#ascendancy
In a recent conversation, I called out a metaphor that was to describe my intention and a measure of success. I said I wanted to ‘climb Mount To-Do’.
It was to conjure up the image of a mountainous landscape of which, I was on a quest to get to the top of a list of tasks and activities. Not to make me sound like a hero, but to show I had a very specific aim in mind. Get to the top. I could have said ‘clear my backlog of tasks’ or ‘smash my outstanding actions’.
I clearly wanted to create the feel of an uphill struggle to get to the summit and look out from a conquered-peak perspective.
I mean, it’s grand and all that, it’s just a pile of actions: Emails to send in reply, research to complete, design to finalise, commitments to follow through on.
It was my attempt to show achievement and focus and not have any delusions of grandeur over the nature of those achievements. I wasn’t vaccinating people to save their lives or keeping our utility services flowing or harvesting food for others to eat.
But whatever work we do that brings us not only financial security but esteem, value and a sense of worthiness, we often have to consider some form of ascendancy.
And that’s not limited to — but is increasingly felt by us all — completing our outstanding actions. Important though this is. It’s also about ascending our sense of service to others, of looking out for those closest to us. Of learning something new, adding more skills, knowledge or wherewithal to enhance ourselves. Ascending to a new level of understanding about a complex socio-political issue. A new height attained for efficient ways to store and retrieve information needed to help our work be more effective.
It may feel difficult in this time of inert ways of working, commuting from bed to desk, on video call after video call to have any feelings of ascendancy, but it suddenly felt important to define the climb as a metaphor for our flattened times.
We’re not experiencing many highs and lots of lows. We’re missing the buzz of variety, travel, random and deliberate human contact and as someone said recently that serendipity is silenced. It feels like we’re at basecamp on that mountain, and we’re doing stuff but are we ascending?
Maybe not physically ascending in the sense of one foot after another, one ledge higher than the last ledge.
It occurred to me that this physically-limited set up at a continued basecamp is where our spiritual, intellectual, emotional, psychological ascendancy can be, or even should be, attended to.
For many of us, we’re in our houses, and in our heads that’s restrictive. Safe and for the best, but restrictive. For others, we’re continuing to be in our places of work (hospitals, factories, warehouses, trucks, utility stations) in a very unsafe world.
Both probably feel like there’s no sense of ascendancy — doing, sure. Ascending. Unlikely.
Why is that important though?
Well, we’ve seen the studies and realised the finding that mastery is important to us whatever our chosen hobby, work or vocation. We like to get better at stuff.
We’re energised by the sense of accomplishment, feeling valued and making a difference. We have a feeling of ascendancy from invisibility, under-appreciation and worthiness.
In a crisis situation, we think a little nearer than an ascendent mindset. We think survival, safety, just enough to get through. We aren’t so bothered about worth, mastery and appreciation. Just doing something in the name of our survival instincts.
Then we move to more complex but nevertheless safer space. And we don’t have so much pressure or intensity and yet our mind has attuned itself to emergency actions.
We can have a range of reactions to this.
- Aware of our now complex, but safer, surroundings, we become overwhelmed by the realisations of where we now are. We can shut-down, panic somewhat and be less inclined to act for fear of a return to chaos and danger.
- We may become energised by the challenges we’re now aware of and can act on. We may feel supremely confident that our instinctive actions caused this arrival and we can tackle whatever comes next. But in this space, the complex is harder to process than immediate danger.
- We may create a new chaotic state. Because this new state of complexity, whilst less intense, isn’t what we’d just learned our way into. So we create an ever-present spiral of self-derived crisis.
And there’s a range of others but these 3 explain perhaps, our continued state of heightened anxiety about the uncertainty of a locked-down world.
I guess it’s my assertion that in any of these 3 mental models we’ve failed to ascend or even realise we have ascended in some way, shape or form.
I’m not talking about lofty, over-confident ascendence (that’s the second state above — I got through that, I’ll simply repeat what got me through that).
I am suggesting we take the time at the peak of the new summit we’ve climbed to see, sense, feel, analyse, understand. That sort of computational and spiritual ascendency.
We would do well to say to ourselves:
- What is this new state and climate I’m in?
- How do I feel about what I did to get me here?
- What is my urge, my calling, my sensing of what to do next?
- How do others feel around me and what I can I do to help them, and they to help me?
- What do my energy levels feel like?
- What have I learned about myself, situations and stimulus in that recent incident/period of time?
- How did I handle my emotions, psychological states, reactions, moods, self-talk, contemplation, pace, resistance, urges and even my sleep and well-being?
And have a sense of what you’ve ascended from.
And what your next steps to a different level of ascendence are.
Ascending may seem like an overbearing word to use for simply getting through a stressful instance, yet I think it’s important to us to realise we did that. We ascended from a despairing moment. We climbed out of a pit of anguish. We built capability, knowledge and ascended to a new plane of understanding about us and what we are able to think, feel and do.
I’m sure we all felt despondent when Lockdown 3 was announced. And when we knew that over 100,000 people had died from COVID-19 in the UK alone. And for some of us, when we heard our employer was going into liquidation.
It’s probably impossible to feel any sense of ascendance at that moment, but I think it’s important to realise that this is when we need to have more ascending thoughts, words and deeds.
- We can lift others with gestures and acts of kindness. Seek them out from those you know will willingly gift them to you.
- We can rationalise with others and learn from those who have a differing viewpoint to us. Seek them out and engage and listen, learn and acquire new perspectives.
- We can lean on others when we’re at our lowest energetic ebb. Some people are continually experiencing exhaustion through their work, yet others feel helpless in the fight for safety. Seek out those who willingly prop you up and give you hope, warmth and appreciation.
Ascending isn’t about the top of the mountain daily. It could be about just one step, just one new thing to know, and one new gesture of kindness to others that helps.
It’s my belief that ascendancy is more important to us than we realise especially in a time of flat stasis for many.
Tiny ascendancies matter as much as a huge climb. The sense of upwards, higher, progression is something we do daily, even hourly. Look up, do up, be up. And perhaps a sense of ascendancy is what will see us positively through our next challenge.
I’ll leave you with Dr King Jnr.
