5-minute read

Guided by Envy

How I ended up doing what I do

Envy distinguishes the significant from the mundane. It guides us to fulfil our own discernment in the world. To do this, we must remove the malice, carefully separate our desire from the cruelly projected ill-feeling. Envy is to covet. To want what another has. To know what you want for yourself could be a useful thing. So, let's quietly separate it from the person - maybe silently thank them for the direction and get to work.

Many years on, I recall the terrible ache I had towards a friend who had advanced in her vocation whilst maintaining sincere meaning in her work. It felt ugly to not be fully glad for her. The envy tip came to me in an essay by Alain De Botton. It is a reorientation of perspective that needed plenty of practice - keeping the difficulty outside of one's self might be a pretty sensible protection mechanism. Gradually, the self was coaxed into making space for the disappointment that must come with unmet desire and the call to action it then required.

Discernment needed to be thoroughly applied. I had to distinguish between the qualities of her success as distinct from my own. 

I had already established a very different set of criteria for my success, and I didn't want exactly what she had. But she had stimulated questions about my own position. What had she cultivated that I had left undernourished? Her success was conventional and followed a known form. In knowing I didn't share the values it was predicated on, I had been muddled with contrariness and distracted from creating an alternative. How do I reformulate my ambitions, emulating her sincerity and clarity but in a form that matches my ethics and aesthetics?

Many years on, I have filled in much that was unclear or unknown. I have succeeded and failed in new ways. Critically, the tensions between my ambitions and the jumble of conventions and expectations I was seeking to extricate myself from have eased. I returned to work that I thought had lost its capacity for meaning. I began consulting over 25 years ago, alongside advocacy and strategic management. My early career was in the not-for-profit sector, where I assumed meaning was more available because commercialism was banned. It was more complicated than that. I wandered off overseas, into arts management, journalism, branding consulting and corporate communications. Much meaning was there in the people who were tasked with profit-making. And it was more complicated than that. 

In my late 30s and in another new country, parenthood made the world so vital and deep and poignant that things like branding seemed too silly a preoccupation. Maybe art would measure up. It was more complicated than that. Consulting stayed with me throughout these years, and my questions were getting better. The practical and the moral training of parenting reorganised the possibilities of what I could ask and help others pay attention to. 

Besides consulting, my second adult-life preoccupation was movement. 

My stiff and awkward 19-year-old body was stretched out one day, and so it began. The discipline of Iyengar yoga taught me the principle of scaffolding learning, starting from what can be done already. You use props to position the body precisely in the pose, and you focus on paying attention to the body instead of being preoccupied with achieving the pose shape. Gradually, you can communicate with your heel, imperceptibly to begin with, it drops a little onto the rolled blanket that holds it up so your hips are aligned above. As with drawing, yoga was a discipline I would take up and drop over and over and over. My third great teacher taught me to deliver my child and relearn to move alongside him from rolling to walking. The attention training these practices gave me has reorganised my mind, my body and my movement. Alongside the consulting, I also work as a cleaner and life model. And this is where I continue the training. As I age, the practise focuses on stabilising all movement, and recalling the lesson that we die from the feet up. 

Enquiry is the third great theme of my adult life. I have a dire need to question, a vital desire to get underneath the facade of things and a delight for the great unknowable. These traits occasionally made my life within organisations fraught. My capacity to think broadly and deeply was prized, particularly by senior leadership who lacked critical thinking spaces within the corporate power dynamics. But/and, there was an approximately three-year limit on my capacity for the conservatism a large bureaucracy necessarily has. Once I mastered the job, I would start pushing too hard at things that couldn't be pushed. Outside of organisations, I have worked with many artists, teachers, and outsider types in the conventional professions. In this realm, I might be the one asking about structures and challenging presumptions about what being a “business” forces one to do. 

In both realms, I was The Fool, asking what needed to be asked because it was beyond what was being attended to. 

I am by nature transdisciplinary - a consultation that moves from accounting systems to questions about the structures of moral accountability is natural and sensible. The secret forces of convention had been hiding in me and taking issue with this approach for many years. It would create a slight overperformance of both positions, which could be instrumentalised by the social dynamic we operate within. I could be cast as either the anti-establishment force or the prim practical parent. My Fool had to become more measured by dancing between different perspectives. I could express the complexity of being both and neither of the characters our culture assigned. I could create plural space. 

I have wandered far from envy. I have found the sincerity and meaning my green eyes saw. I have disappointed the great hopes of various relations, friends and the faceless “conventions”. Moving well beyond meeting that demand has brought me lots of private freedom to focus on what is important to me. I have little public recognition, my networking life is physical - I left social media last year. But in the work itself, I witness my rich experience. It's in the chosen and deliberate language in my consulting sessions, the capacity to hold still and be at ease after 20 minutes in a pose. It's in my writing and my ability to check what my toes are doing as I balance to dust the top shelf. I feel the substance of my life in my actions, which gives me a sincere sense of accomplishment. 

I am curious to meet Envy again and see what the next horizon might be.