Three nourishing books: Rohr, Haraway and Bergson

I don't read as much as I used to - but here is some of what i took from the three books that most enriched my 2025. All three are a good reminder that not everything valuable needs to be immediately applied.

In the second half of life, the task changes

Falling Upwards by Richard Rohr felt like some wholesome food as I enter my mid 40s. His thesis: the first half of life is about creating a strong container - where you ascend and accumulate. But this task becomes unhelpful in the second half of life. Wisdom calls you to invert your perspective, and often challenging events will flip it for you anyway. The second half of life is allowing the container you have built to crack open. It's letting go and "falling upwards". I'm not totally convinced by the simple division of life into "two halves" but there is wisdom in it for sure. I see a link to the Eriksons' stages of development model where in "Middle Adulthood" (45-65ish) the core tension to navigate is between Stagnation and Generativity - where choosing to generate good in the world (beyond yourself, for wider society or future generations) is the way to not go stagnant. A healthy life at this stage should put less focus and emphasis on what you can get and more on what you can contribute. Personally in 2025 I got a lot from joining Dave Allan's WhatWeAllAgreeOn community of "unfinished leaders" looking to give generously to make big things happen.

You won't be pure in a messy world - but you can "stay with the trouble"

The world seems kind of tough - the environment, society, politics, technology - so what should we do? It's tempting to bury our head in the sand, jump on a high horse or collapse into doom. In Staying With The Trouble Donna Haraway asks us to instead stay in relationship with the messiness. To keep moving towards care and justice - even when our actions, choices and histories are at best imperfect and often part of the problem. In this messy world there is no moral purity - but there can be moral honesty and local action in a complex world. Her vision is not of grand utopian regeneration, but some moderate and local restoration - it's a call for each of us to live and die well on a damaged planet. I found her call to “stay with the trouble” grounded and grounding in the face of ethical challenges. To stay with the trouble of the world, of the past, of our mixed incentives, of the possibilities for good actions now. Even when it won't alter a future that is hurtling towards us. Her linguistic dances were baffling at first, but I began to really enjoy her worlding - how her concepts and words creates a world in which different actions are possible. FYI before the book i got started with this podcast episode.

Your past isn't far away

In December I finally got to Emily Herring's book on philosopher Henri Bergson. His core idea is quite mind bending - simply put: time is not space. When we think of time we typically think of a timeline - a line that we are moving along as time passes us (or perhaps as we pass through time). Time is something that can be cut up into parts (like our diaries) and each part is equivalent to the others. And when it's gone you cant get it back. But for Bergson this is not a characteristic of time itself - it's a way of looking at time - it's what happens when we spacialize time - when we pretend that time is just like space. For Bergson time is something that we don't move through but that we accumulate. Think of how a tree accumulates each year - each year layering onto the previous - or how a snowball rolls down the hill. Moments aren't separate events they add on to what was already there. Each moment is experienced through every moment of your experience. So (with Heraclitus) "A man cannot step into the same river twice" because it is not the same river, and he is not same man.

Not easy to condense this idea or its implications into a paragraph! But it gave me a rich exploration - and what felt like a more truthful way to see expertise. In Bergson's way of looking at time, the past isn't far away - it's with us always - it's instantly graspable. My partner's dad just turned 70 and in a birthday message his old friend said "we are still those teenage boys playing volleyball in Bagdad". And i think we can all relate to that - I'm still that 8 year old performing in a local panto - i'm still that 16 year old moving away from home for an apprenticeship with bp - I'm still that 25 year old moving to Seoul - i'm still that 30 year old returning from China - i'm still that 35 year old waiting to go on stage for my TEDx talk in Rome.

Much more to say on all three of these books but the short version is: would recommend.

What resonates with you?

What have you been reading that shifted your perspective?

What ideas have struck you recently?

R

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And if you are an org in need of reinvigoration - where something is stuck or slow or numb - let's talk.