Why is it possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,000 light years away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you’ve been stuck with yourself all your life?*
(Walker Percy)

Find out who you are and do it on purpose.**
(Dolly Parton)

I’m good at some things but there are many things I’m not very good at. One way in which I can understand my developed talents is as limitation, but it is from my limitation that creativity emerges – through accepting and working with these limitations I am able to manipulate the limitations in the world around me when I accept them for what they are.

It is the same for each of us.

When we embrace this, we stop wishing we could do this or that, or only had this or that, we are able to begin:

[Johan Huizinga is] suggesting that anything whatsoever can be constrained as a ground for play, where play becomes possible once the materials at hand are taken seriously and manipulated with deliberateness.^

Between the limitations within and the limitations without there emerges creativity.

We have to keep finding out who we are, though, if we are to do it on purpose – we’re ongoing explorations.

This involves me in a journey from the middle of my life (I-in-me) to the edge where I can see a bigger world including a bigger way of seeing myself (I-in-it); this world includes people who are different to me in their thinking, feeling and acting, who help me see who they are and who I am differently (I-in-us).

When we combine our different limitations the world changes – or perhaps can be seen for what it has always been:

Life is always a configuration of abundance, even as individual lives might experience scarcity.^^

What an adventure to be involved in; let me know ifI can help.

Alas for those that never sing
But die with all their music in them.^*

*From Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos;
**Dolly Parton, quoted in Austin Kleon’s blog: On solitude, and being who you are;
^From Ian Bogost’s Play Anything;
^^From Graham Leicester’s Transformative Innovation;
*^Oliver Wendell Holmes, quoted in Martin Amor and Alex Pellew’s The Idea in You.