Love and Firing People
El amor y despedir personas
A student shares the jarring contrast between a recent experience of boundless love and the painful reality of having to decide which team members to let go, and asks what any of it is for.
Love and Firing People
A student shares the jarring contrast between a recent experience of boundless love and the painful reality of having to decide which team members to let go, and asks what any of it is for.
Just an hour ago I found myself in a situation of deciding who on my team stays and who has to be let go. I won't go into the details, but the hardest part, speaking of honesty, is that first of all, I have no sense of where any of those decisions come from. Who am I to say any of that? It's just business. But the darkest part is how much fear I feel because of the changing nature of it, for myself. Not for anybody else. This "me, me, me" sense of, "Why do I have to go through this anyway?"
Recently I had an experience where I realized I was looking at something so beautiful. For the first time in my case, I felt I had to stop looking for something that has to do with doing and simply rest in being. And maybe the contrast between that experience and today is what shakes me. Today what really struck me was this question: what is all this for? This human experience of waking up one day and finding myself deciding how many of my co-workers need to be fired from their jobs. It really makes no sense, when two days before what I was feeling was this immense love, this freedom, this love that was so beautiful, that was nothing. Nothing.
The love that wants nothing
At first I thought it was a flip from receiving to giving, but even that doesn't fit. It really doesn't want anything. In that one thing, that nothingness, there is no action. It's just being. And in that one thing, there is all this love to share: to share with someone how loved they are, how free they are, how beautiful they have been in their friendship, how beautiful it is that they exist. And still, it is not a giving. It's just the sharing of it. It's so beautiful. There's no goal with it. There's just this joy of sharing, of being.
But the funny thing is that the day after, I felt my mind hijacked the experience and now believes it actually has to do something. It becomes this obsession with the actual doing. And it goes back and forth. Today I wake up, one day from flying back to Vancouver, deciding who stays and who goes, and I think: what is this for? What about all this love that exists just for being? I can't find it today in any of this.
I feel you. I feel you are opening up so much, and you are coming to very essential paradoxes. Essential as in deep, the most fundamental: being versus doing.
You are tasting being. That love you are describing is being. It is so interesting you bring this up, because I pointed to it in the meditation. This love, in words: it wants nothing, needs nothing. And it is you.
Being within doing
The struggle with doing, which is what you are bringing, for example in choosing who will be fired, there is a razor's edge there. You can enter that fully from being, because there really isn't any doing. That is where it becomes very hard to talk about, but it is crucially important. You must enter that process with full commitment and responsibility, coming from your deep knowing of being. Being is fundamental.
When you contemplate your co-workers and face these decisions, what is primary, what is at the foreground, is your deep knowing of being. I don't want to put too many words on it so that they become borrowed rather than your own. But know being as reality, as primary. And know that your co-workers are that as well. They have chosen to be in the position they are in. They are fully responsible.
Fear and the world of relativity
As you go through this process, look at your fear. The world of humanity, of relativity, can become, through true seeing, the fundamental. Being is present in all doing. Most people who are in a position like your co-workers do not have a boss, a co-worker, who is remotely as open and loving, facing that choice in the way that you are.
Just explore that sense that being and doing are fundamentally separate.