When Things Fall Apart
"The spiritual journey is not about heaven and getting to a place that's really swell" — Pema Chödrön
Show me a person above age of ten who hasn’t felt at one point that their life was falling apart. Whoever you are, at some point things tend to fall apart for each of us.
We all know what it feels like. Sometimes, we face big problems, and we work to address them. And sometimes, things just fall apart in a way that we can’t put into words. We simply know that the world as we knew it is no more, and whatever will replace it is not here yet.
It might take a big crisis, but it doesn’t have to. Sometimes, we are surprised ourselves at what makes us feel like things are starting to fall apart. The last drop doesn’t have to be a bucketful.
Every couple of years, I pick up When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön to read or listen again. It never gets old. Pema says:
Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.
When I first started learning to meditate a decade ago, I was attracted by the promise of elimination of suffering as the goal of meditative practice. Sounds great, right? Didn’t the Buddha overcome suffering and taught others to do the same?
What I didn’t quite realise back then is that the path towards the elimination of suffering lies through feeling every single bit of suffering I’m trying to eliminate. Freedom from suffering comes not from avoiding it, but from meeting it so completely that it stops being suffering. The healing comes not from holding things together, but from letting them to fall apart and seeing that we don’t quite die in the process.
This morning, I sat for a morning of zazen with my local Zen group. For hours, I struggled to focus on my breath or my posture for more than a few seconds. I might have been near perfectly still on the outside, but the emotions, thoughts, memories, fantasies were raging on the inside.
The tricky thing is that we can’t really face and feel everything stored inside our minds and bodies in one go. That would be too much; and when things get too much, we shut down, hide behind our defences and don’t feel anything. That’s how most of us live most of our lives.
The way forward when things are falling apart is patience, kindness and compassion towards ourselves. Yes, it hurts a lot, maybe even too much. Yes, it’s very confusing, maybe even too much. Yes, there seems to be no way it could ever be okay again. Take what you can feel at this moment and meet it with compassion and acceptance. And if what you can’t feel fully yet needs a tub of ice-cream and Netflix, maybe that’s okay, too.
A particular temptation when things fall apart is to stop what’s going on by making some big move. A divorce! A new relationship! A new job! Whatever offers some hope of things staying “okay” can become impossibly attractive. Yet, what we most need in times like this is the ability to stay present to how we feel, to look at ourselves honestly and gently without any hope for some lasting security. Pema knows this:
Hopelessness is the basic ground. Otherwise, we’re going to make the journey with the hope of getting security. If we make the journey to get security, we’re completely missing the point. We can do our meditation practice with the hope of getting security; we can study the teachings with the hope of getting security; we can follow all the guidelines and instructions with the hope of getting security; but it will only lead to disappointment and pain. We could save ourselves a lot of time by taking this message very seriously right now. Begin the journey without hope of getting ground under your feet. Begin with hopelessness.
I’m still missing the point. My mind is still full of hope that I will find some lasting security. “Maybe I’ll make enough money to never run out of it.” “Maybe I’ll look after my health and never fall seriously ill.” “Maybe I’ll treat others well and no one will treat me poorly.” “Maybe I’ll meditate diligently, realise nirvana like the Buddha did and then I’ll have arrived.”
And then, maybe, just maybe, things will never fall apart again.
Or, maybe it’s about time I take Pema’s core teaching very seriously right now. We’ll never get solid ground under our feet. Things come together and then they fall apart.
“The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there’s no ground.”
― Chögyam Trungpa (Pema Chödrön’s teacher)
PS. In case you missed it, earlier this week I published my conversation with Claudia Harris, who took over from me as the CEO of Makers. We reflect on what it was like for both of us to transition to power of a mission-led company built on trust.
PPS: And, for all the new subscribers here who are interested in my work, earlier this year I published Startup CEO Succession: a Founder’s Guide to Leadership Transition.
