On Christmas Day, I ended up doodling a Christmas card for 2019. It may feel like a long way off, but if you’re interested in a bespoke Christmas card then drop me a line and I can let you know how much they will be – it all depends on how many we get printed.

The card will be A6 and landscape format with a side fold. The image is a small detail of “may it be a slow, slow christmas”.

if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, “Move from here to there,” and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you*
(Jesus of Nazerath)

One way to begin describing the value you create is to talk about what can’t happen without you.**
(Bernadette Jiwa)

“I can’t do that. I’m still waiting for the one who can.”

Instead of waiting for the one, we can articulate the very unique thing we bring into the world.

Seth Godin writes:

Solving interesting problems is the best work we can do. […] Possibility and responsibility are available to anyone who wants them. That could be us, any of us. Seeing the world as it is, offering people dignity, choosing to make a difference … none of these are fast and easy paths, but we do them anyway.^

When we articulate the unique value we bring into the world, we don’t have to wait for problems to come to us, we begin noticing them, the mountains we need to move.

Robert McKee writes about the difference between inexperienced writers and artists:

Writers that ask questions that begin with “Could…” want finite answers to very complex problems that only the experience of writing can solve. They want to know what’s possible, what’s impossible, what they should pursue and what they should avoid. These are questions from someone who wants to know the limits, before they even begin to explore. In story, all things are possible. Anxious, inexperienced writers stick rigidly to the well trodden, designated route. Artists discover a new path.^^

When we identify our unique kind of mustard seed and plant it, it becomes a verb, and what follows is inevitable.

(*Jesus of Nazerath, from Matthew 17: 20-21)
(*From The Story of Telling: Without You.)
(^From Seth Godin’s blog: Speaking up about what could be better.)
(^^From Robert McKee’s blog: “Could I?” vs. “Should I?”)

Who drew the circle?

The circle that got me thinking this morning is found in Keri Smith’s Wreck This Journal, which I’m using for my daily journaling at the moment.

I decide to write some words inside the circle from Nassim Taleb on randomness:

This discussion aims to show how some predictability (or lack of knowledge) can be beneficial to our defective species. A slightly random schedule prevents us from optimising and being exceedingly efficient, particu-

I couldn’t get all the words inside the circle, so I had to write outside it:

larly in the wrong things.*

That’s the problem with our pre-existing circles, not everything we want or need to put in them fits.

The discussion Taleb refers to an imaginary weeknight meal with a suburban commuter. The train the commuter is aiming for is the 7.08 express, they don’t want the 7.42 local for some reason. This rules the pacing of their meal together. At 6.58, the commuter excuses themself, leaving Taleb with the bill because the meal hasn’t been finished.

Taleb imagines another scenario. This time the commuter is unaware of the exact times of trains, only that they run roughly every 35 minutes. This time finishing the meal, Taleb sees how, whilst he may still pay for the meal, it is followed by a leisurely walk to the station and a fifteen minute wait.

Taleb has introduced us to the satisficer and the optimiser in his two tales:

research on happiness shows that those who live under a self-imposed pressure to be optimal in their enjoyment of things suffer a measure of distress.*

The good news is that we are made for randomness, for the less optimised version, as Richard Sennett points out here in questioning our desire for the perfect machine:

Humankind has first to accept its own weakness and propensity to make a mess of things; if people really take to heart the faultiness in themselves, the perfect machine will seem less a commanding remedy; indeed we will actively seek a remedy to it.**

Something else begins to emerge when we accept and embrace this randomness within; we become artists:

An artist is someone who brings humanity to a problem, who changes someone else for the better, who does work that can’t be written down in a manual.^

Of course you may still want to fit it all inside the circ …

(*From Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness.)
(**From Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman.)
(^From Set Godin’s Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?)

In meditation […] we penetrate the innermost ground of our life. This allows us to find our true meaning not from the outside, […] but from within. It means that we identify ourselves not in terms of social status, race, religion, or sexual orientation, but by our truest identity in the very ground of our being.**

What if life isn’t about beginning with nothing and ending with all we’ve accumulated?

What if it ends the with the ability to see all the possibilities we were born with?

Something we not only see for ourselves but want for others, too?

(*From Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable.)
(**From Philip Newell’s The Rebirthing of God.)

Imagination is no only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and, therefore, the foundation of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.*
(J. K. Rowling)

In an uncertain environment, good intuitions must ignore information.**
(Gerd Gigerenzer)

Yesterday, I visited the Robots exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland, journeying through five hundred years of exploration for making machines more human. From an understanding of the universe being like a machine and thinking of humans as machines, through to seeing the most complex of machines becoming more human.

One of the things that stood out for me was simply how the industrial revolution demanded humans to tend the machines in life-numbing repetitions, souls trapped within the machines.

We are still breaking free from this to understand the possibilities for our lives as creative forces. The argument moves to and fro concerning whether machines serve humans or humans serve machines.

It’s hard to improve on the simple idea, though: Do what you love and love what you do.

(*J. K. Rowling, quoted in Bernadette Jiwa’s Hunch.)
(**From Gerd Gigerenzer’s Gut Feelings.)

characters change when they live through a story*
(Don Miller)

By reinforcing the separation of people from their problems problem solving often functions as a way of maintaining the status quo rather than enabling fundamental change […] where problems often arise from unquestioned assumptions and deeply habitual ways of acting.**
(Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski, Flowers)

It’s hard to see all the implications or the results of a decision at the time of making it. We have to live through it to see exactly what is what.

Something else then comes into play in a really helpful way. The human capacity to change our mind about something.

Seth Godin writes about how hard it is to say, “I was wrong.” But we can flip this:

The alternative is, “based on new information, I can make a new decision.”

We can make a new decision on what’s happening to our environment, based on new data and new science. We can make a new decision on corporate governance or on a recent political referendum.^

Everyone of us has the ability to receive new information and to change our mind. It allows our imaginations more space in which to posit possibilities no one had seen at the beginning.

Wallace Stevens remarks on the human imagination:

If it merely reconstructed the experience or repeated for us our sensations in the face of it, it would be a memory. What it really does is to use it as material with which it does whatever it wills. This is the typical function of the imagination which always makes use of the familiar to produce the unfamiliar.^^

(*From Donald Miller’s Scary Close.)
(**>>>, from Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, Betty Sue Flowers’ Presence.)
(^From Seth Godin’s blog: I was wrong.)
(^^From Wallace Stevens’ The Necessary Angel.)

The tea-towel.

There are only 37 of these and now each one remaining comes with a gift card of the same design: £10 (plus posting and packing)

Every great culture that embraces more than one people rests upon some original encounter, an event at the source when a response was made to a You, an essential act of the spirit.*
(Martin Buber)

The goal can’t be quality, not for people anyway. It needs to be humanity. The rough edges of caring, improv and of connection.**
(Seth Godin)

In or out?

It’s never so simple.

Whether you see it taking us four billion years or seventy thousand, anything to do with being human is never simple.

This is something Etty Hillesum discovered as a young Jewish woman in Holland under Nazi occupation. She strove for truth, but knew it was never simple, even as she looked at her imprisoners seeking to look beneath the cruelty of their words and actions:

to discover the small, naked human being amid the monstrous wreckage caused by man’s senseless deed.^

Martin Buber reflects on how human human is:

How much of a person a man is depends on how strong the I of the basic I-You is in the human duality of his I.*

In reflecting on Jesus of Nazerath’s use of the word “Father,” Buber proffers:

For it is the I of the unconditional relation in which man calls his You “Father” in such a way that he himself becoming nothing but a son.*

He terms this “actuality.” What, then, am I saying about myself if I call someone by a disparaging name of some kind? It is this to which I am blind and Buber’s seeing helps me be aware of. Patrick Woodhouse reflects on the work of Carl Jung:

Jung regarded “isms” as the “viruses of our day, and responsible for greater disasters than any mediaeval plague …”^^

This is the deeper truth.

The truth of what is that can lead us to the truth of what can be.

The journey of four billion years and seventy thousand years is not over.

(*From Martin Buber’s I and Thou.)
(**From Seth Godin’s blog: We can do better than meeting spec.)
(^Etty Hillesum, quoted in Patrick Woodhouse’s Etty Hillesum: A Life Transformed.)
(From Patrick Woodhouse’s Etty Hillesum: A Life Transformed.)

Part of what makes roads, trails and paths so unique as built structures is that they cannot be perceived as a whole all at once by a sedentary onlooker. They unfold in times just as a story does as one listens or reads, and a hairpin turn is like a plot twist, a steep ascent a building of suspense to the view at the summit, a fork in the road as an introduction of a new storyline, arrival the end of a story.*
(Rebecca Solnit)

There has to be training to help you open your ears so that you can begin to hear metaphorically instead of concretely.*
(Joseph Campbell)

As I sit down with my journal at the beginning of a day, I have no idea what I will be specifically reading about, what the appearing theme will be, how disparate thoughts and ideas may or may not come together as I happen upon them along the way.

In Ali Smith’s Autumn the old man that is Daniel Gluck has just been told by the young Elisabeth Demand of the last book she’d read:

‘And what did it make you think about? Daniel said.

Do you mean, what was it about? Elisabeth said.

If you like, Daniel said.^

A road, like a book can be described in at least two ways: what it was like and what happened to us on the way. Journaling, like a road, is not about what I read about but about the possibilities opening up to me:

“So far the evidence is compelling. What seems to be happening is that information is coming from the future.”^^

The person who got me started doodling, Hugh Macleod, writes of growing up in 1980s Edinburgh. Now he’s in Miami. Along the way he developed some great art and thinking.

Now I’m in Edinburgh.

I had wanted to stay in Northallerton but couldn’t.

I moved to Blackburn and wanted to stay there but couldn’t.

Then there was a move to Oldham and I wanted to stay there, but couldn’t.

Now I’m glad I wasn’t able to stay in any of these places.

Edinburgh hasn’t been a destination but a journey. The journey from Northallerton to Edinburgh, now around twenty five years long, has been one that has changed me on the inside.

The inside is what the road changes, and the inside is what changes the road.

(*From Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust.)
(**From Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyer’s The Power of Myth.)
(^From Ali Smith’s Autumn.)
(^^Brian Johnson, quoted in Joseph Jaworski’s Source.)

Oblivious to our human yearnings for permanence, the universe is relentlessly wearing down, falling apart, driving itself to a condition of maximum disorder.*
(Alan Lightman)

Last night I felt suddenly that my inner landscape was like a vast ripening cornfield … inside me are cornfields growing and ripening. […] I am filled with a sort of bountifulness, even towards myself. And a feeling of being at one with all of existence.’**
(Etty Hillesum)

Imagination is critical to our existence.

Being conscious of the past, present and future is only possible because of our imaginations.

We do not come into the world with our imaginations sealed. We know that sometimes we can struggle to imagine, others times we excel.

It is important to feed our imaginations every day:

‘Aways be reading something, he said. Even when we’re not physically reading. How else will we read the world? Think of it as a constant.’^

Etty Hillesum made her diary entries at one of the most horrible and destructive moments in human history. It was 1942 in Holland and the Nazi occupiers were increasing their terror upon the Jewish population, yet something was happening within Etty, desired here by Patrick Woodhouse:

‘Here we glimpse the inner ‘reality’ that made her say often that what was going on within her was more real than what was going on outside.’^^

Wallace Stevens writes about how we must bring the power of our imagination to bear upon the pressure of reality. Everyone not only has imagination but can feed and grow their imagination.

Albert Camus understood that between reality and imagination there can be discovered the most wonderful of human creations, a place we can live and flourish:

‘After all, perhaps the greatest of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent.’*^

(*From Alan Lightman’s The Accidental Universe.)
(**Etty Hillesum, from Patrick Woodhouse’s Etty Hillesum: A Life Transformed.)
(^The character Daniel Gluck, from Ali Smith’s Autumn.)
(^^From Patrick Woodhouse’s Etty Hillesum: A Life Transformed.)
(*^From Albert Camus’ Create Dangerously.)