I love Columbo movies. I’ve just finished watching one this afternoon, whilst waiting for the Volcano in Iceland to stop reminding us about who really runs things around here…

I love Columbo movies and I love Sherlock Holmes stories. I have all of those in text, all of them as audiobooks and most of them on DVD played by a brilliant actor called Jeremy Brett.

What is it about detective movies I love so much? Much as I enjoy watching the ingenious lengths the villains will go to to convince themselves that they are carrying off ‘the perfect crime’ (clearly villains never watch detective movies), more than anything I love that Columbo and Holmes consistently display a human quality I admire deeply. They never give up.

They never give up.

No matter how complex the crime, no matter how smart or vicious or crazy the criminal is, they keep on going. They are professionals who have decided that certain things always work for them. They know that if they stay curious enough, that will solve the mystery. They know that if they keep asking questions – always the questions! – eventually they’ll uncover the insight that will lead to capturing the criminal. They know that they have a thing called the Mind, and that the right use of it will always bring results. Columbo may have to smoke one more cigar, Holmes might be faced with one of his ‘three-pipe problems’, but there is never a doubt that the right use of their mental faculties – curiosity, reasoning, creative imagination, logic – will prevail.

My friend’s nephew has just returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan. Awestruck at his age and at the experiences he’d no doubt accumulated (most of which he did not intend sharing and I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear), I asked him ‘What helped you the most out there?’. He said ‘I do what they train us to do.’

For some people I meet, however, they can’t be trained enough to give them the confidence they need to fight their battles. They’d never admit it in that way of course because one of things I notice about people who tell me about ‘The Real World’ is how convinced they sound when they describe it. Sounding convincing is part of the game. Like  saying ‘Let’s stop talking and take some action!’, the phrase ‘You don’t live in The Real World’ is something that will always make us sound cool in a business meeting. If that is what matters to us.

What they say is this:

There’s this place called Here where we are right now and there’s this other place Not Here right now. And that place is called The Real World. The Real World is a lot bigger, hairier and scarier than where we are now, and what we are thinking, saying and doing right here will not work back there.

There’s three things I am always intrigued about here, three things advocates of The Real World seem to forget:

1. Everywhere we are is the real world. At one moment I am in a packed commuter train, at another moment I am hugging my children, at another I am negotiating a new business deal with a stressed out client, at another I am sitting in a hot tub looking out over the mountains, at another I am simply walking down the street. One moment my friend’s nephew is on the battlefield with a gun in his hand, another he is telling me about what works for him when he is on the battlefield with a gun in his hand. Are any of these worlds not real? Are any of them ‘more real’ than others? I hope not. Our lives occur to us moment by moment.
2. Our lives are created. Each of those moments shows up for us as a sum of two factors – (a) a set of data – there’s an volcano in Iceland erupting, there’s a business deal happening – and (b) what we bring to those moments: what curiosity, what imagination, what reasoning. Our lived experience is always a function of both. And if, as they do for Columbo and Holmes, certain things are known to work for us, then we have to trust that exactly those skills or qualities will work in every moment.
3. Our words matter. One of the ways we create our lives is through the language we choose to use. In this way, we are what we edit. If I asked you the question “Tell, me, what’s your company like to work at?”, I’m sure you could find the evidence that demonstrates it to be the greatest company in the world (if you wanted to). But that wouldn’t be ‘the truth’: it would be a story – “an edited account of reality”. The next of your colleagues I asked could edit the same available data to assure me that it is in fact the worst company in the world and moments away from self-destruction. For both of you to make your claim, you’d need to highlight certain facts, edit others out of the equation, and deliver your argument with conviction. This is what we do. This is how we live. And the point is that the words we choose to use to describe our situation don’t just impact others. They impact us. We are the audiences for our own stories about the world and our place in it. It’s a bit’s like telling my friend’s nephew that the fighting techniques he has been taught don’t really work on the battlefield. It’d be like saying to him ‘Don’t you realize how terrifying and violent a real battlefield is, soldier; we could never arm you against that. Now, off you go!’

The battlefield will not be more real than here, it will be different. Our moments all have different qualities. But the principles we learn in any one place will apply also in that different sphere. Trust the training, trust yourself. That’s a message I’d like to give others in my work, and I’d like to give myself. There are no guarantees in life, but there is always a willingness we can create inside ourselves to keep going. To never give up.

Now, light a third pipe, Holmes, and think about that…