re allowing a different aspect of being an interdependent leader take the focus: how we handle complexity and mess.

(New here? This is the intro to the six-month cycle)

Those of you who’ve been around for a while know that I’m fascinated by the lenses adults can develop to look at the wild uncertainty of reality.

How we can (but don’t always do) move from wanting to just be a good belonger, to standing out for solving specific problems, to being inspirational and focusing on outcomes, to then despairing at how everything ELSE is broken and wondering who the hell we are and what we’re here to do, to finally finding some kind of peace as we zoom further in and further out of what’s happening around us.

This month I think I’m holding a few things gently (and I’d love if you joined me):

Patterns

What is this an example of? What does it remind me of?

Time

What length of time am I seeing this through? What happens if I zoom more into the immediate moment? What happens if I delve into the deep past that lead us here? What future timelines am I aware of - and how far forward am I thinking?

Empathy

Who do I have empathy with and how deeply do I allow that empathy to go? Who do I NOT have empathy with and what effect does that have?

Ways of knowing

Which ways of knowing do I sit in out of habit? Can I allow other ways of knowing to be added in? Where do I have certainty/fundamentalism? How do I know what I know? What else might be true? What does my body know? What does younger me know? What does Big Me know? What are non-human people telling me - the plant people, the animal people? What hunches or instincts am I listening to or ignoring?

A friend asked me a while ago about what was missing in ‘leadership’ education. I said I felt like the middle 65% is very well looked after. But the edges - the super macro and the zoomed in micro are often missing.

My hunch is that we’ll get a lot of mileage from looking at the margins this month, the liminal spaces. The quiet, corner-of-the-eye, don’t-look-straight-at-it subtleties. The big, high/deep, sweeping hugenesses.

Let’s see what happens!

As always, let me know if you are using any of these prompts and what they spark for you. Either by replying here or finding me on the socials (I’m @megalightheart everywhere - Insta, FB, Twitter, Medium).

Another world is possible.

PS Support a Black trans author AND do yourself a favour by having a plotty book that will take over your brain - order/pre-order The Library Thief

What's a dynamic tension and how does it help us navigate complexity?

One of the transitions adults go through as we grow our lenses on complexity and mess is from certainty to a felt-sense of how… mixed life is.

Feels like we're living in the middle of lots of what I think of as dynamic tensions, within a pressure to create clear, pure rules.

I'm wondering if part of moving through the world in a wiser way is resisting rules and instead living inside those dynamic tensions, where there are no clear ‘right’ choices, only annoying nuance.

How do you handle these?

Here's one I'm… embarrassed? ashamed? of…

I’ve signed up for a paid ‘yoga’ app that is wildly customisable (style, level, session length, amount of instruction, voice), and makes sure over a period of days you've had a good variety of movement. All of which to say, I’m finally actually moving my body once or twice a day.

I'm trying to make it more likely that 70-year-old Meg can move, and I'm working on being more present in my body, after years of chronic dysphoria-led disembodiment.

So, through that lens, this app is pretty bloody perfect.

However, I'm extremely aware that it also has less than zero to do with a connected system of spiritual knowledge or even anything or anyone from India.

Whilst I was on my free trial, I spent a while searching for Indian owned yoga apps or Indian yoga videos but they didn't work in a way that suited my neorosparkly brain or they asked for way more time than I can spend each day.

So I either

- find some other type of balancing/stretching/strength activity that isn't (what one of my besties calls) colonised stretching that I won't actually do for more than a week (ask me how I know)

- go back to running (which only serves cardio)

- haul my ass to a class run by someone from a real lineage (money/time/who?)

- work out how to teach myself and make my own sequences (?)

- try and MAKE myself do something I'll find very hard to actually stick to

or… do something I don't find particularly ethical.

Add it to the list of an Evil Prime subscription, owning a car, and not hassling our landlord enough about our gas boiler?

This is what I mean by dynamic tension.

I want to be building my strength, balance and flexibility in ways that suit my brain/timetable AND I don't want to be contributing yet again to the centuries-long project of White violence.

I want to (more publicly) denounce genocides AND it helps literally no one if I lose my job or jeopardise the service I manage.

I want to be working on nurturing our medium-term work culture AND there's so much detail to deal with day-to-day.

I want to talk to the landlord about converting our gas hob so that we're not directly burning fossil fuels every meal AND I love the immediate control I have over the temperature (plus we had a terrible experience with an induction hob at our last place).

I want to nurture a human and humane team environment AND we have to operate within challenging KPIs to keep our funding.

I want to date more AND oh my god don't make me struggle through messaging so many strangers.

I want to read All The Books/knit/play jazz piano/draw/paint/make my own clothes AND I want to rest my brain at the end of the day with Grey's Anatomy reruns.

I want to knit impressive garments AND I find it wildly stressful to spend 100 hours making something that might not fit.

I want to throw my lot in with the climate crisis direct action lot AND we cannot live without my salary.

I want to give it all up to run a tiny bakery AND I want to do everything I can to bring us closer to another, better world (and we all know the bakery is just an escape fantasy lol)

Through a black and white lens, the ethics of some of these are very clear.

In practice, in our current world, it's much less straightforward.

Reminds me of when a (non-day-job) colleague came to me with a dilemma she was in, about someone she was connected to who was beginning to express some anti-trans views.

She came to me for advice, and maybe because I was tired, I ended up saying that it was up to her to decide what fitted with her feminism, what sat right with her, her spirit.

We live in a wildly confusing world. We absolutely shouldn't excuse ourselves from self-education and doing the work of anti-oppression, AND there's also a challenge in facing the truth that we often have to, at least in the short term, live within in a tension that can't be resolved.

AND we need to be conscious of who benefits from that compromise and who loses. And how that sits with our spirit.

AND how we find peace in our body and take the next wise and timely action with so many unresolvable loops.

AND how we do our best to live with integrity whilst we exist in this particular moment/the space-time continuum.

Erm.

I don't have a neat conclusion, here.

Discuss?