The problem with perfect is that when you fail, you have none of the more flexible human traits to fall back on.*
(Seth Godin)

All of our thinking is imperfect.  To think otherwise is to place us in danger – small and large.

Who wants perfect, though? How can we improve on perfect?  We may as well move into the museum right now.  

Of course, we know there isn’t such a thing as perfect.  We only act as if there is.  If our thinking is perfect then why are we living on a dangerously warming planet?

Our thinking and choices hold hands.  Of choice Elle Luna remarks:

‘there is a recurring choice in life, and it occurs at the intersection of two roads.  We arrive at this place again and again’.**

So which is the perfect choice, the perfect road?

There’s a deep humility to be discovered and enjoyed in embracing our imperfection.  We’re one species among thousands upon thousands on an astonishing planet.  Reflecting on America’s national parks, Terry Tempest Williams wonders:

‘how might these public commons bring us back home to a united state of humility’?^

Williams quotes writer Jack Turner when he claims,

“The purpose of life is to see.”^^

I appreciate this, as someone recently helped to see things more clearly.

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: What do you aspire to be?)
(**From Elle Luna’s The Crossroads of Should and Must.)
(^From Terry Tempest Williams’ The Hour of Land.)
(^^Jack Turner, quoted in Terry Tempest Williams’ The Hour of Land.)

To follow your gift is a calling to a wonderful adventure of discovery.  Some of the deepest longing in you is the voice of your gift,  The gift calls you to embrace it , not to be afraid of it.*
(John O’Donohue)

It’s amazing what can be found with a little energetic searching.

It may not even be the thing you set out to seek, but that doesn’t matter if you find something more precious.

At first you cursed the forking road but then grew to love it.

More important for this than the map is the compass and the most important compass lies within:

“We shall not 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. “**

Every day our lives are speaking to us the way we must go.

(*From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)
(**From T S Eliot’s Little Gidding.)

A poet places himself where the future becomes present.*
(Lewis Hyde)

Could our lives be journeys in which we stumble on things of indescribable beauty?  Are we to be alert to even the most ordinary moments of our lives for the possibilities.**
(Alex McManus)

The evening journey through the Scottish-summer-countryside was wonderful.  Mist trailed through fir trees, removing sharp lines.  Green was everywhere, merging into blues and turquoises.

The air was heavily scented.   From flowers, yes, but the sweet fragrances also came from a wild diversity of warmly wet plants, piquant earth, with richly rotting notes.

All of this became the setting for an outdoor performance of Much Ado About Nothing.

The night was becoming increasingly beautiful and memorable but this required a few critical elements.

The day had to grew prematurely dark as the sunshine and blue skies were lost.

The warmth had to be washed away by heavy rain, watering-up the scentedness.

But this is life.  Our species is able to experience and find deep meaning and wonderment in the most unlikely places.

(*From Lewis Hyde’s The Gift.)
(**Alex McManus, source lost.)

Tim Harford tells the story of mathematician Paul Erdös who was prolific in his publication of some five hundred papers.  The especially remarkable thing is that he collaborated with others in order to do this.  Never staying in a place for very long, his motto was, “Another roof, another proof.”*

This is an example of inclusive collaboration.  There are exclusive collaborations.  Harford preceded his telling of Erdös’ story with that of the British 2000 Olympics 8+ rowing team that won gold.  They’d carried themselves off to work together in preparation for the Games.  No one knew who they were never mind thinking they would win.

It’s the inclusive collaboration that fascinates me most.

I have come to see reading a book as collaborating.  I was almost 40 before I really began reading.  Reading to gain insight, I’ve come to discover there’s a way of reading that brings new thoughts into being and these new thoughts can be explored with others and then written about.

Now I find myself wondering about how a collaboration of people can work together to produce a book when they have been told that publishers don’t like many people being involved.  It’s messy.  That’s the thing about a reciprocal world.  It’s messy.  And beautifully so.

(*Paul Erdös, quoted in Tim Harford’s Messy.)

In the past five hundred years our population has increased fourteen-fold but our energy consumption has increased by 115 times and the global economy is now 240 times bigger than it was in 1500.*
(Martin Bhaskar)

To become less wasteful we need to become more creative.

The good news is, we’re all artists, and artists, on the most part, make more with less.

When we receive something from our environments, from those around us or those who have gone before us, and when we reflect on it, imagine it, play with it, shape something with it and produce something different, we’re entering into the world of artists and artisans.

It’s a synaesthysic process in as much as it is bringing what we see, feel and do together.  If we only receivers then we are only consumers.

Elle Luna describes the artist’s Must:

‘We can’t prove Must.  We can’t point to it, or define where it stops and starts, because it’s not a thing that we can see.  But we know that it exists because when it’s near, we feel it in our gut; it begs for a second glance, pulls us into another dimension, a space out of time where a day can pass it a moment.’**

Within these words there’s this sense of joining up of what we see, feel and do.  This is where we find we’re most alert, where we find ourselves in a state of Attention.  Not least because we are carried into new, different, unfamiliar places that keep us on our toes.  Brian Eno writes of this state:

“The enemy of creative work is boredom, actually […].  And the friend is alertness.  Now I think what makes you alert is to be faced with a situation that is beyond your control so you have to be watching it very carefully to see how it unfold, to be able to stay on top of it.  That kind of alertness is exciting.”^

Within this lies the prospect of not knowing where we’ll end up, a story unfolding.  Just saying this might be enough to put some off the artistic way.  But if we can go with the flow, something the company 3M encourages its workers to engage in under the title of “flexible attention,” what we find is the kind of engagement with a wide diversity of creativity that may save our planet and solve many of the issues within a creaking eco-system.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes about living in this unpredictable way:

‘what people enjoy is not the sense of being in control, but the sense of exercising control in difficult situations’.^^

Here is Eno’s alertness made possible by entering the unfamiliar:

‘It is not possible to experience a feeling of control unless one is willing to give up the safety of protective routines.’^^

Who wants to become incompetent, right?  Yet this is where we’ll grow our competences to a new level.  In this case it’s the art of making more with less we’re all capable of.

My friend and mentor Alex McManus states this in his inimitable way when he echoes Ernest Shackleton’s alleged advertisement for a crew:

‘Heroes wanted for an epic quest to hack the universe.  Starting with Earth.  Safe return doubtful.’*^

(*From Martin Bhaskar’s Curation.)
(**From Elle Luna’s The Crossroads of Should and Must.)
(^Brian Eno, quoted in Tim Harford’s Messy.)
(^^From Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow.)
(*^From Alex McManus’ Makers of Fire.)

Even though your body is always bound to one place, your mind is a relentless voyager.*
(John O’Donohue)

The earliest artists worked within the outlines they imagined, the later reworked their imaginations.’**
(James Carse)

In our imaginations we are able to play in a plethora of ways.

Because these are not tangible, we possibly don’t pay them as much attention as the here and now of what we can touch, tase, see, smell and hear.  We allow our more imaginative thoughts to flee away, then we forget them, until we catch a fleeting glimpse, but that is all.

If we capture these imaginings, though, if we write them down or make some kind of doodle or drawing of them, something more begins to happen.

They begin to grow and develop, and we get to play them into some experiment or exploration.

Then we get to wondering just how expandable and expansive our imaginations can be.

Beyond writing them down and drawing them out, there’s the importance of sharing them with others: in the to-ing and fro-ing of conversation, a possibility can grow and grow.

(Who knew it before we had the dynamic conversation?)

We must beware belittling imagination, which brings with it the ganger of the acousmatic life – the one spoken over us from out of the frame:

‘All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them.  We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show is how.  Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people.’^

(*From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)
(**From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)
(^From Ursula Le Guin’s Words Are My Matter.)

An animateur (from the root animer) is someone who “brings to life” a new way of thinking, seeing, or interacting that creates focus or energy.*
(Peter Senge)

I’ve been trying all my life to find out what my limits are and I have not reached them yet.  But then the universe doesn’t really help, it keeps expanding and won’t allow me to know it entirely.**
(J)

The lights are up.

The cameras are poised.

It’s time for action.

The universe, not some or other Simon Cowell, has presented you with a stage and is waiting for you to respond.  And, please, no impressions.  We want to see you.

(*From Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution.)
(**Peter Senge’s character J in Aleph.)

It is wonderful to behold a person who inhabits their own dignity.  The human body is its own language.*
(John O’Donohue)

If you want to be part of a group that bonds like cement, take on a really demanding tasks that’s deeply meaningful.  All of you will remember it for the rest of your lives.**
(Chip and Dan Heath)

These two statements may appear contradictory or mismatched but there is something that lies deeply within us, something we must search for and understand, that will make it possible to connect to others in what will be some of the most significant and memorable moments of our lives.

Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler imagine what they call DIY communities:

‘A DIY community is a group of people united around a massively transformative purpose (MTP), a collection of the passionate willing to donate their time and their minds to projects they truly believe in.’^

My hope is that these kinds of community hold the possibility of uniting people across the lines that usually divide: political, religious/areligious, educational, gender, et al, towards some greater purpose every day of our lives.

(*From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)
(**From Chip and Dan Heath’s The Power of Moments.)
(^From Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler’s Bold.)

Passion is individualistic. […] purpose is something people can share.*
(Chip and Dan Heath)

I write and talk a lot about passion but Chip and Dan Heath make a good point.  It was Frederick Buechner who pointed out that we find our purpose where our deepest joy meet the world’s greatest need.

Of asking others about what they are doing, the Heaths conclude:

‘You know you’re finished when you reach the contribution.’*

We can’t contribute towards ourselves – that would be to only answer the “Who am I?” question that is important but must be counterweighted by “What is my contribution.”

Which takes us to others with others.

(*From Chip and Dan Heath’s The Power of Moments.)

The only difference between people that matters is the difference between those who allow this space to fill with flow – and those who don’t, or won’t allow it.*
(Richard Rohr)

The proverb announces: “iron sharpens iron”.**  This is about interdependence.  I need you to sharpen me; you need me too sharpen you.  An “iron sharpens iron” world is not competitive but collaborative, the like of which is difficult too imagine because it is about abundance, about valuing everyone, and we have lived too long in a world of scarcity.

I’ve picked up a 1988 edition of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.  In the introduction, Carl Sagan remarks:

‘Except for children (who don’t know enough not to ask the important questions), few of us spend much time wondering why nature is the way it is; where the cosmos came from, or whether it was always here; if time will one day flow backward and effects precede causes; or whether there are ultimate limits to what humans can know.’^^

We have left the world of questions and we are struggling to find our way back, but out is not impossible.

I needed to look up the meaning of the word lacuna after coming across it in Maria Popova’s Two Hundred Years of Blue.  It means an unfilled space or gap.  Here we find new horizons and discoveries.  Here we all know something and none of us know everything:

‘Equidistant from the atoms and stars, we are expanding exploratory horizons to explore the very small and the very large.’^

(*From Richard Rohr’s The Divine Dance.)
(**Proverbs 27:17.)
(^Carl Sagan, from Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.)