Not loud, not insistent in any obvious way, but persistent. This buzzy feeling in my nervous system that pushes forward, better, next, up.

It is the story of success that most of us inherited without being asked whether we were on board. That each year, each generation should build on the last. That a career should arc upward.

Anything that looks like a step back, like a quieter season, a shedding, a deliberate slowing, is some version of failure. We have become so fluent in this story that we apply it without noticing, to our organisations, our sense of what a life well lived looks like. Well in this modern part of life anyway.

I can’t say I notice this linear drive when I spend time in nature.

It has its dying, its dormancy, is fallow fields.

I love the way it is indifferent to the idea that things should be consistently improving. The oak tree in my backyard is looking pretty sad these days. Bare branches, no leaves, certainly not the vibrant King of a Tree is turned into during Spring. I don’t notice it’s apology, it’s shame for looking different during that season.

As I try to reconcile this question with the reality of my life, I can sense the conflict in my body. Something in me knows the cyclical truth, that fallow is different to failure, and descent is not collapse, and the void is not empty but generative.

Yet something else in me that is trained, conditioned, and rewarded keeps reaching for the next thing anyway. Oooh… shiny!

Vanessa Machado de Oliveira calls this the second hallucination:

That history moves in one direction, that newer means better, that the arc of things bends reliably toward improvement. It is perhaps the hallucination most deeply encoded in the cultures we lead. This is the hallucination that makes it hardest to choose restraint,

or stillness,

or the longer view,

the slower outcome,

the wisdom without language.

What would it mean to lead from a cyclical understanding instead? Not as a philosophical position, but as something real in the decisions we make, in what we choose to call success?

I wish I had a clean answer to that, perhaps you do, I’d love to hear it.

I notice that the leaders I most respect have all, at some point, chosen a winter.

Allowed a pause.

What if we saw that not as a step back but as the most sophisticated leadership move available; one that creates the conditions for something meaningful to arise. Not necessarily better, bigger or newer.

Just honest.

The pressure, I think, lives in the gap between what we’re actually made of and the story we’ve inherited about how we should operate. Closing that gap, even just a little, might be the most important leadership work there is.

The meeting moves on and then I’m left with this mysterious feeling.

It’s kind of like the feeling when you’ve lost sight of someone in a crowd temporarily, that small lurch of the heart when you realise the connection is gone.

I think it happens when I lose sight of the long view, the actual implication of the things we discuss. Not necessarily the logic of it, which has a way of always being annoyingly sound, but the living context these decisions would land in - not as abstraction, but as actual places,

bodies and

soil.

When I worked at Huddle, people would refer to me as context pants. Why? Because I was consistently asking the big questions, trying to build a wider context for our work. Asking the question:

“What are we actually doing here?”

Vanessa Machado de Oliveira lists 10 hallucinations of modernity and I think what I’m describing is how I sense the first one:

The hallucination that we are sealed, self-contained beings busting around the place through a world of other sealed, self-contained things.

That what happens in the room and what happens in the watershed, our forests, deserts, and skies are different categories of events.

And somehow what we do, how we live and the impact that has weirdly belongs to different conversations, in different rooms, with different people.

Is this making any sense to you?

It is a remarkably effective hallucination; I guess that’s why Vanessa has chosen that word. It certainly doesn’t feel like one from the inside. Inside this hallucination it feels like rigour, and focus, and productivity and just getting shit done. And as someone with over functioning tendencies, it kind of feels good too. And at the same time, I have a feeling that’s like worry when I sense the thread go.

But underneath that efficiency, underneath the momentum of it, something else lives.

A loneliness I think many leaders would recognise if someone gave them a quiet enough moment to feel it. The loneliness of being severed from each other, the long view, from consequence.

Severed from this connection to kin, not as a poetic gesture toward the natural world, but as the most tangible reality we are a part of, the very substance we are made of, the thing we all share.

This feeling of connection lives in me like a yearning.

And I think this is where the work begins - not in a framework or a methodology, but in that slightly mournful, quiet, slightly embarrassing sense that something unnameable is missing.

The invitation, I think, is simply to stop long enough to feel it.

Not to resolve it but to just let it be there, so it can show you what it knows.