We persevere in the confidence that we ourselves are being transformed.  Perseverance produces character, and character hope.  And hope, we will discover is the ultimate gift gained in wisdom.*
(Erwin McManus)

Workers learn more in the coffee room than in the classroom.  They discover how to do their jobs though informal learning: talking observing others, trial and error, and simply working with people in the know.  Formal learning – classrooms and workshops – is the source of only 10 to 20 percent of what people learn at work.**

When we fail and mess up it doesn’t mean we’re failures.

But it can mean we’re learning.

The kind of learning that flows through us, changes us at a fundamental level, attunes us to what is happening around us, to where we have come from and where we are headed:

‘There, there, he said.  The new universe is not all suffering and ssadness.  There is much happiness in the thing.  There is joy, and there is music, and there is spirit.  Yes, I said, all these things.  It is a beautiful universe.’^

(*From Erwin McManus’ Uprising.)
(**From Jay Cross’ Informal Learning.)
(^From Alan Lightman’s Mr g.)

There’s always someone ready to give us advice but the valuable people in our lives are those who provide us with the presencing question.

They become a space in which we can explore through being fully present and fully open, a creativity lounge of possibility.

This is the most basic creativity lounge,  Others may include more people and inhabit particular spaces but it all begins here.

Nobody would have guessed and nobody tried to guess either.  The hodgepodge of Building 20 was the result of simple expedience and neglect.  Where did MIT put disciplines that didn’t fit, researchers who had no clout, projects that made no money, student hobbyists, and anything and anyone else that just didn’t seem to matter?  In the cheapest, nastiest space they could find.  If Building 20 hadn’t been a mess, these strange collaborations might never have happened.*
(Tim Harford)

Building 20 had seen the development of some of the most amazing radar technology during World War II.  Designed and built quickly, it was full of design and safety problems and was to be torn down at the end of the war.  But a stay of demolition led to it becoming the skunkworks for technologies from video games to Bose and it was only finally demolished more than fifty years later.

There’s no denying that it was an ugly, ungainly building.  And there’s no denying these were still very smart people who were to later inhabit its spaces.  We are, though, provided with a powerful metaphor or story for what can happen when people find a place to quietly get on with the things they love doing in proximity to people who do different things with similar passion.

We may think those in control know what they’re doing.  That’s why they are in control, right?  Often, though, they may have unwittingly paid their dues to the machine, to the system, and they are in all the way to their souls.

The rest of us keep quiet when really we ought to be finding our Building 20.

Viktor Frankl, survivor of Nazi labour camps and death camps wrote:

“Life is never made unbearable by circumstances but only by lack off meaning or purpose.”**

We find the same sentiment in Paulo Coelho’s Aleph pondering life without a cause:

“After all, a life without a cause is a life without effect.”^

Building 20 found itself being crammed full of meaning and purpose and therefore with effect.

(One place we can find an expression of Building 20 is in the Presencing Institute’s U.Lab.  You can check out what this is about here but part of the experience is to connect to a local hub and/or coaching circle.  Interestingly, it’s also based at MIT.)

(*From Tim Harford’s Messy.)
(**Viktor Frankl, quoted in Dan Ariely’s Payoff.)
(^From Paulo Coelho’s Aleph.

Some only live in the good and never face the bad.

Others live in the bad and struggle to face the good.

An accurate picture of “what is,” and what we hope for provides a place to move on from, to be instigators of “what can be.”

Rebecca Solnit writes beautifully about the “blue of longing” and, for me, opens up a world of possibilities:

“We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing.  I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance?”*

It seems to me that when we take Solnit’s counsel and turn our attention towards the blue of longing, we’re noticing there is more to us than we knew, than the simple rush we make to something in the distance and find that something is not what we wanted at all:

“For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond.”*

This blue, then, is a deeper experience, a possibility imagined that can be grown, a liminal space that is the spring of our being:

“Show me the hidden things, the creatures of my dreams, the storehouse of forgotten memories and hurts. Take me down to the spring of my life, and tell me my nature and my name.  Give me freedom to grow, so that I may become that self, the seed of which You planted in me at my making.

Out of the depths I cry to You … “**

These words from George Appleton are spoken to his god but whether we allow there to be a god or not, we’re each capable of turning our attention towards the blue, holding our deepest longings and what might be that may not the destination we had thought life would be:

‘Yes, the cards are unfairly stacked against too many people.  Yes, there are too many barriers and not enough support.  But no, your ability to create and contribute isn’t determined at birth.  It’s a choice’^

I think that choice becomes visible and available in the blue.

I intend these words to be blue.  They’re intended not as a destination but simply be a space in which you may find yourself able to imagine and dream and then create because you’ve allowed yourself to long for something.  It is as Hugh Macleod sees:

‘What you love to do will grow with you, so long as you stay true to who you are and allow yourself to change and develop freely.’^^

(*Rebecca Solnit, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Two Hundred Years of Blue.)
(**George Appleton, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(^From Seth Godin’s Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?)
(^^From gapingvoid’s blog: Life without dissonance.)

For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that colour of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away.  The colour of that distance is the colour of an emotion, the colour of solitude and of desire, the colour of there seen from here, the colour of where you are not.  And the colour of where you can never go.  For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains. […] Blue is the colour of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world.
(Rebecca Solnit)

I have just entered sacre bleu into a French to English translator and it comes up with Damn it!  (My learning of French ended at the age of 14 having followed the adventures of the Marsaud famille in Longmans Audio Visual French)

It’s fascinating how sacred and blue, when put together, come out with something quite different.  Or is it?

In these two words we have an expression of how the sacred and holy can also be the ordinary and down-to-earth.

I find myself pondering more and more how the best way to refer to life is in terms of sacredness and holiness, beginning with how we see each other:

‘To engage in a reverential way is to maintain a sense of proportion and balance.  You acknowledge that there is a depth pf presence in every person that should never be reduced to satisfy your own selfishness and greed.’**

We don’t have to be religious to understand life in this way; indeed, those possibly free of religion can speak of this life in ways more rich and lively:

‘Must is both the journey and the destination, the upward journey of our lives that guides us toward that higher place, the oneness of all things, the ultimate source of Must.’^

We need the sacred blue.

Of course, from the perspective of another looking at us across a distance, we are enwrapped by the blue.  We just can’t see it ourselves.  The down-to-earth stuff we are right in the middle of is, at the same time, the sacred blue.

(*Rebecca Solnit, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Two Hundred Years of Blue.)
(**From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)
(^From Elle Luna’s The Crossroads of Should and Must.)

The problem with perfect is that when you fail, you have none of the more flexible human traits to fall back on.*
(Seth Godin)

All of our thinking is imperfect.  To think otherwise is to place us in danger – small and large.

Who wants perfect, though? How can we improve on perfect?  We may as well move into the museum right now.  

Of course, we know there isn’t such a thing as perfect.  We only act as if there is.  If our thinking is perfect then why are we living on a dangerously warming planet?

Our thinking and choices hold hands.  Of choice Elle Luna remarks:

‘there is a recurring choice in life, and it occurs at the intersection of two roads.  We arrive at this place again and again’.**

So which is the perfect choice, the perfect road?

There’s a deep humility to be discovered and enjoyed in embracing our imperfection.  We’re one species among thousands upon thousands on an astonishing planet.  Reflecting on America’s national parks, Terry Tempest Williams wonders:

‘how might these public commons bring us back home to a united state of humility’?^

Williams quotes writer Jack Turner when he claims,

“The purpose of life is to see.”^^

I appreciate this, as someone recently helped to see things more clearly.

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: What do you aspire to be?)
(**From Elle Luna’s The Crossroads of Should and Must.)
(^From Terry Tempest Williams’ The Hour of Land.)
(^^Jack Turner, quoted in Terry Tempest Williams’ The Hour of Land.)

To follow your gift is a calling to a wonderful adventure of discovery.  Some of the deepest longing in you is the voice of your gift,  The gift calls you to embrace it , not to be afraid of it.*
(John O’Donohue)

It’s amazing what can be found with a little energetic searching.

It may not even be the thing you set out to seek, but that doesn’t matter if you find something more precious.

At first you cursed the forking road but then grew to love it.

More important for this than the map is the compass and the most important compass lies within:

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. “**

Every day our lives are speaking to us the way we must go.

(*From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)
(**From T S Eliot’s Little Gidding.)

A poet places himself where the future becomes present.*
(Lewis Hyde)

Could our lives be journeys in which we stumble on things of indescribable beauty?  Are we to be alert to even the most ordinary moments of our lives for the possibilities.**
(Alex McManus)

The evening journey through the Scottish-summer-countryside was wonderful.  Mist trailed through fir trees, removing sharp lines.  Green was everywhere, merging into blues and turquoises.

The air was heavily scented.   From flowers, yes, but the sweet fragrances also came from a wild diversity of warmly wet plants, piquant earth, with richly rotting notes.

All of this became the setting for an outdoor performance of Much Ado About Nothing.

The night was becoming increasingly beautiful and memorable but this required a few critical elements.

The day had to grew prematurely dark as the sunshine and blue skies were lost.

The warmth had to be washed away by heavy rain, watering-up the scentedness.

But this is life.  Our species is able to experience and find deep meaning and wonderment in the most unlikely places.

(*From Lewis Hyde’s The Gift.)
(**Alex McManus, source lost.)

Tim Harford tells the story of mathematician Paul Erdös who was prolific in his publication of some five hundred papers.  The especially remarkable thing is that he collaborated with others in order to do this.  Never staying in a place for very long, his motto was, “Another roof, another proof.”*

This is an example of inclusive collaboration.  There are exclusive collaborations.  Harford preceded his telling of Erdös’ story with that of the British 2000 Olympics 8+ rowing team that won gold.  They’d carried themselves off to work together in preparation for the Games.  No one knew who they were never mind thinking they would win.

It’s the inclusive collaboration that fascinates me most.

I have come to see reading a book as collaborating.  I was almost 40 before I really began reading.  Reading to gain insight, I’ve come to discover there’s a way of reading that brings new thoughts into being and these new thoughts can be explored with others and then written about.

Now I find myself wondering about how a collaboration of people can work together to produce a book when they have been told that publishers don’t like many people being involved.  It’s messy.  That’s the thing about a reciprocal world.  It’s messy.  And beautifully so.

(*Paul Erdös, quoted in Tim Harford’s Messy.)

In the past five hundred years our population has increased fourteen-fold but our energy consumption has increased by 115 times and the global economy is now 240 times bigger than it was in 1500.*
(Martin Bhaskar)

To become less wasteful we need to become more creative.

The good news is, we’re all artists, and artists, on the most part, make more with less.

When we receive something from our environments, from those around us or those who have gone before us, and when we reflect on it, imagine it, play with it, shape something with it and produce something different, we’re entering into the world of artists and artisans.

It’s a synaesthysic process in as much as it is bringing what we see, feel and do together.  If we only receivers then we are only consumers.

Elle Luna describes the artist’s Must:

‘We can’t prove Must.  We can’t point to it, or define where it stops and starts, because it’s not a thing that we can see.  But we know that it exists because when it’s near, we feel it in our gut; it begs for a second glance, pulls us into another dimension, a space out of time where a day can pass it a moment.’**

Within these words there’s this sense of joining up of what we see, feel and do.  This is where we find we’re most alert, where we find ourselves in a state of Attention.  Not least because we are carried into new, different, unfamiliar places that keep us on our toes.  Brian Eno writes of this state:

“The enemy of creative work is boredom, actually […].  And the friend is alertness.  Now I think what makes you alert is to be faced with a situation that is beyond your control so you have to be watching it very carefully to see how it unfold, to be able to stay on top of it.  That kind of alertness is exciting.”^

Within this lies the prospect of not knowing where we’ll end up, a story unfolding.  Just saying this might be enough to put some off the artistic way.  But if we can go with the flow, something the company 3M encourages its workers to engage in under the title of “flexible attention,” what we find is the kind of engagement with a wide diversity of creativity that may save our planet and solve many of the issues within a creaking eco-system.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes about living in this unpredictable way:

‘what people enjoy is not the sense of being in control, but the sense of exercising control in difficult situations’.^^

Here is Eno’s alertness made possible by entering the unfamiliar:

‘It is not possible to experience a feeling of control unless one is willing to give up the safety of protective routines.’^^

Who wants to become incompetent, right?  Yet this is where we’ll grow our competences to a new level.  In this case it’s the art of making more with less we’re all capable of.

My friend and mentor Alex McManus states this in his inimitable way when he echoes Ernest Shackleton’s alleged advertisement for a crew:

‘Heroes wanted for an epic quest to hack the universe.  Starting with Earth.  Safe return doubtful.’*^

(*From Martin Bhaskar’s Curation.)
(**From Elle Luna’s The Crossroads of Should and Must.)
(^Brian Eno, quoted in Tim Harford’s Messy.)
(^^From Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow.)
(*^From Alex McManus’ Makers of Fire.)