Self – Injury: Some Thoughts

This post resonated. I know that feeling. Constantly. To overcome my self inflicted injuries is my greatest challenge. Recent events have helped me grow. I’ve learned to accept that I’m not responsible for how my colleagues act or what they say. That I’m not responsible for what my clients do. That, having satisfied myself that I have done my best, there is nothing I can do as to whether other people find that acceptable, desirable or correct.

These lessons have been bitterly earned. They were slow, burning, lessons. Taught with gnawing self-doubt, anxiety, worry, re-examination and second guessing.

I’ve slowly learned to recalibrate my sense of empathy and understanding towards all of those who undertake the great journey of birth-life-death. I’ve learned that this prisoner complex of the inner mind looking at the outer world was our common shared heritage.  That ultimately, we’re all trying to do the best we can with what we think is right.

So when I say I admire this post, you will see where it comes from. It was about everything that I aspire to achieve at this stage in my life.

Despite  that I  couldn’t shake a sense of disquiet. There was something wrong about this post at its heart. Shortly afterwards, I came across this quote:

“To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth… is potentially to have everything…”

- Joan Didion

It clicked with that sense of disquiet.  Ryan is right that we need to overcome our need for social validation. We need to overcome the self-injury we do to ourselves by grounding our sense of self-worth extrinsically.

He is wrong however, to imply that it is easy. The battle with the self is the most challenging struggle that anyone will encounter in their lives. He makes this difficult struggle over the inner nature of ourselves – ground in a thinking feeling social brain locked in a clumsy callous body- sound like an easy easy victory. A matter of re-wiring. A process of mitigation through therapy. I think that’s wrong. How can anyone else (extrinsically) tell you what your intrinsic self-worth is? How can you let them taint that value assessment?

The truth is that this challenge is a sufficient and noble challenge for any life to achieve. However, it is a struggle that we have to take alone. Others can help us struggle, against impulse, instinct and social programming but they will never have a true understanding of that battle.

Life as Journey

The metaphor of life as journey is common. When we talk about ‘two paths’ that ‘diverged in a wood’ we know that Frost was talking about the life journey and only incidentally narrating a stroll through the woods.

I have been reflecting on that journey for the last day. And I find myself wondering about the metaphor. I find the metaphor troubling. Troubling because it is too comforting. Life as journey wraps the experience of living in an unsatisfactory cocoon of certainty.

When we think of journeys nowadays, we experience them as they exist now, transformed by the certainties of the modern age. We have certain starting points, fixed end points, mapped roads and ready built airports. We have real-time communications with our destinations. A modern day journey is as adventurous (in the first world) as slicing bread. As a result, they are on average as uniquely unchallenging as journeys have ever been in the history of human travel.

We have banished the uncertainties that made a journey akin to life. We have not (alas) banished the uncertainties of life.

If life is a journey, then that journey must now be understood by parable. Travel has always historically been capricious and changeable. The closest parable to that journey that I can find is the Israelites wondering through the desert for forty years in search of the promised land.

A journey where you are alienated from everything left behind, the present is the hostile ever present risks of being stuck in a desert, have only the vaguest idea of where you are going, are seduced into worshipping false gods and where death heralds the entry into the promised land is a profoundly honest reflection of the true nature of life’s journey.

A Quiet Prayer

This is a quiet prayer. A quiet prayer for all those who are (just) holding themselves together. Those who come across as calm, self-assured and confident. Those who laugh, smile and celebrate for others. Those who open their hearts to share the weight of someone else’s burden. Those who tread the world with a lightness of step. Those who bring joy into our lives.

Those who know that all of this is possible only because of a frayed thread that holds out a brave front to the world. Those who worry constantly about the fresh fraying that might break that brave front. Those who know all the heavy cares held back by a single stitched line of bravery.  Those who want to go back make impossible changes so they might not have to put on such a brave front.

I know that feeling. I know that fraying. For you, all of you, all of us, this is a quiet prayer.

People are Circumstantial

I have spoken many thoughts, heard many words, and shared many perceptions in the last month. People talking about people. People talking about their colleagues, friends, lovers and spouses. People talking about the most important relationships of their lives, sometimes going through their most important moments.

Throughout these shared moments, one constant theme I keep finding is how important context tends to be. A person experiencing a rough moment at work, going through a stressed time at home, finds that their relationship with their significant other suddenly is broken. Not because the relationship is flawed but because the significant other has just been fired, has a difficult emotional challenge at home or  cannot cope with another challenge in their lives.

And yet it is the relationship that cracks. Lives radically changed – maybe for a time even shattered – by a perfect storm of circumstance.

Work – Life Balance

Hong Kong people work hard. Undoubtedly they do. It is not unknown here for people to start their day by 8am or 9am and for their working day to finish well past 8pm in the evening. That would be a normal day. One that clocks up over 12 hours on the job. And of course you check, and reply, to emails once you’ve gone home in the evening.

There’s nothing wrong with that attitude in this society. Its pretty much an always on 24/7 place. Restaurants don’t close till late. Shops don’t close till later. And fast food is always open. Especially since McDonalds upped the game by switching many of its outlets to operating 24/7.

In recent weeks I find myself moving towards that 24/7 approach to my own work life. I’m not so much worried by that but by the consequential result that I don’t find the rest of my life as interesting. That has me really worried.

Jessup 2012: Compromis Out

The Jessup 2012 Compromis has been released!

The new compromis raises the customary four issues. Declaration one concerns the ability of the ICJ to hear a dispute submitted to it by a government that has taken power only recently through a coup d’etat. This is a nice, technical, way of raising issues of international capacity and the recognition of governments (as opposed to the recognitions of states). Highly pertinent in light of the Arab Spring and especially with recent events in Libya.

Declaration two revives a common theme. It concerns the legality of, and international responsibility for, the use of force by an international organisation between the international organisation and its member states. This is a staple issue for the Jessup, and one that both judges and competitors seem to enjoy every year. Important recent developments this year in the law of attribution make it a good time to revisit the topic.

Declaration 3 is a strange one. It concerns a mix of the prohibition against forced labour, whether such abuses can be waived by treaty, whether they are subject to adjudication in a foreign states domestic forum and whether the resulting (monetary) judgment can be enforced despite the doctrine of sovereign immunity. This is the newest part of the problem. It raises interesting issues of human rights and the interaction between domestic jurisdiction and international law. This may well  be the most challenging issue  for teams to research and at first glance seems well of the beaten track. This promises to raise interesting issues.

Declaration 4 concerns the protection of heritage sites. The most interesting characteristic of this issue is the highly ironic scenario. On the facts, it is the government which considers the site to be sacred which destroys part of the site. It’s (eventually successful) goal is to bring an end to the use of force against it (the use of force which is the subject of Declaration two). This is also a novel issue, although one that has been gaining in visibility for the last few years, due to the importance and complexity of the protection of world heritage sites and the (relatively) developed international protective framework.

This years Compromis is written in a very different style. Ordinarily Jessup compromises (what is the plural of ‘compromis’?) tend to be written in a fiction style with a linear story that is centred usually on the history of the dispute or a particular individual. This time much more descriptive prose is used to narrate the problem. Not that this has made anything any shorter – the Compromis still racks up an impressive 48 paragraphs which is longer than last year, but considerably shorter than the 70+ paragraph Case Concerning the Windscale Islands.

Good luck to all who compete this year.

Dismissing History

I attended a discourse on the difference between Islamic history and world history. World history, said the speaker, is a series of stories, to be heard and forgotten. Islamic history is an altogether greater enterprise. It requires us to learn its stories, transform them into lessons and to see them as reinforcing the truth of the faith.

A second difference between Islamic history and world history is that world history is linear and always new. Endlessly new things are ultimately irrelevant to the big picture. World history is similarly irrelevant. Islamic history on the other hand is circular. All things are repetitions of things that have happened before. This circularity is an essential way by which the story of religion is reinforced.

This pithy dismissal set off my internal radar.

Flayed to the Bone Prose

Ingrate, that I am, I cannot help it.  I loathed their incessant pedantic demands, their rigid structures, their skewed sense of perfectionism. It rankled. Their bastard form of flayed to the bone English, skeleton-like passed off as a prose supermodel.

If only they could be reasonable: accept that a 5 word point made with a 6 word sentence was not an abomination but ordinary. That preferring the full stop over the comma, passive voice over active, not blasphemy. It  fulfilled effectively the primary goal of language: communication.

I had little success in persuading them. One can’t persuade an ideologue.

Pragmatism Finishes Last

The beauty of any ideology is that it’s simple. Any project that advances the ideology is good. Anything that hinders the ideology is bad. This clear division between right and wrong makes it easy to take action. Once the project has been measured by the ideology action is a short step away.

This black/white division based on ideology is common. One example is the US debt ceiling debate. Republicans are stridently insistent that there should be a cut in spending. There is no scope (in their ideology) for tax increases. Democrats see revenue increases as necessary. Each party being motivated by their ideology. Republicans see tax increases and government spending as wrongs. Democrats see tax increases as a necessary part of the redistributive function of government.

Building Teams Through Hate

One of the most effective ways to unite a newly formed team is hate. When the right kind of hate is present, nothing can match its ability to create the togetherness, camaraderie and inter-reliance that forges a fantastic team.

Not all hate is created equal in this regard. What you need is the most difficult kind of hate to find. You need broad, reasonable personal hate. When you have this magic ingredient, teams join together inseparably.