Thursday 21 April 2016

Climbing Beyond Advantaged Thinking

 


‘A climb more demanding in spirit than the body…’

With these words, Mount Shichimen volcanoed into consciousness.  The magic mountain, shaking my mind with dreams of an expedition into the soul. It would take seven years until I could join a Buddhist pilgrimage for the three day march.  People trekked its contours each spring and autumn to reconnect with the laws of the universe, the memory of ancestors. I too sought to chant the mountain's path to reach sunrise over Fuji, uncertain what the journey would reveal.

It seemed I had already started the climb on my first trip to Japan in 2009.  I was enjoying coffee and cake on a visit to the home of Mr Ijima, the leader of the Shishin temple who organise a twice yearly trip to the mountain.  In the jet-lag mist of stories about Mount Shichimen that night, I felt the summit of something I couldn’t yet understand.   Mr Ijima explained that my work at Foyer Federation was like a tree growing branches but missing its roots; that we were looking at young people’s current and future talents without considering the full significance of where they came from.  Thus, the full potential to transform conflict and challenge, he felt, was being lost.  Mr Ijima showed me how his temple applied a combination of Buddhism and modern psychology to unravel the connections of generational influence. I began to wonder if the importance of family was something missing within me as well as my work.  How to make sense of it though, as something relevant beyond an eastern belief?  What followed from that night is too difficult to explain here, but its relevance has haunted me ever since.

After 2009, I introduced the concept of Advantaged Thinking with Foyer Federation as a way of applying positive, asset-based approaches to improve the lives of young people we ‘disadvantaged’ with our beliefs and stereotypes.  It led to over 5 million pounds of funding in 2013-15 for Advantaged Thinking programmes in the context of advancing young people’s health and employability. That should have been a pinnacle moment.  But by spring 2015, my mother had suffered a stroke, my parents and I struggled to embrace its change in our life, and I resigned my job in the belief that something was lacking in how charity (or my experience of it) worked, which I felt I could discover by being outside it.  In the isolation that followed, I had my chance to find the meaning of Mount Shichimen.  I reconnected with lost family relatives and retraced the paths of grandparents whose memory had resurfaced during my first trip to Japan.  I spent more time in ‘the moment’. Sometimes I felt hurt as people I once helped seemed, in my frustration, to ignore my new ideas on charity as an art and the development of inspiration to impact on more lives. Equally, though, I felt more aware of the need to let the past go – to create a different space for fresh meaning to exist.  Mount Shichimen illuminated my imagination with hope.

I laced up my hiking boots two days after the long flight from London.  The time had finally come. Together with my Japanese family, our footsteps carried the lightness and weight of connected ancestors.  We experienced closeness among the spring shades of mountain colour.   Sometimes the climb was unrelenting in its steepness, while at other moments the belief of reaching the summit overshadowed straining limbs.        
                                             

I remembered how my grandfather Charles had died from a heart murmur, long before I was born. My heart punched out the rhythm of the climb.  At every point on the journey, as we stopped to mark the presence of shrines, we stripped away layers of our daily life like onion skins, reaching for the sweeter values beneath.  Most of all, I felt the appreciation of the pilgrims - from the tea that greeted us at resting points, to the stones we sometime slipped on, everything had equal resonance and space.  The right to be is something so easily forgotten.

When we reached the summit, scattered like runners at the end of a marathon, a line of monks waited in welcome for us, their faces smiling moons.  The moment needed no applause; everything defined us.


Existence was so fragilely present, in the touch of snow under foot, an exchanged bow, the treasured tears cleansing my eyes.  It was overwhelming, as though we had entered an outer layer of our lives, and only stars lay beyond the thin air we breathed. 


I felt it the next morning, too, rising to a snowy world of unfamiliar dark shapes. After a night under a cocoon of blankets, we watched in the bitter cold as a bank of clouds around Mount Fuji lit with the the sharp gold of a fresh chanted dawn.  A white space of inspiration, containing all possibilities, seemed to float between us.  It was as though, rather than reach a new horizon, we had returned to an older sky. 

After the long descent down, we got dressed and took our sleepy seats on the bus for the drive back on the motorway.  At the first stop for refreshments, people ventured out into a shopping mall, returning with a treasure trove of ice cream, coffees and junk food.  Familiar habits were taking us home.  Our climb beyond the mountain had begun.

The word ‘shishin’ means children’s feelings toward their parents, and parent’s feelings toward their children.  In Shishin, both feelings are brought together to create harmony from the conflict of experience, just like the climb brought us together, from different lives, to a single illumination of dawn.  I reflected if it was this disruptive harmony that was missing in our work in the UK.  We seek to involve young people, but do we fully appreciate what their challenges signify, have we found a dialogue to embrace our joint transitions together, with equal power and appreciation? I wondered if an expression of Shishin would deepen our discovery.  Putting aside existing structures and beliefs, a starting point for generational inspiration could flourish. 

For me, this is what the magic of Mount Shichimen represents.  Like the fragile blossom of a Japanese cherry tree it blooms and fades under our eyes.  It is as much within us, as it grows outside through others.  Until we reach a point to bring inspiration back into our all our lives, we repeat the same problems that are the root of things we wish to overcome.

The climb is something best measured, as with all experiences of inspiration, in its gradual treasuring over time.  I am still descending, unravelling from it, climbing again through it, reaching for new ideas on the trek to good; looking for others to join with my footsteps and heartbeat on...