Between the darkness of night and the lightness of day there’s been the most beautiful dawn: a hiatus in the universe, it’s a moment of wonder and magic, alive with possibility.
It’s a moment in which we can do something imaginative with what we have received.
My friend Dan said this about something we’re both involved in:
“We have to keep doing the scary stuff, else we’ll just keep doing the same stuff and not very well.”*
There’s a scene in Star Trek Generations when Jean Luc Picard is trying to enlist the help of James T Kirk, but the former captain of the USS Enterprise is content with a place in the Nexus – a Paradise ribbon moving across the galaxy. That is, until they go for a horse-ride and a jump leaves Kirk feeling nothing – it’s not real and he knows he cannot live in the not real.
Between taking in from others and the world around us, and making our contributions, there’s generative place – and when we explore the potential of this place with others, something dynamic happens:
‘The revolutionary force in this century is the awakening of a deep generative human capacity – the I-in-Now.’**
(*Dan said this about VOXedinburgh which always feels like jumping a void.)
(**From Otto Scharmer’s Theory U.)
THIN|SILENCE 
A question I asked a few people. “What happens when you don’t know what you’re scared ok?”, a response to this one was “I don’t know, but if I’d do it”.
Another response I hear “What if I seem not to be afraid of anything… so how does fear help me?”.
I can see the second being true if a person is a avid learner, or even so used to putting themselves out there so much they aren’t aware that they do it anymore….
Any thoughts?
Wonder if it falls into the 3 voices?
Great questions. What we’re scared of and what we ought to be scared of are probably two different things. The person who doesn’t venture from a safe place ought to be scared of what is happening to them because of staying where they are. The person who has no fear is, perhaps, like a person who has no sense of touch to tell them when they’re about to hurt themselves or others. We have to learn ways of being sensitive to the messages and signals coming from people and things around us. We have to be reflective adventurers. People prepared to move but also prepared to reflect on the moving.
Brené Brown proffers this personal insight: ‘I have found that the most difficult and most rewarding challenge of my work is how to be both a mapmaker and a traveller.’
Another thought about fear is in terms of mitigating risk. Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler counsel iterating small examples of what you want to do. This allows us to fail fast and so fail forward.
Thanks Geoffrey.
Mastering leaning in.
You are a master leaner, Steve.