“Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes.”

(Carl Jung)

Insight always seems to be just beyond where we are.

The temptation to look outwards, reach further or work harder can be compelling; if we can just solve this next problem, get the next task done, then we might have enough ‘air and light and time and space’ to clear the mental decks and find the clarity we seek. It’s a pervasive narrative that has insidious consequences.

But my photograph recalls a moment of insight that crept up on me, unawares, apparently effortlessly.

As I drove through the Chiltern Hills, low morning sunlight flashed through the trees and a new perspective on an experience that had nagged at me over several years suddenly crystallised. My internal expression of, “Oh…. I get it now….” was so strong that I pulled over to take a walk in the woods, feeling the warm sun and making notes in a journal in case the moment slipped away from me like a mischievous dream. In those few seconds, insight found me, forged connections through my psyche and changed my world.

These days, what insight is, and the conditions that promote it, have become my enduring inquiry.

It’s an essential element of how I understand radical change and it challenges all our notions of organisational roadmaps, plans, charts and instructions that specify outcomes of transformation. Clearly defined ‘solutions’ might inspire us to change within the constraints of our current thinking, but genuine transformation, and the insight it requires, is always beyond that.

Insight requires that we give up not only of what we already know but, critically, who we are.

Put simply, insight requires surrender.

Which is why is can be so challenging for those of us invested in expertise or whose power depends on controlled, measured, predictable results; it always feels easier to work to a formula and produce verifiable data so that we might ‘measure what matters’ as we work. None of which takes even a single imaginal, perceptual step into the unknowing confusion which is a fundamental first move towards our transformation. Rather than safe, controlled, calculated, calibrated, quantifiable ‘change’ methodologies, transformation requires immersion in imagination, aesthetics, poetry, story, play, dialogue, art.

Anything that might stretch us just beyond where we are.

The poet, David Whyte, notes that when we collide with success our metrics of achievement shift. Moments of insight have a similar impact; scales fall from our eyes and we look back to wonder at what we thought we knew and who we were. As I walked among the Chiltern trees, I knew that I needed to step away from a privileged ‘job for life’ and, instead, begin a precarious path towards renewal. I look back fondly on my previous career and there are parts I still treasure, but were I to encounter similar circumstances now, I would be a very different person.

I constantly challenge the faster, harder, outward facing better mantra of contemporary change; I know that it doesn’t set the conditions for real transformation to arise.

Instead, we might take a moment to enjoy the sun in the trees and turn inwards to our imaginal selves.

Insight will be just beyond there.

Notes:

Here is the full text of ‘Air and Light and Time and Space’ by Charles Bukowski, who was, according to Time magazine, the ‘laureate of American low life.’ It’s a poem I love and straight forward challenge to just do it (baby).

Take a look at this article in Aeon, ‘Sweetness and Strangeness’ which looks at how metaphors shape our experience of learning and offers us the idea that ‘the future has to have a metaphoric quality for us to imagine it.’

Finally, Elizabeth Gilbert’s seminal 2009 TED talk ‘Your elusive creative genius’ always bears another view!