Thinking metaphorically is common in design.*
(Brian Mau)

We’re born designers.

We love metaphors.

These make for an interesting mix – nothing is as it seems, everything can be reimagined. Live a different metaphor and things happen.

Enjoy thinking about today differently.

(*Brian Mau, quoted in Warren Berger’s Glimmer.)

Reality needs imagination; imagination needs reality. What then happens is life.

We can wonder whether we have made the right choices, said yes to the right things.

Here’s a triage I found myself pondering earlier:

Am I courageous for what I am doing; would I do it even if I didn’t get paid for it?
Am I most generative and generous when I am doing this?
Am I becoming wiser in that I know things that work in life and make a difference for the better?

I didn’t ask if this way is easier or more comfortable; they’re the wrong questions.

When people see a concept presented visually, they tend to understand it in a way that goes beyond words.*
(Brian Mau)

It must be one of the oldest and most universal phrases.

I can’t see it; can you show me.

People have been drawing pictures for each other millennia.

Designer Brian Collins defines design as hope made visible.** Where there once was nothing, possibility appears.

Doodling and sketching create a conversation between the hand and the mind. First the hand draws something, the mind thinks about it and suggests tidying it up, and so on, and something takes shape.

Of course, we’re also living doodles of hope to one another.

(*Brian Mau, quoted in Warren Berger’s Glimmer.)
(**From Warren Berger’s Glimmer.)

So then the journey for peace begins within our hearts. This is why we must face our fears, stand-in in our pain, and walk courageously into the uncertainty and mystery of a better future.*
(Erwin McManus)

Some who think they are lost are really hiding. Others who tell themselves they are hiding are really lost.

We can all be found, though.

Good news.

(*From Erwin McManus’ The Way of the Warrior.)

When you don’t know what should be done, or how something is supposed to work, it’s a brief pocket of possibility. You’re free to speculate on something, unencumbered by the conventional structures.*
(Brian Mau)

be curious, be observant, be fickle [not fixated], be thoughtful, be elegant**
(Rohit Bhargava)

Inspiration requires space and time; information is certainly way faster and easier.

That can be our problem.

Perhaps inspiration will come up with a better solution.

Trust yourself: give yourself some time and space.

Go with the flow rather than the know.

(*Brian Mau, quoted in Warren Berger’s Glimmer.)
(**From Rohit Bhargava’s Non Obvious 2018.)

It is very difficult to practice what we agree in theory. And it is very difficult to be modest in our scorn of the gap between what we dream and what we do, and to persevere patiently in our efforts to bridge it. This battle is daily and specific and basic.*
(M. C. Richards)

Often it’s the growth we can’t see that is the making of us.**
(Bernadette Jiwa)

The summary is often neater and more impressive than the full story which contains a lot of messiness and failure and fragility. Both are important if we use them in the right way.

A summary allows us to appreciate what has been achieved, how far we have come, but the big problems, including problems of personal development, cannot be solved summarily. The important turns and moves, the difficulty and the mess of closing the gap between dream and reality has need of the full account, to which we bring our strongest ways of reflection.

Erwin McManus, exploring the way of the warrior as a means of finding peace within and peace without our lives, understands the value of being someone prepared to tell the whole story:

The warrior […] understands that wisdom is not gained in a moment but in an endless number of moments in which choices must be made.^

(*From M. C. Richards’ Centering.)
(**From The Story of Telling: Imperceptible Growth.)
(^From Erwin McManus’ The Way of the Warrior.)

If something is beautiful, it may be easier to use. […] Designers […] build “forgiveness” (a wonderful name for a design principle) to help us avoid mistakes and recover easily from them.*
(Warren Berger)

We can grasp the fact that at any moment what seems most certain to us is an illusion. It is an illusion in that it precedes a further revelation of ourselves.**
(M. C. Richards)

Given that

research suggests that we simply respond better, on a gut level, to smooth, curved, and symmetrical designs as opposed to rough, angular jagged, or uneven shapes*

here are some more features we can build into our operating stories to make life smoother for others and for ourselves:

compassion
kindness
humility
meekness
patience
forbearance
love
harmony.

We are all designers.

(*From Warren Berger’s Glimmer.)
(**From M. C. Richards’ Centering.)

All that time saved. Now that you’ve got the time back, you get to choose what’s truly important to you. How will you spend it?*
(Seth Godin)

The call to adventure signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual centre of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown. The fateful region of both treasure and danger may be variously represented: as a distant land, forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves or above the sky, a secret island, lofty mountaintop, or profound dream state: but it’s always a place of strangely fluid polymorphous being, unimaginable torments, superhuman deeds, and impossible delights.**
(Joseph Campbell)

Add Covid-19 lockdown to the list.

Joseph Campbell’s call to adventure may suggest some Tolkienesque landscape and grand-drama but the key phrase in his description is ‘a zone unknown,’ when the unknown overcomes or interrupts the routine.

Our temptation can be to try and maintain the normal. I’ve certainly found myself trying to do what I’ve always done, but the interruption can often be more, it is a call requiring we let go in order that we can take hold of something new.

We find that we are more than capable and the adventure makes it possible to discover just how; Keri Smith, uses mythological language in her call to simply walk the earth differently:

Let us allow our wild spirits to roam unfettered and unbound. Let us roar and howl and voce our deepest yearnings without caring what others will think about us.^

Interruptions have a way of turning up and spilling us out of the normal, into the discovery that there is far more to our universe and world, the flora and fauna filling these, and, yes, ourselves, too.

If we think we’ve missed our opportunity, it probably means we haven’t, that we’ve only woken up.

Adventure is another word for today.

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: What will you do with the time you save?)
(**From Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey.)
(^From Keri Smith’s The Wander Society.)

From the beginning I have believed the world an amazing place, full of marvels, unheard of, not yet experienced.*
(M. C. Richards)

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. As a man is, so he sees.**
(William Blake)

We’ll probably have to go into training to be as open as this wonderful planet requires if we are to see all that it has to offer.

Presence is pure unadulterated openness, necessary for healthy co-creativity, whether with others, the planet and even the hiddenness of ourselves:

The capacity to be present to everything that is happening, without resistance, creates possibility.^

Where there is no openness … same old same old.

There’s the philosophical and anthropocentric teaser: If a tree falls in a forest and there isn’t anyone there to hear it, does it make a sound?

Dur! Yes! If I’m not present then I miss something. We also now know that, in a way, the trees surrounding it “hear” it.

(*From M. C. Richards’ Centering.)
(**William Blake, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: The Cosmic Miracle of Trees.)
(^From Benjamin and Rosalind Zander’s The Art of Possibility.)