With vision above and reality at the base, creativity resides beteen the two.*
(Kelvy Bird)

We live within many different stories and we carry many more within us. The large majority of these will never be written down but we couldn’t get by without them. We couldn’t live our lives as lists of data, although our stories do contain lots of information.

We despair when we are treated as a number, a fact; we want to be treated as a person with a name and a story. Numbers and facts bring clarity but stories help us to know and understand why we do things.

In his letter to young readers, Chris Anderson outlines what makes us different to other species – and it’s not language or using tools or being kind to others outside of our families:

What is your superpower? […] You dear child, can create worlds that don’t exist.**

Some of the most amazing things happen when we share our stories with others:

But even more amazingly, you can conjure up that same world in someone else’s mind. You know how you do that? With words. You just tell them about it. Gently, carefully, piece by piece. Until they can see it as clearly as you can.**

These remain stories inside our heads so we need to do something more to make them real and become something we can actually live inside:

And when two or more humans can see the same imaginary world, extraordinary things can happen. They can play with it together. The can get excited about the event that might take place int hat world. They can dream of stories and inventions and almost limitless possibilities. And sometimes, they can act to me our own work more like their imaginary world.**

This is the creative place between the imagination and reality, and it’s why love stories so much and will never give up on telling them.

(*From Kelvy Bird’s Generative Scribing.)
(**From Chris Anderson’s letter to you readers in Maria Popova and Claudia Bedrick’s A Velocity of Being.)

these economic craftsmen have treated the crash as a rite of passage*
(Richard Sennett)

Cherish your curiosity. It is your questions that will shape you.**
(David Delgado)

Beyond birthdays and various ceremonies that tend to be more party than trial, we probably don’t encounter many rites of passage.

And yet they’re out there, in the more more difficult things that happen to us: rejection, dismissal, loss, hardship … .

Some may be of our making, many are not. They do not define us, rather how we respond defines us.

Here’re five elemental truths that may help us frame and explore these moments when they come in our lives; these are: life is hard, we’re not as special as we think, our lives are not about us, we’re not in control and we are going to die.

These are posed to us in many of the experiences we face, but they need to be completed.

How we complete each tells us whether an experience has become a rite of passage for us, when, instead of turning away from what has happened, we turn towards it.

(*From Richard Sennett’s Together. These were men and women in the financial sector who’d become victims of the financial crash of 2008.)
(**From David Delgado‘s letter to young readers in Maria Popova and Claudia Bedrick’s A Velocity of Being.)

More generally, the dialogic conversation flourishes through informality; the odd twists and turns of these conversations can result in win-win exchanges.*
(Richjard Sennett)

We never know what will come out of a difficult situation we find ourselves in or who we thought the unlikeliest person to help us or someone who’s chalk to our cheese.

Often we walk away or stop talking too soon or exchange questions for telling them what we know.

(*From Richard Sennett’s Together.)

The geneticist Stephen Gould […] developed the concept of ‘punctuated equilibrium’ to highlight the fact of collective disruption; in his analysis, environmental ruptures occur suddenly, disorganising previously established patterns. This is to to say that chaos rules, that there is no equilibrium in the environment, but simply that it is a stay against time.*
(Richard Sennett)

truth is stranger than fiction because fiction is never that complex**
(Hugh Macleod)

My calves are killing me.

I’ve just begun run again after struggling with an injury some years ago. I’m not covering much ground, but, boy, do my calves hurt.

Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz point out that we’re likely to back off when we encounter pain but:

Stress is not the enemy in our lives. Paradoxically, it is the key to growth.^

If I just let my muscles recover each time then I’ll be able to keep on developing them.

What is true of our physical muscles, Loehr and Schwartz remind us, is also true for our emotional, mental and spiritual muscles – all of which we’ll need for the days ahead.

In our opening quotes, Richard Sennett and Hugh Macleod are pointing out how we ought not to be surprised by randomness in our world.

Stephen Gould’s punctuated equilibrium finds us living in one of the most disruptive stories of modern times, but we may have been offered one of our best opportunities to be disruptive back, individually and collectively.

I wonder what may be some of the things you’re noticing through these days and wanting to see change in what will be a different future to the one most of us imagined only three or four months ago?

Business, education and government will all look somewhat different in the future. I wonder if they will be enough to more equitably share profits, improve educational possibilities for all and shape a safer and fairer world.

I made Richard Sennet’s book Together my read for May partly because we can’t get together right now, but I also wonder how we’ll come together in new and different ways in our different future. With his engaging thoroughness, Sennett explores the “rituals, pleasures and politics of cooperation,” including taking a look at competition and cooperation through history before moving on to look at how today’s equilibrium includes many inequalities, including that of education, being one affecting each of us:

I’ll look at two dimensions of social inequality: first, inequalities that are imposed on children, not of their own making or desiring; secondly, inequalities which are absorbed and naturalised, so seeming to become part of the child’s self. One way in which children naturalise inequality does something quite special to their psyche: they can become more dependent on the things they consume than on other people.*

Resonating with Ken Robinson’s views of industrial education, Sennett warns:

A child of ten will pass a watershed in absorbing these external realities: economic facts and social institutions will in the course of a few short years shape the sense of self.*

Streamed from a very early age, for many it will be impossible to recover within their lifetimes.

Perhaps, beyond the lockdown, we’ll have the opportunity to reflect on many of these things and begin to imagine different ways to live our lives and live together.

It begins with how we allow our own stories to be disrupted, which, is both a painful and a growing thing, but makes it possible to disrupt back.

(*From Richard Sennett’s Together.)
(**From gapingvoid’s blog: Why we wrote Angrynomics – Mark Blyth.)
(^From Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz’s The Power of Full Engagement.)

A crisis is there to be managed or waited out. The goal of each day is to simply get through it. Until things are back to normal. But sometimes we’re dealing with a slog. […] During a slog, we have a chance to accept a new normal, even if it’s temporary, and to figure out how to make something of it. […] When we get to the other side of the slog and look back, what will we have contributed, learned and created?*
(Seth Godin)

We may be disappointed if we think this is going to be over soon.

The chef d’œuvre was the name given to a piece of work produced at the completion of a medieval apprenticeship. Seven years of training and this piece would determine whether the apprentice would move on to become a journeyman or have to try again. They were not allowed to explain their work, understanding the things they crafted to be alive and able to speak for themselves The question for those judging was whether this piece was lively enough to pass:

The event exemplifies the classic rite of passage ritual: a young person is taken outside of himself, exposed to danger, then reconfirmed as a valued member of the community. In medieval craftsmanship, the maker’s things took the journey for him.**

If you look up the meaning of chef d’œuvre now, you’ll probably come upon a definition alike this:

chef-d’œuvre/ʃeɪˈdəːvr(ə)/noun

1. a masterpiece.”the painting was made after a number of preliminary studies as a self-conscious chef d’oeuvre”

Some of our most important work – within and through our lives – can take a lifetime, following multiple experiences we may consider to be “preliminary studies.”

In the movement of Methodism that I belong to, a minister may retire when they have either “travelled” (it’s an itinerant ministry) for forty years or reach retirement age. At this point they ask permission of their local colleagues to “sit down,” offering a testimony of their work within this process.

The term chef d’œuvre caught my eye because next year it’s my turn. I’ll have completed forty years of travelling and wonder what I’ll say. There have been a lot of slogs along the way and yet I hope these have been embraced as important studies with their own value that eventually led me to the work that I love most of all – which is helping people to discover how amazing they are: fearfully and wonderfully made, “a mystery, wrapped in a question” as my friend Alex^ would say.

If you were to us this term of chef d’œuvre to reflect on what’s happening right now, how are things going, what’s coming into view, what’s the most important thing that you keep moving towards using everything as a means of contributing, learning, creating?

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: A situation vs a slog.)
(**From Richard Sennett’s Together.)
(^Alex McManus.)

We shall to 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.*
(T. S. Eliot)

From our lonely corner of the cosmos we have used creativity and imagination to shape words and images and structures and sounds to express our longings and frustrations, our confusions and revelations, our failures and triumphs.**
(Brian Greene)

We are the curious ones, seekers and explorers all.

Sometimes we forget.

We walk this earth within billions of everyday stories and yet we have our heads among the stars, a drama sometimes hidden in the repeating theatre of life:

the central animating force of our species, the wellspring of our joy and curiosity, the restlessness that gave us Whitman and Wheeler, Keats and Curie, is the very fathoming of this fathomless universe — an impulse itself a marvel in light of our own improbability.^

When we remember – through something we read or a picture we look upon or a life-lived-large or a walk through nature or some science or maths or music or … – we resume the path through earth and stars that will carry us home.

(*From T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding.)
(**Brian Greene, from Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings blog: Until the End of Time.)
(^From Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings blog: Until the End of Time.)

Maybe you work with an organisation. They have systems and charts and boxes. […] Perhaps you work with an organism instead. An organism constantly changes. The cells develop, die and are replaced. It adapts to the current environment or goes away.*
(Seth Godin)

Changes in the environment run ahead of genetically patterned behaviour; among social animals, no single institution, like the family, can guarantee stability.**
(Richard Sennett)

Change happens. We know this only too well.

We have to adapt. When we work together, we’ll need to be more organism than organisation.

When considering cooperation and competition, Richard Sennett explores a spectrum of exchange beginning with altruism and moving through win-win, differentiating exchange, zero-sum, to winner-takes-all.

It’s the first three of these that will help us work together towards a new future.

When it comes to altruism it seems we’re helped by being more reflective:

altruism is performed for a ‘shadow self,’ a shadow companion with who one conducts a conversation about how to behave.**

Erwin McManus writes about three quests – for honour, nobility and for enlightenment. The quest for nobility helps us discover our generative heart through gratitude for what we have. We understand ourselves to be whole, generative beings capable of great generosity. The language may be different to that of Sennett but it’s a reflective journey and the product is the same^

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: What kind of org?)
(**From Richard Sennett’s Together.)
(^From Erwin McManus’ Uprising.)

[W]ith reading and writing, language becomes billions of times more powerful. We can learn from people who live on the other side of the city, or the country, or the world. We can learn from people who are dead, and we can teach people who have not yet been born […] of all human inventions, it’s the printed world that multiplies our powers the most*
(Steven Pinker)

In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives he chooses one and eliminates the others; in fiction of the almost inextricable Ts’ui Pên, he chooses simultaneously all of them.. He creates in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork.**
(Jorge Luis Borges)

In 1530, Florence was besieged by the combined forces of Charles V and Pope Clement VII. Michelangelo Buonarroti was put in charge of defending the city and part of his preparations involved laying mattresses over the defensive walls to minimise the damage from enemy cannon fire. Mattresses and warfare became connected, popularly re-emerging in The Godfather in the phrase “Go to the mattresses,” meaning prepare for battle.

“Go to the library” is what we do when we want to move into the future with more options. The library with all its shelves – fiction, factual, children’s, adult’s, ancient, modern, text, audio, visual, person … – provides us with the many forking paths we need.

To see your futures, go to the library.

(*From Steven Pinker’s letter to young readers, in Maria Popova and Claudia Bedrick’s A Velocity of Being.)
(**From Jorge Luis Borges’ The Garden of Forking Paths.)

We want to start with resistances, those facts that stand in the way of the will. Resistances themselves come in two forms: found and made.*
(Richard Sennett)

I am grateful for the resistances I’ve faced, resistances that sometimes have even meant I have had to move on with my family – three times, but there is life after the resistance. They’re never pleasant at the time but they force us to ask more important questions prompting our imaginations to come up with the increasingly better. Without resistance, I wouldn’t be doing the work I love.

Wallace Stevens warns that our imaginations need to meet the real if it is to do what it does best:

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect is extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect it will ever have.**

And there’s a sense of ideas of requirement when M. C. Richards writes:

Ideas live in the world as we do. We discover certain ideas at certain times.^

Our imaginations are largest and brightest when we’re being true and honest about who we are and what we can do – not making ourselves more and not making ourselves less. Then, when we face the resistance with our imagination – and prototype or experiment in some way or other, something shifts.

(*From Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman.)
(**From Wallace Stevens’ The Necessary Angel.)
(^From M. C. Richards’ Centering.)

cooperation precedes individuation: cooperation is the foundation of human development, in that we learn how to be together before we learn how to stand apart*
(Richard Sennett)

Most of the progress in our culture of the last 200 years has come from using truth as a force for forward motion. Centralised proclamations are not nearly as resilient or effective as the work of countless individuals, aligned in their intention, engaging with the world. […] It pays to curate the incoming, to ignore the noise and to engage with voices who are willing to show their work.**
(Seth Godin)

If we find a misalignment between the truth of who we are – think values, talents and how we flourish through action – and the person we portray then we need to realign. The old word for this is repent, more than being sorry about something, it means we do something.

To know the truth about ourselves and the truth about each other provides a powerful force for moving forward together.

(*From Richard Sennett’s Together.)
(**From Seth Godin’s blog: Reality as an organising principle.)