Friday, October 11, 2024

political relationships

What is everything but just relationships.

When something goes well at work, it's because I've made someone happy; or I've been made happy. Parents feel good, I feel good. The kid feels good, he's talking, I feel good. My colleagues feel good at therapy team meeting, they do good work, I feel good, I feel like I'm doing my job, my boss feels good. I have good partnerships with external parties and persons, they do good work for me, I feel good and get good work done too. Rather than being purely a 'good' worker, isn't it really about being good with each other? I've seen supposed good clinicians fared not so good in the organisation for not being good with people. (And isn't that a shocking observation; my early assumption was that therapists are essentially people-persons.) Don't take emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence for granted. They aren't taught, but they're necessary.

And aren't relationships governing even world politics? Who's chummy with whom defines sides and finance and weapons support. It's all relationships. And if relationships affect power and effectiveness and success, then relationships can be, and are, politics. What was it Aristotle said? "The human is a political animal." Or something like that.

Is part of my trouble wanting relationships to be apolitical? 

But apparently even I know how to play it when I want to.

Monday, October 07, 2024

Something I read in the book Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton kept running through my mind today. That one of the principles of beauty in architecture was about the balance of chaos and order. That a straight line of buildings would be boring; but a straight line of buildings each with its own bursting colour and style would be a sight to behold.

A constant theme in my life is the struggle to maintain my chaos within the boundaries of order. Thankfully, I was born into an orderly family, and an orderly society (Singapore's national mental illness is apparently OCD), and a religion that provides a lot of order and structure. So my chaos has been successfully managed in most instances by these external factors. But I've realised that I've barely learnt to manage my own chaos on a personal level. Everything is often spilling over at the edges; often just on the border of not being sane; messy, disorganised, messy. Sometimes I do wonder if I have some version of high-functioning ADHD perhaps (as one of my close colleagues discovered in adulthood).

Anyway, my point being, order for all this chaos; that's the key.