…you know sometimes you just have to write without caring where it goes. Let it go where it wants and see if you are brave enough to share when you are done.
I have a thought, it is not complete, it may be really dumb, but I need to write about it. It is about love.
When we love someone, the reasons we fall in love are not always going to last, they are sometimes contextual, sometimes driven by other factors that push or pull us in a direction.
So to love someone comes with a challenge; the challenge of finding and renewing the reasons to continue loving; we cannot just rely on what brought us together.
I believe the essence of love is respecting, cherishing and honouring vulnerability. To care that someone’s weaknesses are more important than our strengths and to want their fulfilment to be our life’s work.
If love was a project it would be hopelessly difficult. No spreadsheet on earth is going to have enough columns for this beauty, but love works like a superhuman power, beyond the mind and rational thought. And of course it isn’t ever a project, in fact it doesn’t exist outside of us as a thing, it becomes us.
If you have been in love you’ll know that feeling of being vulnerable, but you’ll also know that embracing our vulnerability is how we grow, how we share, how we become more human.
We feel more, we see more, we are more.
If you have read my recent work you’ll know I am worried for the well-being of very many people who I think are weakened by their work and work environments. You will also know that I do not believe we are close to the answer. No amount of breathing exercises (at one end of the scale) or mental health intervention (at the other) is helping us find a way out.
At best we are building field hospitals for the walking wounded. We have not stopped the war.
The world of work, in my judgement, is too brutalising. Too unhuman.
Recruitment is a “last person standing” exercise which exhausts optimism; appraisals are a sour, inefficient and futile thing; they kill ambition, drive generic bland acquiescence and throw a dread-soaked tarpaulin over individualism. Then we “let people go” which we all know is the veterinary gun used by HR to salve their conscience, but which is deeply dehumanising and ensures a thoroughly ungracious end for any person in any role.
Where am I going?
I am full of a thought; what if we could work in a space that respected, cherished and honoured our vulnerability? What if an employer considered that our weaknesses were more important than our strengths? What if the life’s work of a company was not “share-holder value”, but to fulfil the potential of its employees?
What if our relationship with our work was more loving, less contractual; more forgiving, less punitive; more collaborative less competitive; more generous, less audited and more vulnerable, less grim facade?
What if we were not afraid of commitment, but recommitted to a new standard of care and thoughtfulness. What if we had less automated messaging (“your call is important to us”) and more eye to eye contact? What if we didn’t fear failing, but saw the whole person and knew the reasons to put trust in them before would still be there?
I am doubtful now that I can end this without sounding glib or ridiculous; but this is my thought and I want to share it.
In love we reveal our vulnerability and thrive for as long as the love can be sustained. In love we are superhuman.
In work, we bury our vulnerability and march to a discordant drum beat until we fall in a ditch exhausted by the distance travelled and still stretching ahead of us. We are nowhere near superhuman, we are just broken.
Could we not learn more from our most developed emotional response, to love and be loved, taking the lessons of all humanity over thousands of years; rather than working still in what is essentially a Victorian construct that treats people as dispensable and wasting assets, only now with added superfast broadband?
Could we reinvent what “to work” means?
Paul
