I notice it most as a kind of hum.
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.
Why are we still clinging to this (relatively new) idea?
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:
Progress is linear.
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.
