Love songs in age

The future is coming and you’re not in it

They say you die for good when the last person with a living memory of you dies. If you live to one-hundred years old and form a sentient working relationship with your great-great-great-grandchildren, this calculated scenario still has you fading to dust round about ninety years after you pass. 

We tend to think of how the generation after us will remember us in a future devoid of us. But skip forward a generation and it’s more like “Tell me about Grandad. What was he like?”. Skip forward another generation and relevance is fading fast. “John’s middle name is Gary. Something about one of Mum’s long gone relatives.”

Skip forward another generation and it’s more a case of “Are those headstones beneath the weeds in that field? Might we clear the site for land development? I could make a tonne around here.” 

Irrelevance is fine and about the size of it. We are both sequential and inconsequential. It’s a healthy state of affairs. For, how could the world move on with all manner of strings attached? A clean break is just that. Clean. No traces. We like to say that we hope for a better world for our children. So then, cut them loose of our baggage. Go at the intention with authenticity.

In Top Gun Maverick, Pete Mitchell is the returning old-timer. The Aviator ray-bans might still be acceptable but time is corrosive and even yesterday’s heroes are not exempt. His light blue 501’s seem to call time at the bar even louder than his one-time sweetheart now running the bar he drinks in: The Hard Deck; replete with whole squadrons of twenty-somethings at their physical prime and referring to Tom Cruise’s character as pops and a museum piece. 

My favourite couple of lines of dialogue are where Maverick is trying to bond with the young guns and one of them inadvertently refers to the Korean War. Maverick corrects them from the vantage point of first hand experience, as if to say: I served in it: I should know,. 

“You mean the Cold War.”

“Different war, same century. Not this one” is the comeback, as if the poor chap needs reminding that he’s all out of time. No matter what. On the face of it, age can be cruel. Yet here I contend that this is an illusion, a cheap ploy to shift the blame, a theft of agency and a total misunderstanding of what age really is. And what it is not.

Jennifer Connelly’s Penny and Val Kilmer’s IceMan save Maverick from drowning in a sea of no context. 

Yet the wide arc of the whole movie retains the theme of ageing. Maverick trains his successors in a mission that involves flying old-school aircraft – F18s preceded by a flock of tornado missiles, in a battle against today’s fifth-generation fighters supported by caches of state-of-the-art surface-to-air guided heatseekers. At one point he’s looking at commanding an old F14 with a cockpit full of analogue switches. It’s the modern-day Millennium Falcon.

When you and your world are older: how to live well among your peers? How can you go on? 

Naturally, Maverick wins the day: his whole story unfolding in an eerie parallel to Harrison Ford’s character in Star Wars: A New Hope from the late 1970s. 

A recurring motto in Top Gun Maverick appears to be It’s not the plane: it’s the pilot which on the surface is a throw-away. It doesn’t mean anything. Save for attitude.

Pete Maverick Mitchell, at the very start of the film, is grounded by his superior, played by John Hamm (Madmen) who informs the pilot of superior drone technology and pilot-less planes. Of the fact that soon he and all his kind will be surplus to requirements.

The future is coming and you are not in it, exclaims Hamm, defiantly. 

But with his symmetry teeth and his California tan Maverick simply smiles and replies:

“Maybe so. But not today.”

Slowly fading blue. The eastern hollows.

The essence of eternal youth is embracing today and letting go of everything outside of it. If you can do it, you’ll even become younger and be accepted by your contemporaries, many of whom are delightfully young and so by definition, are respectful of nowness. Because they are now, too. If you are older, like me, you have a chance to learn from the energy field young people create. It falls off them in showers. The hereness. The nowness. Soak it up. Re-learn how to live like this once more.

Turns out that the perspective, the white tooth ear-to-ear grin, the hope, the energy, the forgiving instinct, the curiosity, the sheer joy and the chiefest charm of people born more recently than others: the keystone confidence of youth, are not youth. They correlate with age but are not caused by it. No more than the time that is said to heal bears any tracing essence of the healing that runs concurrently with it. (REM sleep causes healing, not time). Naturally, people that crack the code tend to look happy and refreshing so we say they look younger. Exuberant. Inspiring. Reborn. Otherly. But it’s just a saying, not a truth. And in any case, it’s only a look. An image. Appearances contain precisely none of the essence of the is-ness that they reference. They just appear to do so. That’s why they are called appearances. The best character qualities of young people that older people tend to lose have nothing to do with age. They roam free in the skies of authenticity. The blue skies. Slowly fading blue. The eastern hollows. Rinsed in equilibrium. Natural poetic justice is available to all. Sure, you’re gonna have to work at it. It’s a meditation and a half. Worth it, but. 

This is not a shout out in favour of irresponsibility or any justification of anything negative. It is a call to emptiness. The state of being awake. Empty of thought. Full of presence. The natural balance that so easily distorts into unerring risk aversity, over-vigilance, neurosis, thoughtlessness, trust issues, a lack of faith and lashings of ego (in the name of fear) should we forget to work on it. Yet which offers joy and positive contributions should we summon the will to work on retaining that with which we were born.

The future is always coming and never here. That’s why it’s called the future. No point worrying about it. Because it simply cannot touch you. By definition. You can live out your whole life in the now column. Or, to put it another way, you have no choice. It’s impossible to do anything else. This is not a polite request. My suggestion is more to do with awareness of the unswerving fact. That’s it.

The four corners of now belong to us. We can have it all. It’s a massive shiny gift under the tree with your name on it. That’s why it’s called the present.

You just gotta stand up in the present. The now. Here. It’s not easy but you can even do it gracefully and in your own way. You can even get it wrong and go right back at it and get it right. You can have never known about presence and emptiness and mindfulness being the keys to eternal youth and still just go right out and instantly shift perspective and acquire it. There are no lessons. No course. No exams. No build-up where you need to practice for the thing. No time-honoured ceremony to endure. Now is now, not just in the nature of its insistence, but in the time it takes to acclimatise. It is out of time. Beyond the clocks. I am not asking for any time or money. Since now is about undoing, I am not asking for effort. More of a letting go. No time. No money. No effort. Unthink about that!

Moreover, notice how every one is imploring you to invest precisely time, effort and money into personal growth and wellness. And notice how, when the lay of the land is thus, it hardly ever works – suggesting that for those who succeed, non-monitored factors were critical. Time, money and effort are the currency of the modern world and are forms of ego in anyones language. You can dress them up otherly and PR the hell out of some narrative that implies altruism and positive contribution, but there they stand – stripped of all the noise at the end of the day. Exposed for what they are. Cheap tokens. All my best mentors and all the people I’ve helped transform themselves for the better took place, one-hundred percent in the arena of kindness and friendship. Compassion and humility. Why is that? Why doesn’t getting paid work? Think about it. Transactional relationships are not what we need when we seek higher love. The boundless nature of the relational dynamic gets catapulted into a contract when money shows its face. Someone owes someone. Something is promised. Someone is now a customer not a human. Is that what you want? Actually that’s a rhetorical. Can you really not get a take on the grand design? Try harder. Break out. Run free.

You’ve messed up. Made enemies. Caused hurt. Left a calling card at the scene of some very cringe-worthy incidents that live long in the memory. And you will do it again. You’ve crucified yourself in the fires of guilt and shame and you have worked hard at the cognitive logic of corrective therapy. You even took a shot at forgiveness. But nothing seems to quite wipe the slate clean.

Begin again in the off-world colonies

You are working hard to make amends. So just stop. It does not work. You are invested in atonement yet the fact is that you are implicated in life. Now. Here. Right in front of your nose. So invest in that. It’s what everyone who cares about you wants for you. So you don’t know it? That’s OK. Just do it, anyway. Have faith that atonement and making amends and forgiveness (which is actually internal and self-directed, despite our misguided language surrounding the issue) are only to be found in moving on.

The best revenge, the best apology, the best atonement – is living well. Always was. Always is. Always will be.

Come to know, if only fleetingly, the real nature of forgiveness and love. They are not one-off actions. They are not feelings. They are a permanent state of mind and a form of old instinctive compassionate behaviour. Older than tombstones. Lighter than feathers. Come to know them through now. Know now.

Different war. Different century. This one. 

It’s tempting to round off where I started and say something coy like You’ll be a long time pushing daisies but if you are someone like me, or even if you are me (which I am), you simply can’t hold with something so unscientific and therefore, it clashes with my intuitive wisdom. Science long since proved time and again that something cannot simply disappear into nothing. That Debbie McGee and Paul Daniels’ performances really were just TV-show fiction. 

Newton’s laws of thermodynamics power our atomic world, and state that energy can never be destroyed. That it simply moves around, changing form. 

Matter moves from place to place, slowly coming together to be you. So whatever you are, you are not the stuff of which you are made.

When you die out of your body, you will be elsewhere. Otherwise, Newton is wrong and the world we have built could not exist. But it does. And we are in it.

That said, being in this body here and now is undeniably a prize worth holding. If only for its guaranteed temporary nature. It’s a short stint. Failure to optimise is like walking out of a speed-date session because it’s taking too long. And firework displays do go on for an unseemly amount of time these days and Christmas Day really does appear to last about half a year, and superstore staffers really do implore queueing customers to grab the short line so as to save them about eighteen seconds of their precious lives – but that’s all just commercial babble. Radio gaga. Background noise. You don’t have to get all Gone in Sixty Seconds about it. The idiots only win if you let them.

Be present. Just do it. Or try to. Or don’t, but quit whining. Or don’t. Your call, Gary!

I have been talking to myself, by the way. This was a mental soliloquy. But you know writers, right?

Thanks for reading

We are one

The machine in the garden

In this short article I re-organise the received wisdom of many smart people. Three, in particular, are cited with asterisks adjacent. They (and their works) are;

*Richard H Boland JR, and Ralph H Greenberg: Managing Ambiguity and Change

** Jamie Smart: Clarity

*** Buddha: The Royal Rule of Relativity

The symbolic function is a uniquely human characteristic but it is not just a power we possess. It is a fundamental determinant of the reality we experience. 

Drawing an analogy between one thing that is familiar and another thing that is less familiar is a common response to the ambiguity of change. Imposing a familiar structure on an unfamiliar event or situation helps us to make sense of the situation. 

Here are some examples of organisational structures I find myself in when undertaking various projects: I am in a band or a workgroup or a relationship or a community. I am building something with friends as a means to building the friendship itself. I am in a family unit or a wider family organisation of in-laws and second cousins. I am spontaneously among strangers. 

At such times it may occur to me that it is my duty and honour to keep this ship afloat. Before, during or after a break-up it may occur to me that I want to sail this ship alone. During times of sweeping change, it may occur that I am steering this ship through troubled waters and that, alone or as part of the group dynamic, I or we are required to turn this ship around and head in a new direction; that going with the flow is no longer good for stakeholders. The tide is high. The weather is stormy. But I have a map and a compass and we are headed for new horizons. 

Swopping the ship for a car, I might need me or my team to step up a gear or maybe I think it best that we all cool off since I perceive that we are overheating. Make a pit stop. Look left and right at the crossroads. Kick the tyres. At a product launch, it makes sense to give it some gas and to make a deadline I might push the pedal to the metal. At a strategy meeting, I might consider changing lanes, putting the brakes on or shifting into reverse and backing up.

Swopping the car for the old ten-pin bowling machines that pre-dated automatic resetting technology, requiring some unlucky member of staff to leg it out onto the bowling lane and manually align the duck-pins before (hopefully) some alcohol-fuelled Friday night factory worker released another high-speed bowling ball down into my face, I might want to get all of my ducks in a row. 

We crashed. We need to reboot. My tangibles are my hardware and my intangibles my software. If I consciously or subconsciously deploy computer-age symbolism to my visions of organisational structure then everything from the questions I ask regarding the problems I perceive, to the answers I find regarding the solutions I intuit, and even the way I expect my staff and myself to undertake L&D will be based on apps: which is short for applications and is the opposite of implications. It will never occur that epistemological and ontological growth has taken place since time immemorial and with great success to the dulcet chime of empirically-induced intuitive implication and definitely not to the deadening-thud of the mind-numbing, childish rote-riddled endeavours of application: that without the initial penny-drop Eureka moment of far-flung implication, all applications are a meaningless dead-end. And cannot work. We wind up with this whole new sub-standard normality. The dumb-asses are calling it progress.

Applications call to mind long columns of mid-twentieth century cotton looms each attended by a (usually female) machine operator working long hours for a pittance on the dim-lit and deafening shop floor whilst up at ground level the manager (usually male) sat at a desk in a sharp suit in the bay window of a large, quiet office, chewing on the end of his biro as he considered the implications of the women’s output. The people who know how will always work for the people who know why. Or, to put it another way, the people engrossed in apps will always be enslaved to the people that grasp the imps. The heart of it, though, is that metaphoring your way through your career often has you careering off the road and into the long grass. The metaphors I deploy above are tidy, appropriate, versatile, graphic and abysmally problematic.

You see, ships take a long time to turn around and head in a new direction.

Cars are powered by electricity and hydrocarbons, not hormones.

Skittles get bowled.

Computers resolve to their system BIOS.

Faced with ambiguity and change, all your mechanistic metaphors have you grasping for more centralised or top-heavy control, seeing change as a chronic project and generally making heavy work of it. Your colleagues feel themselves to be the cogs in the chain that you have made them, overworked and unlistened to because who listens to machine parts, right? One oils and cools down and replaces machine parts. And where does the environment feature in this analogy? 

If you use organistic metaphors and analogies; we are gardeners nurturing budding employees toward flowering results, reaping what we sew and putting down roots for next season’s harvest with a dynamic take on the weather in our sector; this relationship is an organism with a life of its own; this company is a lion and the market is our jungle; our ombudsman taskforce is an octopus with tentacles extending out in various directions; then you haven’t escaped the clamping parameters of my point. Your plant-based logic is both better and worse than the machine in the garden but it is also no different to it in that you are equally as locked into a constant velocity reference frame that is about as much your own doing as the sunrise. Now you’re all about decentralisation and nurturing. Duvet-days and tickets to the match and the rigidity of Agile scrums and EGM’s on your carbon footprint.

Without hammering the metaphor by writing a further six-hundred-word demonstration of what happens when we instinctively adopt an organic as opposed to a mechanical metaphor when considering or relating to organizational theory – and you are either doing one or the other – please reconsider my opening line which is repeated below:

The symbolic function is a uniquely human characteristic but it is not just a power we possess. It is a fundamental determinant of the reality we experience. 

The metaphorical structuring of organisational ambiguity was addressed in the late nineteen-eighties in business schools and management training classes. The italic wisdom above is a direct quote from Richard J Boland, Louis R Pondy and Howard Thomas’ Managing Ambiguity and Change 1988, Wiley Press. Chapter 2 (Page 17)

In fact, in that study, Cassirer goes further and argues that all human understanding is essentially symbolic. That we are always seeing one thing in terms of another. 

That there is no passively received, purely literal knowledge to which the symbolic function merely adds colour.*

We see the world in a given way unique to us: this is our paradigm. The paradigm provides an image of reality that suggests its underlying structure and also suggests the problems associated with it that are important to solve and the methods for doing so. 

Yet in any given disciplinary paradigm there are several schools of thought. Each school of thought has a relatively coherent perspective that is based upon a shared metaphor. Most of the time we are solving puzzles. Puzzles are suggested to the school of thought by the metaphorical imagery. You’ll be applying techniques appropriate to the metaphor. You just don’t know it. 

You think you are all about breaking out and expressing yourself and dipping low in the lap of luxurious freedom, cowboy. But you’re a prisoner to the words because you still refuse to consider my time-honoured contention that words are more important than you think. 

Everything is illuminated

Forget business. There is a cognitive (mental) semantic dissonance right across all of our (physical and emotional) lives. Social. Familial. Personal. Environmental. Recreational. Charitable. Spiritual. Financial.

You see, there is no housing ladder. Window cleaners have ladders. Not housing markets. 

And your problems are never deep-rooted. Trees have roots. Problems do not.

And on and on. 

Yet, in a divine form of poetic justice, there will be deep-rooted problems for those that deploy the metaphor. Because once you bring it to the table it will take you to the cleaners. You think you’re using the metaphor and indeed there is usurpation in play. Metaphors and analogies make you feel safe as houses. As long as you remember who’s wearing the trousers.

Make conscious your instinctive and unavoidable metaphorical structuring of organisational ambiguity and situational change. Turn on the light. 

Yours is a thought-generated experiential reality. **

This is existentialism. Semantic dissonance. The wide-arc ramification of thought-words. Having committed to the teleology of words as signposts in the past, I might be accused of Janusian thinking in the here and now. But I contend that as far as the use of metaphor and analogy in the context of organizational theory is concerned, words are no signposts. They are not the thing that gets you to the thing. They are the thing.

All phenomena arise simultaneously in reality in the present moment. They do not illuminate your reality. They are your reality illuminated. ***

Thanks for reading 

We are one