#164: Lekkerwater, Jazz and Alienation
Good morning my friends
Please forgive me, I have meandered a little today. I will return to our tighter formula next week.
Winter has arrived in the Cape. The days are soaked by long steady rains, interrupted only by moments of deluge. It is a time for cozy fires and contemplation.
In an earlier age, it was a time for recovery. Longer, darker nights would have called us to approximate hibernation.
In our world, the clocks and calendars force us into the dark morning.
Still, winter continues to whisper its ancient truth, that all beings need time to reflect and recuperate. I try to listen.
Over weekends, I settle into winter’s dreaminess. I curl into pages of other worlds, pausing only to place another log on the burning pile.
Last week’s reading included Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’s A Spell of Good Things, Thomas Brussig’s The Short End of the Sonnallee and Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter.
Winter is also jazz time. Well, anytime is jazz time, but winter is special. The cuddle of coats, the romance of soft sweaters, bright sax notes bouncing off dark, wet streets.
This week took us to Cape Town’s Blue Room.
Imagine a genie sprinkling four Nobel-prize-winning mathematicians with jazz dust. Then imagine them playing for hours on end.
That is what happened when Dr. Nduduzo Makhathini, Linda Sikhakhane, Zwelakhe-Duma Bell le Pere and Kweku Sumbry cast spells over the Wednesday winter night. They coaxed fractals into composition, converted mathematical genius into musical magic, the complexity bewildering and beguiling in equal measure.
Unfortunately, Bell le Pere and Sumbry aren’t on this version of Umbhedesho, but it gives you a taste of Mathathini and Sikhakhane’s wizardry.
/ strategy
This week Gallup released its 2023 State of the Global Workplace Report.
In what has become – for me at least – an almost boring finding, they found – again – that the majority of us, i.e. a full 59% of us, ‘put in the minimum effort required’, ‘are psychologically disconnected from their employer’, are minimally productive and more likely to be stressed and burnt out than engaged workers because we feel lost and disconnected at work.
One might adopt the view that ‘it’s just work’ or ‘well, they don’t own the place’ and so these levels of disengagement are ‘okay’…a ‘work is like cod liver oil, so close your eyes, hold your nose and get it done’ perspective. But think about like this – forty hours a week, for forty-eight weeks a year, for forty years equates to nearly nine full years, lived in stress and burnout, feeling lost and alienated.
That feels criminal. Changing how we experience work is a moral and spiritual imperative.
It might feel overwhelming, but confronting the brutal facts empowers us to take targeted action.
With intention, we can make a difference.
Connect with your colleagues. Listen to their stories. Learn who they are, who their people are, what their journey has been, what makes them happy and sad. People who feel connected to others at work, who have friendships at work, are happier.
If you’re a leader, create opportunities for connection. Encourage connection across departments and business units.
Know what energises you, not just the noun but the verb, the what and the how. For example, creative work may energise you, then, in all likelihood, finding ways to do your work creatively will also energise you.
Spending just 20% of your week working with or in ways that energise you are a powerful inoculation against burnout.
If you lead a team, spend time helping people discover and use their strengths. Having the opportunity to use our strengths every day at work is the number one determinant of engagement.
Check-in with people every week.
Marcus Buckingham suggests that we use these four questions to guide the conversation; What activities did you love last week? What did you loathe? What are your priorities this week? How can I help? Don’t worry about how skilled a coach-leader you are. Frequency and intent deliver results.
Get on a team or create a team.
People who are part of a team are 2.7 times more likely to be fully engaged, three times more likely to be resilient and twice as likely to feel a strong sense of belonging.
Note, team not department.
Teams train together, they learn together, they understand and anticipate each other, they help and support each other. If you lead a group of people, make sure that you’re creating a team.
Most of us can do these five things. Do them and increase global happiness.
You can be the angel who rescues people from hellish work.
/ self
I suspect to create a happier world we must avoid instrumentality, the blinkered, single-minded, outcome-at-all-cost, must-have-an-immediate-return. It robs us of joy and, ironically, blunts our effectiveness.
On occasion I share this passage from William Dicey’s, What Goes on Inside Is Just Too Fast, with my clients.
Dicey is a writer dedicated to improving his craft. For months he reads books about writing. Day by day writing becomes more a task than a joy. His love of writing is leached by the acid of outcome.
He gives up and, in what feels like a self-indulgent fit, he decides to read only authors whose surnames begin with B. He calls it Project B.
He says of Project B, “Once I had decided to have more fun with my reading, to follow my nose and not confine myself to those books I assume will help me as a writer, to not obsess, that is, over the opportunity costs of wayward excursions, I’m free to pursue literary investigations. I can spend a few hours – or an entire day, if needs be – unpicking the near magical concision of ‘Everything and Nothing’, Borges’ mesmeric two pages on Shakespeare. Or I can turn my attention to his biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz and try to establish how he manages to say more about a man in three pages than most biographers manage in three hundred. The irony, of course, is that in ditching utility from my reading – that is, in not restricting myself to books that I think might aid my writing – I land up with more utility: I land up actually writing.”
/ soul
I love places that have a hint of adventure, places that you have to get to. They need not be far.
I love Cape Town’s Secret Gin Bar because it is tucked in a courtyard behind a chocolate shop. Culture Wine Bar perches above precarious stairs. Leo’s Wine Bar is folded into Max’s Bagels, jack-a-boxing into life at 5 pm.
Lekkerwater Beach Lodge is a place like that.
It is only three hours from Cape Town, but getting there has adventure’s touch.
You leave a regional road to spend forty kilometres on the kind of gravel road that agricultural trucks and white double cabs treat as an autobahn, whilst city folk (me) are city folk (me).
The road dips and rises in concert with green hills that hold it in place. The green of algae found in the deepest pools in old-growth forests. It speaks of life.
The next fifteen kilometres are a little more adventurous, even the double cabbers are cautious here. Shallow streams bubble across the road. Tyres gurgle through deep puddles and slide in slippery mud. It is completely passable in a suburban SUV, but you do know you’re leaving the world behind.
The last part of the journey is done in the lodge’s four-wheel drive, suburban cars left in a leafy parking spot.
Lekkerwater is a place of layers, surrounded by sandstone cliffs and caves, whose striations are a reminder that all places are rooted in history.
Today, it is surrounded by the expansive De Hoop nature reserve and a marine protected area that stretches miles into the ocean – pristine and peaceful. Thirty years ago, the homestead was the retreat of apartheid’s last president, FW de Klerk. In the decade before that, it was a missile testing zone. For the forty years preceding that it was a family’s holiday home. Twenty years before that the Native Land Act dispossessed the communities that had lived in the area for centuries. And one hundred thousand years before that, it incubated the emergence of human culture.
The ironies are multiple.
A safe, food-rich area, it provided humans with the nutrients to develop powerful brains that in turn led to them testing weapons to destroy other humans on the same ground. The missile testing in turn creates a zone that protects sea life now scarce in many oceans. A place that gave protection and solace to all humans was stolen for the few.
What it is to be human. What it is to be this planet watching us in our confusion.
Tim Wells, Lekkerwater’s sustainability advisor, is a wonderful guide to this complex history and the world surrounding the lodge.
De Hoop is home to 1800 plant species. The Kruger National Park, 2000. Kruger is 570 times bigger than De Hoop.
De Hoop is a place where one’s senses come alive. Each colour lives in multiple expressions of itself. Grey walks across plants from silver to bark to coal; yellow is sunny, and golden, and lemony; green is alpine, and acidic, and velvety.
Wells’ stories reveal the worlds in the rock pools. They remind us of the multiple intelligences that inhabit our world. We need not look for alien intelligence, we need only listen to those who are here.
The three-hearted octopus whose eight legs each have 280 sensing suckers that grip, taste, and smell. We say that a successful person has the world at their fingertips. What does it mean when you have 2,240 multisensory fingertips?
Algae-eating periwinkles scrape rocks with microscopic teeth forged by nature to be one of the world’s toughest substances.
Seemingly immobile limpets farm their patch of rock, practicing an agriculture that we need activists and laws to get right.
As Wells spoke, I wondered what might happen if we listened to these beings.
Tens of thousands of years ago, their ancestors gave our ancestors the fuel to create our culture. What if we returned the favour?
The protected marine area means that whales and dolphins swim by all day long. You can stay in bed and still have a Southern Right raise its flipper in greeting. It is a special place.
All the best
Karl
PS: The lodge is spectacular. The Pan-African team who work there are welcoming and expert. We booked our trip through Conservio, who specialise in travel that intersects with conversation.
PPS: You can learn more about my coaching practice here, and follow me on LinkedIn and Instagram.