How to be Happy in Love, and in Life

“You don’t know what it’s like when someone you thought loved one, goes away and does the same things with somebody else”

Jigsaw, Sybille Bedford, 1989

Pieces from a jigsaw of relationships

Here’s a blog from a volcanic island for anyone who wants to be love again. I’ve just finished reading Sybille Bedford’s autobiographical novel ‘Jigsaw’, and I can’t stop thinking about love. Maybe it’s the Sicilian heat, or possibly my medication, that cost twice as much as last night’s dinner. Whatever. Bedford’s Proustian narrative about inconstant, and unforgiving lovers, has got me thinking about my past relationships: what happened, and what I contributed, often, to make a difficult situation worse.

Patterns of behaviour

I need to make sense of the pieces in Bedford’s ‘Jigsaw’. What messages does she have about love and life? Imagine a real jigsaw depicting a French mediterranean town, north London, and Finchingfield, Essex. If you look at the whole picture, you can see small groups of people, in twos and threes, involved in different types of relationships. Take a closer look, and you will see patterns of behaviour that, for me, are uncomfortable.

The Pursuit of Love

In ‘Jigsaw’, Bedford describes many different relationships. I’ll try to summarise five of the most prominent.

Relationship One

A young woman and a young man have a one night stand. Later, the young man becomes increasingly abusive towards the young woman, because she does not want to sleep with him again.

Relationship Two 

A young man marries a young woman because she is very keen to marry him, and, having been engaged for a year, he feels it is the right thing to do. Once they are married, the young woman makes a habit of sniping at her husband, while cultivating admirers in a very public way.

Relationship Three

An older man has a long term unacknowledged relationship with a young woman. They live separately, and go on holiday together, once. After a number of years, the older man commits suicide over gambling debts.

Relationship Four

A married woman divorces her husband after he tells her that he is having an affair with someone else. The married woman insists on a divorce, saying: “Jamie has done wrong…he must bear the consequences.”

Relationship Five

A young man marries a much older woman. After some years of living happily together, the young man has an affair with a younger woman. His wife starts to drink, and becomes addicted to morphine. The young man still loves his wife, and wants to stay married to her. Eventually, he leaves, because he finds it too difficult to watch her self-destruct.

What can we learn?

What is Bedford’s message? If she had written a book called ‘How to be Happy in Love, and in Life’, perhaps she might have said this:

Have purpose in your life. Discover what you want to do, and stick to it.
The young woman in Relationship Two wanted to be world class tennis player. She didn’t succeed, because she was not physically strong enough. The narrator of ‘Jigsaw’, on the other hand, becomes a writer. Despite her many ups and downs, she is one of the few characters in the book who achieves some kind of lasting personal fulfillment – Maslow’s ‘Self-Actualisation’.

Learn to forgive, avoid jealousy and blame
Taking positions, making demands, and blaming other people, is what leads to the failure of four of the five relationships. In Relationship One, the young man blames the young woman for not wanting to sleep with him again. In Relationship Two, the young woman blames the young man for many things, including not being good at business. In Relationship Four, the young woman blames her husband because according to her principles, he did wrong and must suffer. And in Relationship Five, the older woman blames the young man for having an affair. Only the young woman in Relationship Three does not blame her lover.

Be kind, be empathetic, try to see things from the other person’s perspective
The older woman in Relationship Five has moments of seeing things through her husband’s eyes. However, she needs increasing doses of morphine to manage her rage. What if the older man in Relationship Three had asked himself what it was like for the younger woman to be his lover? He did not even know how she traveled to his apartment every night.
 
In ‘Jigsaw’, Sybille Bedford pieces together what she has learned about love and life. It's good learning, if only I could put it into practice...

Stromboli and London, 25-28 July 2013

PS Listen to Sybille Bedford on Desert Island Discs broadcast on 5 July 1998

Five things I learned about leadership on a Leaders’ Quest

What can you learn from spending five days having conversations with people who are not obviously like you, and who know and do things you may not understand or care about? Quite a lot, as I found out when I went on a leadership journey organized by Leaders’ Quest. I have been home, physically, for two days, but in my mind I am still on the road. I need more time to digest what I saw and heard. Meanwhile, here are five things I learned:

1 How milking with Paul beats sitting with Mary

‘Sitting with Mary’ used to be how one learned to do a job. You sat, you listened, you observed, and you asked questions. And sometimes you got to practice, too. Last week I was given the chance to ‘milk with Paul’. Cows are very large animals, they poo and pee a lot, and they don’t like strangers in their milking parlour. This means you need highly developed skills and awareness to have someone shadow you when you are milking 187 cows in a confined space. Paul, the cowman, who looked after me, demonstrated phenomenal technical, spatial, communication, time and risk management skills. I learned a lot about how to lead from Paul.

2 Collaborative Inquiry not Interrogation

The conversations that worked best for me were the ones where the people we met had questions for us, too. Let me try to explain. If you tell me what you do, and then I tell you what I do, then we both know, what we both know. Whereas, if there is time, and the conditions are right for dialogue, new questions will emerge, and quite possibly we will discover valuable learning points together.  Firing questions at people may result in a diminished learning for all, because the thing you think you need to know, may not be as valuable as the knowledge or experience your interlocutor was going to share with you. If only you had let them.

3 Ditch your titles

We are conditioned to recognize people by their role, and job title. When you meet someone for the first time, hearing a job title may help to understand who you are speaking to: Banker, Consultant, Entrepreneur, Ex-Offender, Husband, Finance Director, Mother, Piano Tuner, Student. Husband, Mother, and Newly Redundant don’t work so well. If you want someone to remember who you are, it is essential to say something about yourself that will help them understand what you do, and, hopefully, arouse their curiousity.

4 Leadership and Learning

‘Leadership and Learning are indispendible to each other’, as John F Kennedy has said. For me, the people we met who were consciously learning from their challenges and opportunities, tended to be the most inspiring leaders. I’m thinking of a manager at a social enterprise who knew everyone by name, a school student in a new Academy, a probation officer who always took the difficult path, a banker who wanted to be a painter, Jimmy Mizen’s family, a piano tuner whose home is London, and who has no home.

5 The Kindness of Strangers

Perfect strangers can be exceptionally kind. Again, and again, we met people doing difficult things, who were patient, open, thoughtful, generous, compassionate, funny, and respectful to us, and to each other. With leaders like these, seizing the opportunity to tell them how great they are at what they do, was a privilege and a pleasure.