Dear Friend
As I slipped into sleep last night I knew that I would be rising earlier than usual. I’m at home in London at my desk sipping an expresso and smiling a little and maybe a little concerned at what I’ve got myself into. I’m showing up.
Yesterday a friend in America, Gala, pledged financial support for the Substack, which is typically generous of her, but also typically intelligent and incisive. Gala knows the importance of accountability. As well as an expression of her love the pledge is moral support, and woke me up with a little shot of adrenalin.
To borrow a phrase from Seth Godin, Gala has lovingly ensured I am on the hook.
For anyone who has ever experienced self doubt and criticism, you’ll know how strange it feels when it first kicks in. It’s reasonable to expect that the growing feeling that starting a daily Substack is a good idea will present the self critical parts of me with lots of opportunities to make an appearance.
And that is okay with me.
We have to, I do think this is true, we really do have to give ourselves permission to be human. The human part of us is a walking contradiction. I am lazy and motivated. I am highly productive sometimes and unaccountably slovenly and lazy at others. I’m kind and considerate and awfully judgemental and intolerant.
Expecting ourselves to conform to something like perfection is supremely unhelpful. I feel I can say that with confidence. There are at least as many sides to a human being as there are to a cut diamond, but that’s what lets the light through and what makes us sparkle.
So this won’t be a place for perfection. Maybe more a space to celebrate the raggedy-ness of our day to day efforts towards peace. Peace on a personal level radiates outwards into the world. We can live in peace. I can see this. Many others can see it too. We find courage when we find one another.
The title for today’s letter came this morning when I recalled my earliest memory. I’m in a cot or a crib and it’s dark. The curtains are drawn and there is light behind them. The room is cold. I’m on wobbly legs and my tiny hands are grasping the sides of the cot. I can hear a noise coming from somewhere beneath me. It’s the vacuum cleaner. I’m the only kid in the place at this time so I must have been about 18 months old, before my brother was born. I remember thinking “Where’s that woman?” I didn’t have the word for mother yet.
Who knows how much of that I made up.
But it’s true to me.
I’m imagining you at 18 months old. What was there then, is here now.
Maybe your memories start earlier? Maybe later, but the awareness that was you when you were fresh to this world, came with you into it.
That awareness is as soft and impressionable as it is powerful.
You didn’t need to be perfect then. You don’t need to be perfect now.
If we could see ourselves through the loving eyes of our friends, if we could except ourselves as we are, how much peace would come from that?
Our house guests are waking up. The sound of old friends chatting in the kitchen, my cue to stop writing for now.
Maybe today you’ll join with me in a commitment to being ever so gentle with yourself. Like we’re walking a path together, one day at a time. We can’t go wrong with kindness. Our human side requires us to be raggedy, walking contradictions.
Maybe that’s what human perfection looks like?
Until tomorrow
Love
Mike