Between the Waves: On Attention, Unlearning, and Reconciliation
I've been thinking a lot about attention.
And noticing my own capacity to pay attention – to what others are bringing to conversations, to the subtle patterns and dynamics in groups and systems I work with. To notice my own biases and tune in to the embodied intelligence - insight that comes from beyond the rational mind.
Mostly, I’ve been noticing how much I miss.
I often feel like I only catch glimpses of the whole, the fullest perspective, of the depths of possibility of what might be - what’s really present.
This sense of what waits just beyond reach of our perception reminds me of the poet WB Yeats who writes
The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.
Yeats points to the unseen, hidden possibilities that are present but not yet sensed.
I interpret this not as a fantastical type of magic – but the world of possibility that lives just beyond our current frame, our current capacity for perception. The insight, perspective, wisdom that’s held in what hasn’t yet been fully heard.
TS Elliot describes this in Four Quartets
Not known, because not looked for But heard, half-heard, in the stillness Between two waves of the sea.
I’ve been practicing a deeper attunement - expanding how I notice what’s unfolding around me. Practising listening more deeply to what’s said and not said – and what’s heard and not heard. And listening to the stillness between the waves.
This attending asks us to be present to the full complexity we're swimming in – not rushing toward solutions, but staying present with what is.
The paradox of helpfulness
This week, it's Reconciliation Week in Australia, and I notice in myself grappling again with how to show up. What does leadership look like now?
There's something paradoxical at play - the impulse to do something, to help, might be part of the problem. This tension between wanting to help and potentially causing unintended consequences is something the philosopher Bayo Akomolafe explores.
Akomolafe writes about the bind of whiteness, that when white-identified bodies ask, “How do I help?”, the answers arise from the perspectives and systems creating the problematic situation.
That even acts of inclusion can be a form of violence when they require others to fit a shape not of their own making.
Because so often in systems work, in leadership, even with good intent we rush toward a solution. Toward ‘doing something helpful’. But we can miss the whole point and end up falling into what Akomolafe describes as the “shrine of moral rectitude” – the kind of feel good actions that don’t do much to shift the status quo.
Composting assumptions
What if helpfulness isn’t the point? What if, as Akomolafe suggests, the work isn’t to be helpful, but to compost our assumptions? To unlearn. To sit in the discomfort of not knowing how to lead, and let that unknowing be fertile.
Evelyn Araluen speaks to this unlearning in her poem Learning Bundjalung on Tharawal:
It's hard to unlearn a language; to unspeak the empire, to teach my voice to rise and fall like landscape, a topographic intonation
There’s something in this unspeaking, the unlearning of language - and the move toward reflecting the land - that feels like part of what’s being called for now.
In the midst of this complexity, I felt something shift when I heard Patrick Dodson speak for the first time since the Referendum, in an interview on ABC’s 730 program this week. Towards the end of the interview he said that
Now is a time for listening more closely to these waves, to the wind, to the environment, to see how the leaves move and don't move, and the animals that live there, to discern what it is that's happening.
Because [racism, the ongoing effects of colonisation] is not as blatant as it was back in [previous generations]... It's a lot more subtle, and its long term intent isn't as clear.
Dodson speaks of the need for deeper discernment - to notice the subtle forces at play.
Araluen in the poem above later writes about naming ‘the song that swoops through this mosaic’ - to discern the subtle music that runs through our systems – the song that we can’t always name.
Dodson talked about not making "superficial analysis of why these things happen, but try to look... at what the structural foundations are."
This is a capacity I deeply admire – and one I'm trying to cultivate in myself.
Living with questions
So I find myself sitting with these questions:
How do I continue to contribute to the problem – despite good intentions continue to perpetuate a system that centres colonial ways?
What is being unlearnt?
What is being protected? What can be given up or let go?
And what are my lineages, and their ancestral ways? thank you Robert Mulhall for this important question
I’m not going to try and tie this up with a neat conclusion. There is so much I don’t see in this work. Reconciliation isn’t a week - it’s a long, unfinished, often uncomfortable reckoning. There is so much still unresolved, so much unseen, unspoken, still to be truly heard. I don’t have answers, but I know I don’t want to turn away. I want to keep paying attention, to keep listening.
