Not Deep Enough

It often seems plain that the prob­lems of orga­ni­za­tions are real­ly just the prob­lems of us unwill­ing to go deep enough. Deep enough into see­ing things from oth­ers’ per­spec­tives (whether cus­tomers or staff or peers) and deep enough into our own “stuff,” as well — the stuff that gets in the way of effec­tive lead­er­ship. In such a world, which has become fun­da­men­tal­ly insen­si­tive, every­thing is viewed as a prod­uct, even us the “pro­duc­ers.” Redun­dan­cy of the work, pres­sures for cer­tain­ty and results along with a fan­ta­sy lev­el of con­trol all mit­i­gate against a deep­er form of the learn­ing that we need.

Our pro­cliv­i­ty, it seems, is to dis­card the ten­der work of inter­per­son­al risk and intrap­er­son­al vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty — there isn’t time for it and our days are hard enough and long enough as it is. Isn’t there a way to achieve our goals with­out see­ing our own faces (and fates) in the mir­ror every time we turn around? Busi­ness deci­sions come dai­ly thick and fast. We accept our small dai­ly humil­i­a­tions as a cost of sim­ply keep­ing a place in the machine.

And yet there is anoth­er side of us that yearns for its chance, its own sen­si­tive sanc­tu­ary, that yearns for retreat “into a qui­et cor­ner of Uncon­scious­ness,” a phrase I’ve pulled from an essay about cha-no-yu, the Japan­ese tea cer­e­mo­ny. By this Uncon­scious­ness, the essay’s author, D.T.Suzuki (one of the first teach­ers of Zen Bud­dhism to the West), does not mean a state of dream­less sleep or coma. That would be more like the over-busy state of many orga­ni­za­tions today and where I start­ed with “not deep enough.” To the con­trary, this Uncon­scious­ness rep­re­sents an inward pen­e­tra­tion of deep­er parts of our hearts and minds, the source and home­com­ing of our reflec­tive spirits.

Suzu­ki is talk­ing about the very gift we fail to give our­selves, time to sit qui­et­ly, not nec­es­sar­i­ly in some for­mal prac­tice of med­i­ta­tion, but sim­ply to be present and to allow deep­er spaces and insights to reveal them­selves as they will. 

Suzu­ki explains: “The tea-drinking…is not just drink­ing tea, but it is the art of cul­ti­vat­ing what might be called, ‘psy­chos­phere,’ or psy­chic atmos­phere, or the inner field of con­scious­ness. We may say that it is gen­er­at­ed with­in one­self, while sit­ting in a small semi-dark room with a low ceil­ing, irreg­u­lar­ly con­struct­ed, from han­dling the tea bowl, which is crude­ly formed but elo­quent with the per­son­al­i­ty of the mak­er, and from lis­ten­ing to the sound of boil­ing water in the iron ket­tle over a char­coal fire. Let time pass for a while, and as one feels more com­posed, one begins to notice anoth­er kind of sound com­ing from out­side the win­dows. It is the water drip­ping from a bam­boo trough that con­ducts it from some­where on the moun­tain­side.”

If you can feel, even from this small pas­sage, that process of slow­ing down, of going deep­er into the recess­es of your own aware­ness, then you know some­thing of the state of mind need­ed to con­sid­er the “prob­lems of orga­ni­za­tions” I have called out in the first lines of this post. All too often we are threat­ened by this space instead of wel­com­ing it. We pass judg­ment on it or even try to dis­ci­pline it out of our worlds because it leads to painful mem­o­ries of past mis­takes or sup­po­si­tions of wast­ed time and lazi­ness. Yet if we are to have the strength to deal with the dilem­mas that press relent­less­ly on us, don’t we need qui­etude and our share of tran­quil­li­ty to achieve real insight into the prob­lems in which we are impli­cat­ed, that ensnare us and have inad­ver­tent­ly cre­at­ed for our­selves? We need time to reflect in order to learn, not an inte­ri­or­ized set of whips to help us “hur­ry up.”

And isn’t this tran­quil place, this seren­i­ty also the place for a dif­fer­ent kind of dia­logue with oth­ers, one with­out the bar­ri­ers of orga­ni­za­tion­al caste and sta­tus and polit­i­cal machi­na­tion? Who knows how the con­ver­sa­tion might turn if we were not in a con­test for who first can come up with “right answers” but could allow them instead to arise out of a mutu­al wish to active­ly tran­scend ourselves? 

So when I say, “not deep enough,” I do not mean a judg­ment about the need to work hard­er or think hard­er and quick­er or steel­ing our­selves for the pain of look­ing at harsh real­i­ties when we final­ly get off the mer­ry-go-round. Nor is this some jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for a rit­u­al form of pro­cras­ti­na­tion. Nor is it a mere day­dream while star­ing out the window. 

I do mean that in a world that is too hard, too fast, too polit­i­cal­ly fraught and moral­ly ambigu­ous, too manip­u­la­tive and demand­ing, we need our “tea hous­es” more than ever — wher­ev­er and in what ways we can find them — to rest our brains while cul­ti­vat­ing our minds and hearts, our psy­chos­pheres. Only then can time slow down enough for gen­uine clar­i­ty to emerge and the space for rich­er under­stand­ings begin to appear.

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