What if life were so engaging that it didn’t take much for us to be drawn in the direction of the positive?

That is, when we connect with our talents and values, our lives are capable of generating countless positive ideas to be turned into gifts and art and the kind of things others need?

Such a journey from idea to reality would need us to move towards others, to those with complementary talents to our own.

There’d be two things we’d need from this interaction with others.

One is playfulness, with a willingness to be open and exploring of something different.

The other need is deep inquiry.  Questions are fire sparks, igniting the not-so-good parts of our ideas.  Historian David Hackett calls such questions “cerebral machines that convert curiosity into controlled inquiry,” whilst Polly LaBarre adds, the best questions are “fundamentally subversive, disruptive, and playful.”*

I just thought I’d share this idea.  Enjoy playing with the ideas arising from your life and asking questions of it.

Creativity, Generosity, Enjoyment.

(*David Hackett and Polly LaBarre, quoted in Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)

‘Creativity has to start somewhere, and we are true believers in the power of bracing, candid feedback and the iterative process, reworking, reworking, and reworking again,until a flawed story finds its throughline or a hollow character finds its soul.’*

Every day is an opportunity to write a story.

A great story always takes a lot of hard work, trying out ideas, failing, learning, and trying again.

Pixar’s Ed Catmull shares how difficult it is to move from a story that sucks to one with realised creativity – and every Pixar story sucks at first.  Even the best writers and directors can lose their way and need help to move from something that’s less than mediocre to something that is imaginative, and from something which is a story for themselves to a story that’s for others.  Catmull continues:

‘We give filmmakers both freedom and responsibility. … we believe that the most promising stories are not assigned to filmmakers but emerge from within them.’*

Every day, we get to be the filmmaker, the director of a great story, battling to take it from poor or mediocre to something imaginative and creative, and from being focused on ourselves to focusing on others.

Just as Pixar’s directors have the help of the company’s Braintrust – a supportive group of people who knew filmmaking but whose ideas didn’t have to be taken on board – so we’re helped by all sorts of others around us to create the best story of all.  In the end, though, only we have the responsibility and it’s up to us to decide what’s included and what’s left out.

Only we can live the story, the one that emerges from within.

(*From Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc..)

A story through the following quotes:

‘[Culture] is a layer of human design.’*

‘Many powerful organisations fear a truth-teller.  They work hard to avoid being confronted by an individual who sees the world as it is, and by a person who cares enough to change things.’**

‘A life that wishes to honour its own possibility has to learn too how to integrate the suffering of dark and bleak times into a dignity of presence.’^

‘If we look at what we do best as well as what we want to change the most, we will often find that the two are varying degrees of the same core behaviour.’^^

You can place these in any order to make a story, but here’s the one I found this morning.

Culture is not how things really are.  It’s the story people create to live by, whether a small group, a whole country, or a whole world hemisphere.

Cultures don’t remain the same, they change, usually towards the better.  Change coming about through small numbers of people doing what they feel they must do.

We’re all capable of being culture-changers.

Culture needs this good news because it’s always “broken” and needs to be developed towards something healthier, more Human.  What is most feared is someone pointing out that the emperor is not wearing any clothes.  Suffragettes and Gay Rights activisists are two groups that have changed culture towards the better.

Both of these movements illustrate how honouring Human possibility requires embodying suffering.  Hoping for something better is like looking into the darkness knowing we must enter into the dark to dream our hope into the light.

Your life is already telling you what it is you want to change.  You’re the best person to do this with all your talents and passions and experience.

(*From Alex McManus’s Makers of Fire.)
(**From Seth Godin’s What To Do When It’s Your Turn.)
(^From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)
(^^From Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly.)

“Listen to your life.
See it for the fathomless mystery it is.”*

Dignity is essentially living our our worthiness.

It emerges from humility: being exactly who we are is to find our dignity.

‘What they really want, in fact, is to be helped to do the things they want to do. … The smallest thing can feel like magic to someone who has been living with a problem they may not be able to articulate.’**

Bernadette Jiwa reminds me that the thing which brings dignity to another doesn’t have to be big or complex.  It does ask us to listen to our life, perhaps to ask, “Does this make me feel fully Human?”

I realise I’m stringing these random quotes together because it matters to me that people find out just how amazing they really are, and that they are able to share the beauty of their resulting art with others.

“Try not to become a person of success, but rather try to become a person of value.”^

Some wish for there to be an easier way, but shortcuts don’t take us to our dignity, as Robert Greene points out – mastery being a part of our dignity:

‘The very desire for shortcuts makes you eminently unsuitable for any kind of mastery.’^^

This sentiment is echoed by Seth Godin:

‘Sooner or later, it comes to this: Great work is the result of seeking out tension, not avoiding it.  Great work doesn’t require reassurance, in fact, it avoids it.’*^

This last point from Godin is important, suggesting, as it does, that our dignity doesn’t come from outside, from another; it is already within us, waiting to be uncovered.

Create, give, enjoy.

(*Frederick Buechner, quoted in The Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer for 21/1/16)
(**From Bernadette Jiwa’s Meaningful.)
(^Albert Einstein, quoted in Bernadette Jiwa’s Meaningful.)
(From Robert Greene’s Mastery.)
(*^FromSeth Godin’s What To Do When It’s Your Turn.)

“And above all, if you must:
shine!”*

So, I thought, “whatever it is you must do, give it to others.”

I’m reading through Nesta‘s Visualise Plan Test Build & Launch and it’s asking me these questions about what I feel I must do:

What does it enhance?
What does it replace or make less desirable?
What does it bring back?
What does it flip when pushed to the limits?**

So I wrote down my answers, …

How I want to enhance the lives of others, not only my own.
How I want to replace “the story so far” as the way it has to be into the future.
How I want us to be able to respond to our primal needs to be free to choose, to do something uniquely well, and to live for something bigger than ourselves.
How I long to be part of a gripping story passed from one to another.

I continued to reflect on this, knowing this is not about people being pushed from outside, but motivated from what they find within.  Edward Deci offers this thought:

‘The proper question is not, “how can people motivate others?” but rather,“how can people create the conditions within which others will motivate themselves?”^

Seth Godin dreams of as many people as possible choosing this way:

‘When it’s your turn, it’s your turn.  You own it.  Your choice.  Your freedom.  Your responsibility.’^^

I found myself imagining a city of dreams.  A place of belonging for those who would  bring out and explore their unique dreams, around who we are, not who we are not; where we’re aware of what we have, not regretting what we lack; knowing we have enough to take our turn.

Now it’s your turn, and what will you do?

(Create, give, enjoy.)

(*Kerry Hillcoat, quoted in The Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer for the 10th January, 2016.)
(**From Nesta’s Visualise Plan Test Build & Launch.)
(^From Edward Deci’s Why We Do What We Do.)
(^^From Seth Godin’s What To Do When It’s Your Turn.)

Humans are journey-making creatures.

Yuval Noah Harari describes how there were once tens of thousands of “worlds” within our planet. As Humans made their journeys, these other worlds disappeared to one another.  The last major world to be integrated into our “one world” was Tasmania.

Have we become more Human as a result?

We are now on the brink of journeying into space.

Journey is a powerful metaphor we use in other ways, too.  We travel through life by growing older, changing work, meeting new and different people, facing challenges, serving.  The best journeys are transformative, help us to become, to change, to grow.

‘Struggling through the production of Toy Story 2 twisted our heads around, causing us to look inward, to be self-critical and to change the way we thought about ourselves.’*

It’s not so much about entering the journey, but the journey entering us, when it changes us.

Every day can be a transformative journey, capable of changing us – just a little.  What are the new ideas, who are the new people, where are there different sequences offering us an opportunity to stretch and become.  And tomorrow, there’ll be another day.

Create, give, enjoy.

(*From Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc..)

Anger tells us something is wrong.  We then have a choice: to become immersed in the anger, often leading to poor or weak decisions and worse actions, or we can do something about what’s wrong – we can get creative.

One place to begin is to ask questions about our felt anger.  Perhaps the prime question is: Which of my values has just been transgressed by this?

Our values come from the deepest places our lives, guiding us and making it possible to respond with foresight, intention, and love.

Great questions help us to open our minds, in turn allowing us to open our hearts to the whole situation, towards coming up with an imaginative response.

When we connect to our values, we know there are many responses we can select from.

Create, give, enjoy.

“Each thing we see hides something else we want to see,”*

Warren Berger warns that ‘well meaning people are always trying to solve a problem by answering the wrong question.’**

The wrong question is often an easier question.  Sometimes, we see someone in pain and, wanting to help them through this, we change the question – maybe not even seeing this is what we’ve done.

Our best work is uncovered in the places where we find ourselves wrestling with different questions, challenges, and demands, when we’re not prepared to go with the first answer, or rest on what we have done before.  Ed Catmull admits Toy Story 2 was going to be terrible: ‘The story was hollow, predictable, without tension, the humour fell flat.’^  Partners Disney were happy enough to let it go straight to video, but Pixar wanted to reach greater heights.

We all need our story to overflow with good things, to be unpredictable in the best possible ways, to have creative tension, and have plenty of laughter,

(*René Magritte, quoted in Erwin McManus’s Soul Cravings.)
(**From Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)
(^From Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc..)

What were you thinking?

The excitement rush is over and the reality of what you’ve done is now settling in.

There’s only cold, hard reality, and, inside, a growing panic.

Time to refocus.  You have to trust all that brought you to the point of jumping: your story, filled with all that thinking and feeling and behaving.

There’re are certainly more words now in your lexicon for describing your skills and your dreams, and those of people around you.  You’ve even made up some new words and phrases up as so many of the inherited didn’t fit comfortably.

You know why you are who you are and why this has led you down different paths to others.

‘Leave it all, and let you send just slip back into the rhythms of your intimate wildness. You will be surprised at the lost terrains, wells and mountains that you will rediscover, territories which have been buried under well-meaning but dead names.  To go beyond beyond confinement is to rediscover yourself.*

If your mind isn’t on the fear right now, it’s because you’ve just reconnected to your story – the one which caused you to jump, the one that’ll not let you down now.

(*From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)