Elsewhere
#1000Steps: Leica Q2
"An image enters in, plunges into the heart and is gone."
(Rilke)
It can feel like I’ve spent a lifetime being not quite where I should be.
As though I should be elsewhere.
And that my experience of the world is just a little bit out of register; that a small jolt might make everything suddenly fall into place. As I look back, I remember that even in my most ‘successful’ moments, I would be thinking, “If only…”
Yet a chilled morning and a moment of low sunlight can reconnect me to my senses and help me experience my life differently.
Moments like this help me find a sense of place and belonging. Everything feels enough. And as I walk my way into this more resolved feeling of participation, it’s as though things ‘fit’ differently here.
I walked towards this sunlit vista while reflecting on a conversation describing work processes and performance measurement. It seems that our organisations constantly look (maybe inevitably) backwards; strategy takes a retrospective, case study view to what we know once worked or, at least, what seems to work now, and tries to apply that thinking to an emerging future. So, we step into an uncanny place of abstraction: past assumptions build on past assumptions, specifications are set and seemingly measurable things get measured.
The spreadsheet is produced.
As it happens, I know that spreadsheets can be beautiful, poetic things. And I don’t reject measurement. Or the theories, tools and techniques of management.
But as we strategise and plan around old abstractions, we forget the quality of our real experience. Things feel out of kilter; which means that our organisations struggle for ‘engagement’ and work becomes meaningless. ‘Bullshit jobs’ proliferate.
I’m learning that ‘creative’ work lies in bringing us back to who we are, and where we need to be, as we sense our way into the future.
That somewhere in the heart of all our distractions, in our abstract management measures and indicators, we will find our sensuous and sentient lives.
And as we bring our lives into clearer focus, they might fall more easily into place.
We might find ourselves where we need to be.
Notes:
Rilke was right. After a few moments, I returned to the spot where I photographed the sunlight and trees. The image was gone…
In his brilliant book, ‘The Spell of the Sensuous’, writer, philosopher and ecologist David Abram explores the Lebenswelt or ‘life-world’ ideas of Edmund Husserl. He says, “… whenever we attempt to explain this world conceptually we seem to forget our active participation within it. Striving to represent the world, we forget its direct presence.’
My #1000Steps photo-dialogue inquiry project is helping me to understand my processes of perception, seeing and how I ‘come to know’. I know this might seem rather esoteric but how we experience and come to know the world matters. We play an active role in creating what is ‘out there’: take another look at the ambiguous duck/rabbit image or ‘the dress that broke the internet’!
Finally, ‘Bullshit Jobs’ was a term coined by the late David Graeber in his funny but provocative book which takes a brilliant swipe at meaningless work.
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