Today is a natural environment provided by life in which you can shape the future now.

Your life is just such an environment too, for others, now.

We might think this means some people and not others, but we’d be wrong.

On a personal level, we all can train and practise around our curiosities and skills and passions.  Together, we can shape these natural environments even more through intentional meetings exploring future possibilities.

‘We were all told too young, to colour
inside the creativity crushing lines.  The
child you once were – and might yet be
again – will not be careful, but sloppy and
more than a bit reckless, because it
genuinely doesn’t matter.’*

Today, I’ve been exploring future possibilities with a number of others for an hour or so; we didn’t know exactly what would happen, and still don’t – maybe something valuable we can give to others.  It was intentionally a now environment, not a wait environment.  (Whatever comes out of this will be helpful for making something else happen, as we learn what does not work as well as what does.)

In his novel Invisible Cities, Italo Cavalo describes the city of Irene, about which there is only conjecture because no one has visited it, only observing it from a distance: ‘Irene is the name for a city in the distance, and if you approach, it changes.’  Now-environments change this.

Now we can step inside places of creativity.

(*From McNair Wilson’s Hatch.)
(Cartoon: A take on Hugh MacLeod‘s blog Neither do I – here’s a little of this: “There’s a famous British story about two well-known authors who meet at a cocktail party (I tried to find the exact reference on Google, sorry, I failed).  Having been asked by the first author what he does for the living, the second author says, “I write!”  “Really?” says the first author, “Neither do I!”  The story is a little quip about how little writing authors actually write every day, the rest of the time they’re just staring out of windows.”)