Light Chasing the Image

I feel fried today- yesterday and today, I was in the presence of Stephen Jenkinson. His teachings helped me face some of the most enduring knots in my life. In preparation for examining these stones of my life, I started to look through some of the things I wrote in the last few years and found this.

 

 

Sunday, 14^th June 2009 through to Monday 15^th June 2009

Edited 13^th September 2010

 ‘Light chasing the image’

Somehow, it was the words ‘light chasing the image’ that made a deep impression on me and triggered a connection in my mind with ‘leadership’. I sat with this unknown connection for a number of days.

This afternoon, on the 18:37 train from London to Alton, while reading through draft version four, the significance of ‘light chasing the image’ became clearer to me. Since then, the significance has further unfolded.

The phrase ‘light chasing the image’, as I am discovering now, acts as a multi-layered metaphor. When I was writing about leadership and organisational life, it occurred to me that despite our best efforts, emotion is still chasing rationality. Years back, I had the experience of being told by the Operations Director at a manufacturing firm that ‘only scientific management has withstood the test of time’. I realised that the closest emotions get to corporate life is under the veil of rationality- ‘Emotional Intelligence’, ‘Open Space Technology’, ‘The Fifth Discipline’, ‘Theory U’. It is a truly sad state of affairs. In this ‘race’, we do not realise that there are no winners. For as long as we deny an essential aspect of ourselves and, for as long as we fail to understand that emotion, cognition and action function as an interdependent whole, we exist merely as an image of who we are.

What then is our light? To me, it is our full range of feelings- some articulable, some inarticulable. Are they sensations? Are they chemicals? Are they real? Do we even know? So ‘light chasing the image’ is also our struggle to fully express the vastness and infinite variations on a theme we call ‘feelings’- words such as love, fear, hate, compassion are mere images of our experiencing- ‘light’ or perhaps our ‘moment of lighting up?’ So there is a sense that feelings and the articulation of feelings could be close yet will always remain slightly apart. Our recognition of vastness and complexity and our own uniqueness and therefore, separateness are such fundamental aspects of being human. It is both our joy and our pain. Perhaps it is because our light seems so elusive and ethereal that it is just easier to deal with the practical, the measurable and the concrete. But in saying this, I am neglecting the value of the practical and the concrete. This is because when I think a little deeper, it is the existence of the practical and concrete other that helps us learn, identify, develop and continue to differentiate and refine our awareness and articulation of our feelings. In our attempt to share these feelings with others, in our attempt to bridge our separateness, our formless eternal light can become an unending source of inspiration and creativity- giving rise to art, poetry and music- ‘light chasing the image’.

As an existential metaphor, life itself can be ‘light chasing the image’. How many of us are conditioned to live a life as our own image of what or who we should be? How many of us have been conditioned to live life according to the expectations laid down by our institutions- family, school, college, workplaces, society. How many of us project an image of success and okness when really, inside, we feel empty and lost? What does it take to be the light and to understand that it is not our image that feeds us, it is our light? What does it take for us to feel that if we are only our light, we will be not be found wanting- that we are ‘enough’ as we are? What does it take for us to feel that if others are only their light, we would not find them lacking- that they are ‘enough’ as they are? When will we learn that when we are only our light that is when we are not only just living but we are most alive to our liveliness?

What I learnt from our group session this weekend, through a true meeting with someone from my group is this:

Our pain and our vulnerability are also our light. When we have the right support, perhaps we can risk abandoning our image and reveal more of our light. Perhaps this act will move and touch others to do the same. And when we do that, when we both allow each other’s light to shine freely, in that moment, with grace, the chasing stops.