Forgetting the River’s Name.

Forgetting the River’s Name.

The chief requirement of the good life is to live without any image of oneself. — Iris Murdoch

Both the rewards and the perils of ego in the workplace are well understood. The former cannot be denied; the latter cannot be ignored. The ‘fat, relentless ego’ — as Murdoch described it — boosts confidence and clouds judgement.

‘Ego’ is a loaded term that invites moral assessment and mild indignation from leadership theorists. Yet for the purposes of becoming a better manager, it’s more useful to ignore whether ego is good or evil and focus instead on what we can do about our undeniable self-absorption.

Murdoch advocated for unselfing — turning one’s attention outward toward nature, art, or other people, stunning the ego into silence. The dissolution of self-centeredness is momentary rather than permanent: a turning of attention away from one’s anxieties and desires toward the external world.

Unselfing pierces selfish consciousness, making personal worries less significant, even briefly. As Bill Watterson observed, ‘If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I’ll bet they’d live a lot differently.’

Unselfing is not suppressing the ego, but cultivating a more attentive way of seeing. Uncentring our minds from ourselves, as Jeffers said. Not permanently — that’s undoable — but frequently enough to improve judgement. It’s about distracting ego for brief moments of distance. The ego returns immediately. It always does.

Among unselfing practices, nothing beats a daily morning walk. Not merely ‘relaxing outside’ or exercising, but attending to a slowly changing landscape. It needn’t be dramatic. Noticing the shape of a solitary winter tree is enough to interrupt self-absorption. As Roberto Bolaño observed, ‘Every hundred feet the world changes.’ Going out becomes going in. You’re still there, but no longer the center. Walking turns into mobile stillness, your thoughts like a balloon tethered with string.

The ego loosens because you realize the world is clearly not about you. A tree doesn’t care how you feel about it. A landscape doesn’t adapt to your expectations. A river flows where it must. They don’t care what name you give them.

You don’t decide to be less self-centered — it just starts happening.

A vivid — even mildly absurd — image of unselfing appears in Seamus Heaney’s poem St. Kevin and the Blackbird. The poem tells of a monk who holds out his hand so long that a bird nests in it.

And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow,

Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?

Self-forgetful or in agony all the time

Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth

Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?

For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird

And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.

Heaney captures the tension perfectly: did Kevin forget himself, or find himself? That is what unselfing is about. The movement from a self that is hurting to one with distance in its head. The reverse is automatic; unselfing is manual.

Seeing the river, but forgetting its name.