This week was one of those weeks. They happen from time to time and if you’re like me, you don’t see them coming.
It has been coming for some time. It started with my 2021 commitment to reduce my carbon footprint. This, I set about in two ways. Firstly, I have been making myself walk the 14 minutes to the local MRT (underground railway) station. To my surprise, this has been a genuinely pleasurable experience, something akin to the excitement of holiday travel during a period of travel famine. Who would have thought how much I’d missed the turnstiles, the escalators, the departures board, missed the suburban scenery flashing by before the rail line plunges under the city. I’d missed making up stories about my fellow passengers – a spy here, a master criminal there – I’d missed the forensic ability to predict my arrival times and I’d missed the feeling of travel that planes and trains give us but cars don’t. So this has all been to the good and I’ve saved not only carbon emissions but also some pocket change along the way.
The second way that I set about decommissioning the need for my car (I’m not yet at the point of sale but I am working towards) is to bicycle to meetings. In Singapore, the terrain makes this very possible even if the burgeoning start of year temperature is something of a militation. It’s not always attractive to arrive at a meeting bathed in sweat and it certainly doesn’t make for a composed introduction – so allowing cooling off time is all.
One essential for the cycling consultant is the sort of shirt that dries quickly. A cotton T really isn’t going to do it for you because sitting with a wet shirt in an airconditioned meeting venue is more likely to bring pneumonia than business.
So I decided that I really needed to supplement my road-safe shocking orange and lurid green cycling shirts with something a little more business-like that would not dazzle the eyes of a coachee or prospective client. I went shopping and bought some this week and it was this simple action that precipitated an unexpected crisis: when I got home, there was no room for my new purchases in my T-shirt draw.
Suddenly, I was thrown into that place that we all find ourselves forced into from time to time: the place of letting go.
This was not an easy task. I had a relationship – dammit I had history – with each of those T shirts. Admittedly, many of them no longer fit me. Since I dropped a shirt size through intermittent fasting (that is a different blog), shirts that once looked trim and cool now look (and possibly smell) like my uncle’s nightshirt. But discarding these old friends was hard and leaving those eye witnesses to my personal story bundled up in a bin bag in the recycling felt like an act of treacherous betrayal.
Why do we cling on to things that we don’t need, don’t use, won’t ever use again? Is it just the fact that some of us are more mawkishly sentimental than is good for us? Why is there a bent wire Thai elephant that I have carried around from house to house for several decades, here on my desk? In front of me, on my notice board, is a delicate Korean bookmark that is auspiciously useless to me since I became a Kindle reader. Sitting staring down at me from the top of my wardrobe are a knitted pink panther that my mother made for me, a squirrel glove puppet which squeaks that I bought on the Isle of Wight in 1983 and a paisley silk monkey with a purple head that can’t stand up on it’s own and must forever lean on the panther and the squirrel for support. Why not let go of these objects? What value do they bring?
As humans, we cling to big things and we cling to small things. Maybe the small things don’t matter so much, our ability to be sentimental is part of our humanity but our fear of letting go is profound. We cling, for example, to a belief that our children must be weighed and measured numerically to prove their worth as members of society. We do this in the face of the near overwhelming evidence that academic success is not the golden ticket to life, liberty and happiness but we refuse to let go of the notion that what was good for us must be essential for our kids. In clinging to this idea, we bring huge pressure to bear on teenagers who can see very well for themselves that the things they are being told are not true. Increasing numbers of them are voting with their feet and developing lives, incomes and careers without heeding the conventional wisdom of hard study, good grades, good university, good job, happy life. For members of Generation Z, the promise of that life path is as baggy and shapeless as my old Hotel California T shirt.
We have to do better. We have to let go. We have to stop believing that we know best. We have to detach from the belief that we can curate and serve up learning programmes that will be ‘good’ for whole swathes of children of the same age at the same time. It is ridiculous even to write that down. How can it be true? Actually, it was never true but now our children have the tools to simply by-pass the misshapen axioms of their parent’s generation. We are not all the same. We do not learn in the same ways. We mature and evolve at different speeds and in different areas of our lives at any given point in time. Those given the responsibility to make rules must be more purposeful in finding ways to credential learning. We must move to our children and find what they do well, not insist that every single one of them comes to us in a manner and at a time that we prescribe for them.
When I coach, I often interact with people whose hidden goals are to control the behaviours of others – normally out of love, for sure, but to control, nevertheless. In these moments, I sometimes use the metaphor of a butterfly that lands on the palm of our outstretched hand. It is exquisite, it is delicate, it has the power to inspire with its beauty and the power to fly. It is amazing. Our instinct, when we have something so precious, so unbearably lovely, so fragile in our hands? Our instinct is to close our fingers around it and hold it tight.
