Form & Essence

In a box on my desk is a hundred-year-old pocket watch with MGH engraved on the back. It still works when I wind it, and it tells time. That is its Form.

The watch belonged to my great grandfather, who worked as a carpenter on the railroad his whole life. I never met him, yet he inspires me. I’m named after him, so those initials on the watch are my initials, too. I also have a notebook in which he made a one-line entry of every day of his working life with what he did, how many hours, and how much he was owed. It goes on like that for more than thirty years.

When I hold his watch, or leaf through his tattered notebook, I think of his diligence. I wonder about who he was—how much of him is in me. Thinking of him puts my days in perspective. It makes me feel strong. Those feelings? They are Essence.

To think of great-grandfather’s watch as a physical object without comprehending its significance, is to see its Form but not its Essence. It is only half of Truth.

Nowadays we’re obsessed with the things we can see, define, and measure. Form dominates Essence. We walk on a visible path of likes and shares, profit and loss, yours and mine, right and wrong.

But this is a misunderstanding, and it is costly.

What we see on our screens eclipses what we know in our hearts. The labels we put on one another prevent us from building friendships across boundaries and beliefs. The metrics we use to claim progress in school or work leave little room for earnest commitment to joy and curiosity.

There is a better path, one that balances Form with Essence, and leads to deeper Truth. It’s hard to find because it is made of invisible things like emotion, meaning and spirit, but walking the invisible path is transformative and powerful. It works first within the heart, and then radiates outward through our dreams and deeds.

In business there is conventional wisdom that you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Really? Think about it. Be honest.

The truth is that measurement is extremely helpful in managing certain aspects of business. But it’s bad at managing relationships. And it’s terrible at comprehending the kinds of instincts the greatest business leaders of all time are so famous for. Spend any time reading about Herb Kelleher and Southwest Airlines and you’ll realize that while the company was filled with metrics, it was also imbued with Kelleher’s spirit. All the other airlines Southwest outcompeted were filled with metrics, too. But they didn’t have his Essence.

Kelleher once said, “We will hire someone with less experience, less education, and less expertise, [over] someone who has more of those things and has a rotten attitude. Because we can train people. We can teach people how to lead. We can teach people how to provide customer service. But we can’t change their DNA.”

It’s not that Form is bad, or measurement is bad. But it’s only half of Truth. In fact, it’s the easy half to understand, because it is visible and measurable. So Form dwarfs Essence in most business conversations. To discuss feelings, or instincts, or the cultural implications of strategic decisions seems bizarre—a distraction from the real conversations about sales, efficiency, and profit.

In secondary education, for another example, we are obsessed with measuring progress along a narrow curricular pathway we think will lead to a good college followed by a good job. Along the way, parents expect their children to get goodgrades. Administrators judge teachers on how well their students perform on standardized tests. Politicians tie school funding to those tests, and journalists love to write stories with colorful graphs displaying school passing and failing rates.

But if education is a competitive, closely monitored, linear pathway through important predetermined subjects, then what is it not? It is not exploration, or self-expression, or history, or art. It is not a community-centered haven of safety and support for children in areas rife with social and economic challenge.

In the wake of high-profile bullying, and school violence, and studies about depression, the plaintive voices about educating the whole child that have spoken in the shadows for decades, turn into buzz concepts like “social-emotional learning” or “turning STEM into STEAM” by adding “A” in for “Arts.” Not because of some grand revelation that teaching arts and humanities are intrinsically good, but rather because studies have shown that kids engaged in such things test better in the job-oriented areas we really care about—while improving measured deliverables like rates of attendance and graduation.

Jobs make money. Money is measurable and helps us obtain other things in Form. The domination of Form in education, therefore, applies constant pressure to remove frivolous things like arts and humanities in favor of subjects with a more obvious purpose.

Preparation to enter the workforce isn’t bad. It’s good! But is that even what we’re talking about?

Success is not a product only of what subjects we study, or what our grades are. Success is also a product of our sense of self, belonging, safety, determination, inspiration, confidence, motivation, resilience, cultural awareness, and so on.

But those are hard things to talk about, and they’re difficult to test. They are not easy answers because they belong to Essence. And so we delude ourselves, at great expense, into the half-truth of Form-obsession in education.

As we will soon discover, Form and Essence are dangerously out of balance not only in our understanding of objects, business management, and education, but across a wide spectrum of human endeavor impacting creativity and motivation, relationships with ourselves and others, and care for our communities and our planet. We’ll learn that distraction—especially from smart phones, polarizing media, and social media—smothers our awareness of Essence nearly every minute of every day.

How do we practice deeper Truth when Essence in the modern world is so totally dominated by Form?

That’s what my book, Form & Essence, is all about. I can’t wait to share it with you!

BUY the book. SEE the review at KIRKUS.

Photo by Sonaal Bangera on Unsplash