Taking regular aerobic exercise enhances blood flow through the brain, as sell as making a marked difference to the structure and function of the brain.*
(Shane O’Mara)

You have been given a task, have to come up with an idea, it’s your responsibility.

What do you do?

Freeze your brain with panic?

Cut out all distractions and sit in one place scrunching up your face with focus until an idea comes?

Or do you take a walk?

Shane O’Mara’s work uncovers how we have the ability to both focus on details and to mind-wander. There is a real possibility that creativity occurs when we perform these tasks simultaneously.

We’re full of ideas and information and experiences with millions of permutations for how these may come together:

One possibility as to why the flickering between these two modes of thinking lies at the core of creativity arises from the notion that in order to create something new, you must combine ideas some form of novel association. Mind-wandering allows the collision of ideas, whilst mind-focusing allows you to test whether it is nonsensical or interesting and new.*

Next time you’re responsible, why not take a notebook and pen and go for a walk? It’s what I’m going to be doing later today.

(*From Shane O’Mara’s In Praise of Walking.)

It is not possible to experience a feeling of control unless one is willing to give up the safety of protective routines.*
(Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)

“It won’t work.”

The trouble is, the new is often measured by the old, even though it’s now struggling.

Someone, at some point, has to go try out the new and see what happens, to help it escape the gravitational pull of the old.

Maybe you?

(*From Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow.)

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 us how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people.*
(Ursula Le Guin)

Myths, told for their own sake, are not stories that have meanings, but stories that give meanings. […] We resonate with myth when it resounds in us. A myth resounds in me when its voice is heard in mine but not heard as mine.**
(James Carse)

We put our lives together from people we’ve met, places we have been, events we have immersed ourselves in, books that we have read, experiments that we have explored – there is no such thing as hermetically developed meaning and purpose.

Our guides are all around us.

We mix all of these together in a never before imagined way of creating a never-to-be-repeated life.

It’s not once and for all, which means, we haven’t missed our opportunity. It can happen any time in life and is possible every day.

This journey is nothing less than exhilarating.

(*From Ursula Le Guin’s Words Are My Matter.)
(**From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)

In normal times, it’s easy to get into a rhythm of simply responding. Someone else setting the agenda. When things are uncertain, it’s easy to react. But now, right now, is the single best time to initiate. We’re in for a slog, but there will be an end to it.*
(Seth Godin)

I’ve been trying all my life to find out what my limits are and I have never reached them yet. But then the universe doesn’t really help, it keeps expanding and won’t allow me to know it entirely.**
(J)

Yes, there are times when we will need to react in order to stay out of trouble, other times when we will need to do as we are asked, but if we are not initiating, we will not develop as we are able to, nor will we bring this to others.

It’s how the universe provokes us.

Illustratio, nobilitatis, honorem!

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: React, respond, or initiate?)
(**The character J in Paulo Coelho’s Aleph.)

Reading teaches me the answers to problems I haven’t had yet, or to problems I didn’t even know how to describe.*
(Alexander Chee)

“Set!” comes between “On your marks!” and BANG! (or Go!).

“On your marks!” is about being in the right place at the right time, but it doesn’t mean we’re necessarily “Set!” which is about having the wherewithal to go when called upon.

Reading isn’t the only way to be set, but it’s a big one** – or equivalents: podcasts, TEDtalks, MOOCs, etc. I think that everyone has a book in them, though, so conversations with interesting people is also a great way to be “Set!,” also running with ideas and experimenting and reflecting.

As we turn up to do these things each day, we may even find that we don’t have to wait for anyone else the fire the starter’s gun.

(*Alexander Chee’s letter to young readers from Maria Popova and Claudia Bedrick’s A Velocity of Being.)
(**I’ve recently replenished my shelves with the following books:
Together (Richard Sennett)
The Power of Full Engagement (Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz)
Understanding Comics (Scott Macleod)
Born For This (Chris Guillebeau)
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Walter Benjamin)
Deep Work (Cal Newport)
The Idea in You (Martin Amor and Alex Pellew)
Centering (M. C. Richards).)

[E]very person is a unique source of transformative insight and human potential. Our lives are a process of constant discovery and invention. Each of us lives a unique human life.*
(Bill Sharpe)

The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches. […]‘The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.**
(Jesus of Nazareth)

The thing about the two short stories about the mustard seed and yeast is that something very small was able to transform what was already there. It was likely that the particular mustard plant clambered over existing plants and trees and the yeast needs flour to work its magic.

It is true for the individual as it is for the society.

We need to find the (often) small thing that will transform what is already present in our lives.

It may be an idea, a story or a person:

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.^

Stories that have enduring strength of myths reach through experience to touch the genius in each of us.^^

When we connect with and transform what is already within us then we become animateurs to others.

Beneath the way things are, we find deeper things from which everything new is possible:

Myth provokes explanation but accepts none of it. […] Explanations establish islands, even continents of order and predictability. But these regions were first charted by adventurers whose lives are narratives of exploration and risk. They found them only by mystic journeys into the wayless open. When the less adventuresome settlers arrive later to work out the details and domesticate these spaces, they easily lose the sense that all this firm knowledge does not expunge myth but floats on it.^^

I love James Carse’s phrase “into the wayless open” and this is exactly where we find ourselves – stepping into yet undiscovered continent’s of life-in-all-its-fullness.

(*From Bill Sharpe’s Three Horizons.)
(**Matthew 13:31-33.)
(^From Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution.)
(^^From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)

Whatever your idea ends up becoming […] the process of bringing it into being will change your life. […] All you need to do is start …*
(Martin Amor and Alex Pellew)

We need some kind of reflective practice to best bring into being what it is we believe and feel we must.

Twenty two yeas ago I heard someone describe their own reflective practice and being 38 years old and not having then found one that really worked for me, I decided to copy it.

All these years later, it’s developed a lot into something quite different, and it means that for around the last 8,000 days or so, I have had some way of reflecting on my life and my work.

No doubt the practice will keep on changing, but I wonder where things might be if I’d resisted copying, if I wanted to find something original and unique to me.

Steal and copy to find your own way because it provides you with a place to start and, once started, it’s likely that you will overtake your teacher and become the the new teacher we need.

This morning, I was struck by David Whyte‘s words to a young reader because they are about openness and newness and possibility through the practice of reading, and, when it comes to the adventures of reflection, no less will be the excitement for those who begin and what treasures they will have to share:

I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish; I wish I were in your shoes now, I wish I were standing where you are standing now, I would swap everything I have learned through my reading, I would swap my entire library of a thousand books, every journey and adventure I have taken through their pages, all the insights about the world and myself, all the laughter, the tragedy, the moments of shock and relief, all the books that have amazed me and that have made me reread them again and again, to be at the beginning as you are, so that I could read them all again for the first time […] to walk through the incredible territory we call writing and reading and see it all again with new eyes.**

(*From Martin Amor and Alex Pellew’s The Idea in You.)
(**David Whyte‘s letter to young readers from Maria Popova and Claudia Bedrick’s A Velocity of Being.)

Of course it’s a difficult problem. All the easy ones are already solved. Difficult problems are precisely what we signed up for, right? […] Difficult problems are rarely solved immediately, and sometimes they’re not solved the way we might have imagined, but with effort, they often yield.*
(Seth Godin)

What if we altered our value system so that the priority was place on soul-enhancing, skill building, self-sufficiency, exploration, mind-expanding tasks?**
(Keri Smith)

We don’t find the life we want or believe we are made for by solving easy problems.

The worthwhile problems are probably those that require us not to use only words but also pictures:

Pictures and words together make a third thing.^

Just a thought. When we’re taking on the kind of problems that transform things, pictures help us to see things differently: stories are the closest things words can be before they become pictures.

Such pictures and images and illustrations can help us to keep moving against the things that prevail when words fail us.

Until we break through:

Kids don’t call it art when they’re throwing things around – they’re just doing stuff.^

We can all draw; don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t.

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: Of course it’s a difficult problem.)
(**From Keri Smith’s The Wander Society.)
(^John Baldessari, quoted in Austin Kleon’s blog: A brief appreciation of John Baldessari.)

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)

Life is always a configuration of abundance, even as individual lives might experience scarcity.**
(Graham Leicester)

Walker Percy’s words reminded me of Laurence Kushner’s book God Was in This Place and I, I Did Not Know, focusing on the biblical character Jacob’s encounter with God in a dream told in several ways.

The thing I want to draw out from this, when we experience the most amazing things in life, we are left standing in front of it, wondering who we are.

This is both humbling and awesome.

Especially when we see how it is in relationship with each other that we can be even more.

Again, humbling and awesome.

We end up in trouble when we believe we are everything we need and we have no need of each other.

(*From Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos.)
(**From Graham Leicester’s Transformative Innovation.)

The first horizon is dominated by the quantitive sense of time as duration, a limited resource. […] By contrast, the third horizon is characterised by a qualitative awareness of time as a defining moment, a moment of decision. […] the second horizon is a committed choice in the context of the moment, and attempt to capture the flow.*
(Bill Sharpe)

All three horizons are present to us right now: the first horizon of how we have always done things, the third horizon of different future possibilities and the second horizon of capturing and giving form to this future.

This may be something within society, within our work or within our personal lives.

Our overwhelming experience is that we’re likely to give more time to the first horizon of how things have always been when we need to slow down and pay attention to what can be.

(*From Bill Sharpe’s Three Horizons.)