To speak or act, or think originally is to erase the boundary of the Self. It is to leave behind the territorial personality. A genius does no have a mind full of thoughts but is a thinker of thoughts and is the centre of a field of vision.*
(James Carse)

Organisations around the world are recognising that either they can expand their thinking to match the real system they belong to or they can artificially shrink the system they are managing to match their thinking.**
(Peter Senge

Think world.

Think future.

Think everything.

(*From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)
(**From Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution.)

The earlier artists worked within the outlines of their imaginations: the latter reworked their imaginations.*
(James Carse)

Notice what makes you You – curiosities, talents, energies; see what you have access to right now – resources, people, time, and so much more is possible.

It’s funny, but the more thankful you are for your existence, the easier it is to take advantage of just being you. The easier it is to make the most of this moment in the here and now, no matter how small that moment might be […] with gratitude, any moment can be made magical.*

It’s the truth about humility, gratitude and faithfulness. Embrace and use these, and things happen.

Bernadette Jiwa avers:

The greatest gift you can give to a person is to see who she is and reflect the back to her, when we help people to be who they want to be, to take back some of the permission they deny themselves, we are doing our best, most meaningful work.^

It doesn’t get better than this. It’s why I love the work I do with the amazing people I get to walk with for a while. When we see our imaginations are not some fixed deal then game on.

Lewis Hyde speaks of what happens between what we receive and what we give, about how something new comes into being. This is the wonderfully, glorious, magical-in-a-very-real-way to play with life:

between the perception and the bestowal, lies a moment in which new identity come to life as the old identity perishes.^^

(*From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)
(From gapingvoid’s blog: Are you sleepwalking through life?)
(^From Bernadette Jiwa’s Meaningful.)
(^^From Lewis Hyde’s The Gift.)

It took me an entire lifetime to find out what my generator is: We favoour the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, the tangible; we scorn the abstract. Everything good (aesthetics, ethics) and wrong (Fooled by Randomness) with us seems to flow from it.*
(Nassim Taleb)

We can try and be like anyone else or someone else, or we can explore how we’re different.

Just a random thought.

(*From Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness.)

Myths are so infinitely bound to the culture, time, and place that unless the symbols, the metaphors, are kept alive by constant recreation through the arts, the life just slips away from them. […] There is more reality in an image than in a word.*
(Joseph Campbell)

Which game would you rather play? I’ll give you a choice of two. One. Every picture tells a story. Two. Every story tells a picture.**
(Daniel Gluck)

Pictures can hold powerful truths in ways words are no able, though both words and images can be endlessly reconfigured and re-formed in ways of almost infinite recreation. It’s why familiar words or images are the things of art when they are put together in unfamiliar ways.

This is re-creation, so important for understanding belief today.

Joseph Campbell asserted that the speed of change has left us unable to shape our myths for understanding ourselves and for joining with our society and culture. What he shares in our introductory words expresses hope, though; it is not impossible. We find Wallace Stevens saying something similar to Campbell when he writes about disbelief and of hope in the arts:

in an age in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent or, if not disbelief, indifference to questions of belief, poetry and painting, and the arts in general, are, in their measure, a compensation for what has been lost.^

The arts are really showing each of us how we all have the capacity to recreate

How we need this. Caitlin Moran warns us about what we lose when we become unbelieving:

When cynicism becomes the default language, playfulness and invention become impossible.^^

Disbelief whilst not an end position, can help us towards re-believing when it is forged into helpful inquiry. It can especially help when it comes to what we cannot see:

Modern reality is a reality of recreation, in which our revelations are not the revelations of belief, but the precious portents of our own powers.^

There is a difference between belief that is memory and belief charged with imagination.

(*Joseph Campbell, from Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth.)
(**The character Daniel Gluck, from Ali Smith’s Autumn.)
(^From Wallace Stevens’ The Necessary Angel.)
(^^Caitlin Moran, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Caitlin Moran on Fighting the Cowardice of Cynicism.)

Asking a generous question will elicit a generous answer.*
(Krista Tippett)

The most satisfying encounters are those that allow all members of the conversation to contribute.

(*Unremembered source: Krista Tippett.)

Hindsight is easy, foresight is hard. In hindsight there is no uncertainty left; we know what has happened, and, if we are imaginative, we can always construct an explanation. In foresight, however, we must face uncertainty.*
(Gerd Gigerenzer)

Every morning I is going out and snitching new dreams to put in my bottles.**
(The BFG)

Ken Mogi writes about the Japanese concept ofikigai (our reason or purpose for life):

Ikigai resides in the realm of small things.^

If we accept this then each one of us can develop a unique knowledge and talent core to our lives. As we elevate these things we become artists, connecting with our truest self, those around us and with our environments:

when the poet is in his gifted state, the world seems generous, exhaling odours and auras toward him.^^

The limits to this giftedness and gift are unknown to us. Too often we commoditise what we do and, by so doing, create false limits to our lives.

These words – gift and commodity – help us to explore things further. Youngme Moon writes:

We have to eliminate the extraneous in order to shed new light on the fundamental. […] Less is more only when more has become a commodity.

This is the opposite of fanciful. Seth Godin writes about unicorns:

The problem with unicorns … is that there aren’t any. […] Instead of aspiring to unicorn status, a pipe dream which is simply a place to hide, we can instead decide to do something useful (and possible) instead.*^

When it comes to our dreams – the kind we wake up to and want to live each day, the kind that push us beyond our present limits, when we take away the unicorns, what we’re left with is the less that is more.

If you want to see what this looks like, here are some ways for stripping back the commodity in order to find the gift:

Articulate your values …

Identify the talents you have honed over many years …

Notice when you are most energised and when energy is being stolen from you.

These have emerged as critical things when it comes to some of my dreams, snitched at the beginning of a new day – and which I’ll be sharing with a couple of people before the day is over.

(*From Gerd Gigerenzer’s Gut Feelings.)
(**The Big Friendly Giant, from Roald Dahl’s The BFG.)
(^From Ken Mogi’s The Little Book off Ikigai.)
(^^From Lewis Hyde’s The Gift.)
(*^From Seth Godin’s blog: The problem with unicorns … .)

Oh you don’t want to go to college […]. You want to go to collage […] Collage is an institute of education where all the rules can be thrown into the air, and size and space and time and foreground and background all become relative, and because of these skills everything you think you know gets made into something new and strange.*
(Daniel Gluck)

To act on behalf of the future requires a deep sense of responsibility and selflessness.**
(Joseph Jaworski)

Sometimes the gift we want to bring, the contribution we hope to make, the future we want to bring can often only form when we let go of what has become the familiar and the welcomed for us.

Nan Shepherd catches my attention because of her use of the word revenant for a guide in the Cairngorms – I’d begun watching Leonardo de Caprio’s movie of the same name a few nights ago:

we walked in a cloud so thick that when the man who was leading us went ahead so much as an arm’s length, he vanished, except for his whistle. […] And alone in that whiteness, while our revenant came and went, we climbed an endless way.^

Here’s a description for how moving into the unfamiliar can be disorientating and yet wonderful and magical. It feels that Maria Popova adds more detail when describing Albert Einstein’s “combinatory play”:

Part of Einstein’s genius […] was his willingness to leap beyond the limits of his particular mathematical problem and into a field of possibilities, which he explored through improvisational experimentation — gedankenexperiments, or thought experiments. Einstein himself, who believed his best ideas came to him during his violin breaks, called his ideation process “combinatory play” — a wilderness of associations reaching across boundaries of various theories and fields of thought, not as deliberate problem-solving but as unforced mental meanderings.

This desire to explore without intent is also found in some words from Shepherd ahead of her white cloud experience:

Yet often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone our merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend with not intention but to be with him.^

When we are prepared to explore the spaces between people and ideas where the futures are found, letting go of the firm things in our lives will be necessary, sometimes for ever, making it possible to be open to whatever wants to appear.

We may also become invisible to others who do not understand or want to follow or struggle to follow. Just something to be aware of.

Of course, genius is encountered in moving back and forth, but that feels like another blog.

(*The character Daniel Gluck, from Ali Smith’s Autumn.)
(**From Joseph Jaworski’s Source.)
(^From Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain.)
(^^From Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: The Jazz of Physics.)

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?)