Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.*
(Mary Shelley)

I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances without our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.’**
(Joseph Campbell)

As I was reading about curiosity and curation and creativity, the word curativity came to mind.  I googled it and sure enough, it’s a word that’s already been put together, most likely because of the rise of the Internet.

The Internet is probably a good description of the kind of chaos Mary Shelley points to as a context of our creativity.  We’ve had to find some way of navigating everything it is in order to find the valuable amongst the non-descript.

This will be different for different people.  We each are curious in different things.  When we bring these different things together then we begin to imagine what we can build.

Here is movement, and in it we see something of the distinction Joseph Campbell is imagining.  The question, he says, is not what is life? but am I alive?

We may hate made up words – though all words are made up – but we are moving into what may be the most enlivening and most deadening time for the human species to be be alive.

One more thing that makes things really interesting is character.  Character is something that happens when we get creative and is something that shapes our future creativity:

‘Character is formed in the crucible of faithfulness and refined through the gauntlet of perseverance.  Remember the shape of our character is the shape of our future.’^

I take faithfulness to be the habits and disciplines we shape to contain the talents and things our worlds contain.  Character is the best container of all for being curious, curating and creating.

(*Mary Shelley, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: ‘Frankenstein’ author Mary Shelley on Creativity.)
(**From Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth.)
(^From Erwin McManus’s Uprising.)

From the beginning a curator was somewhere between priest and bureaucrat, combining the practical with the otherworldly.  Either way curators had access to and mastery over difficult concealed knowledge.*
(Michael Bhaskar)

Did you suppose there could be only one Supreme?  We affirm there can be unnumbered Supremes, and that one does not counterfeit another … and that men can be good or grand only of their supremacy within them.**
(Walt Whitman)

Michael Bhaskar’s title Curation caught my attention because I’m fascinated by how people and things can be arranged in a multiplicity of ways, not in some manipulating way but making our world the wonderful place it should be, beyond the mindset of scarcity.

Curators take care of things, caring and nurturing, and making things work politically.

Add Edward Deci’s remark about creating the right conditions for one another to create and life gets a lot more interesting:

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

In 2007, curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Stéphanie Moisdon were responsible for the Lyon Biennial art show and went about it somewhat differently.  They involved a whole lot more people, Bhaskar describing it this way:

‘So effectively what you had is […] curators curating curators curating.  And then given that they all made artists and critics curators, the whole category of curator had been blown wide open.  Everyone was a curator.’*

So it’s been done.

I wonder what might happen if this mindset spilt out beyond the walls of galleries and biennials, that we saw the possibility of helping one another to find the kind of spaces in which each is able to organise the things they love doing with a freedom of creation for a purpose bigger than themselves.

Some say it isn’t possible.

Others might say, it’s neither been attempted nor explored.

(*From Michael Bhaskar’s Curation.)
(**From Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.)
(^From Edward Deci’s Why We Do What We Do.)

It turns out that culture is the most powerful force available to to us.  Culture comes from each of us, from the connections between.*
(Seth Godin)

The important distinction is not between theists and naturalists; it’s between people who care enough about the universe to make a good-faith effort to understand it, and those who fit into a predetermined box or simply take it for granted.  The universe is much bigger than you and me, and the quest to figure it out unites people with a spectrum of substantive beliefs.  It’s us against the mysteries of the universe; if we care about understanding, we’re on the same side.**
(Sean Carroll)

The saying goes, “If you build it, they will come.”

There’ll always be people who, for one reason or another, will wait until others build or create something they will come to see they need or want.

The reality of the universe, though, is that we all get the chance to make something valuable together that we want to live within and for.

We know that as we grow up we have to move from dependence to independence, but that isn’t our destination.  To be independent people is to value the person, the thing.

Our goal, though, is to move into interdependence, then the thing we are valuing most of all is the relationship between one thing and another thing, a person and some thing, and a person and another person.

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: Where’s the king of the ants?)
(**Sean Carroll, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Existential Therapy from the Universe.)

Recent research has found a correlation between playing informal games as a child and being creative as an adult; the opposite was true of the time spent playing formal organised games.’*
(Tim Harford)

re-examine all you’ve been told at school or church or in any book; dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency no only in its words but in the silent lines**
(Walt Whitman)

Perhaps Nassim Taleb is picking up on what the formal games lead to when he writes of the predictability of our days:

‘If you know, in the morning, what your day looks like with any precision, you are a little bit dead – the more precision, the more dead you are.’^

Joseph Campbell points us in the direction of the inner life and what it is saying to us about what it wants to be about but if we haven’t cultivated this then we will be lost:

‘When you get older, and the concerns of the day have all been attended to, and you turn to your inner life – well, if you don’t know where it is or what it is, you’ll be sorry.’^^

Palliative-care nurse Bronnie Ware wrote an article on the top five regrets people in her care articulated: they had not lived a life true to who they are; they had worked too hard; they lacked courage to express their feelings; they had not remained in touch with friends; and, they hadn’t allowed themselves to be happier.*^

Our longings might be seen as tensions between our dreams and reality.  As Kelvy Bird points out, the interesting stuff happens in-between:

‘With vision above and reality at the base, creativity resides between the two.’^*

Longings are what make us human.  I appreciate that a number of faiths suggest overcoming longings and desires, though, as physicist Sean Carroll suggests, this too is a longing or desire:

“In human terms, the dynamic nature of life itself as a desire.  There is always some thing we want, even if what we want is to break free of the bonds of desire.  Curiosity is a form of desire.”⁺

If we do not pick up and run with our desires then we lay ourselves open to the pushing and pulling of others.  It is where we find our joy, which I guess is what a life without regrets is about.

Audre Lorde aligns with Campbell, encouraging us to go where our ‘true spirit rises.’  Although Lorde is writing for women, there is power in her words for every person;

‘For each of us as women, there is a dark place within where hidden and growing our true spirit rises,

“beautiful
and tough as chestnut
stanchion against your nightmares of weakness”

and of impotence.’⁺⁺

(*From Tim Harford’s Messy.)
(**From Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.)
(^From Nassim Taleb’s The Bed of Procrustes.)
(^^From Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth.)
(*^From Chip and Dan Heath’s The Power of Moments.)
(^*From Kelvy Bird’s Generative Scribing.)
(+Sean Carroll, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Existential Therapy from the Universe.)
(++From Audre Lorde’s The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.)

In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives he chooses one and eliminates the others; in fiction of the almost inextricable Ts’ui Pen, he chooses – simultaneously – all of them.  He creates in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves proliferate and fork.*
(Jorge Luis Borges)

There are always choices.  Viktor Frankl saw the truth of this when he declared our final freedom is to choose our response to what happens to us.

Seth Godin catches my eye with these opening words to his blog:

‘There is no market.  There are markets.’**

He could be saying, There is no future.  There are futures; something Jorge Luis Borges imagined in his story of all paths simultaneously existing.

Perhaps a single future is most often an easier shortcut from now to then, far easier than being open to many futures.  There are many paths to recognise: your skills and abilities, your dreams and hopes and passions, your values, your stories of relationships and experiences, and more.  The more these threads are noticed, the more futures become possible.

This will sound too messy for some.  Tim Harford is writing about the people who tidy their desk and workplace and those who leave it messy:

‘That’s the thing about a messy desk, or a messy office, it’s full of clues about recent patterns of working, and those clues can help us work more effectively.’^

The interesting point he makes comes from some research showing tidy people tend to file prematurely and are often unable to find what they need in their vast systems of storage.

This sounds like the future and futures.  The more we tidy away the clues, the more we lose sight of the paths and the choices and the possibilities.  Out of sight is out of mind and heart and will, but as Ben and Ros Zander point out:

‘The action in a universe of possibility may be characterised as generative, or giving, in all senses of that word – producing new life, creating new ideas, consciously endowing with meaning, contributing, yielding to the power of contexts.  The relationship between people and environments is highlighted, not the people and the things themselves.  Emotions that are related to the special category of spirituality are abundant here: joy, grace, awe, wholeness, passion, and compassion.’^^

Here we see forking paths that fork and fork again.  Maybe to file early in this case would be to only see the people and things, rather than the messy relationships that may appear if everything is left out in some kind of explorative and creative mess?

I concluded my reading this morning with Jürgen Todenhöfer’s account of his journey into ISIS, where I find an extreme example of seeing only one future.  Abu Loth, one of the fighters he met told him:

“All of life is just a test, and you need a clear set of instructions.”*^

A single future contains the danger of becoming narrower and narrower. Another fighter, Abu Qatadah, told Todenhöfer:

“A bad Muslim who lies, cheats, and kills, is preferable to Allah than a non-Muslim who does good all day long.”^*

I have come across similar thinking in the Christian Church and in non-religious contexts too.  These are examples of what Otto Scharmer would call absencing, in which the future is pre-determined and those who believe otherwise will be ignored or worse.

There are, though, many right and beautiful futures waiting to be uncovered through our imagining and creating:

‘The craftsmanship of meaning amid the unfeeling laws of nature  invariably calls on us to use human tools like ethics and art to answer questions of what is right and beautiful.’⁺

(*The character Stephen Albert in Jorge Luis Borges’ The Garden of Forking Paths.)
(**From Seth Godin’s blog: The shortcut crowd.)
(^From Tim Harford’s Messy.)
(^^From Rosamund and Benjamin Zander’s The Art of Possibility.)
(*^Abu Loth, quoted in Jürgen Todenhöfer’s My Journey into the Heart of Terror.)
(^*Abu Qatadah, quoted in Jürgen Todenhöfer’s My Journey into the Heart of Terror.)
(⁺From Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Existential Therapy from the Universe.)

We want to start with resistances, those facts that stand in the way of the will.  Resistances themselves come in two sorts: found and made.**
(Richard Sennett)

We have to have something to live for, to look forward to.  We have to have more than existence: we have to have something inspiring.^
(Hugh Macleod)

Our imaginations need resistance and reality to bring about creations that are critical, transformative and lasting.  Imagination makes it possible for us to expand our freedom, develop key abilities and live for a purpose greater than ourselves.

Wallace Stevens writes about how:

‘The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.  When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect it will ever have.’^^

I take this to mean that whilst we only imagine and create more imagining, as in some idea going around and around with in our heads or within a conversation of a group, it may feel great but ultimately that is as good as it gets.  But imagination that meets some reality and resistance and seeks to overcome it is imagination that has become coherent.

I borrow the word coherent from David Bohm when he describes coherent and incoherent light:

“Ordinary light is called ‘incoherent,’ which means that it’s going in all sorts of directions, and the light waves are not in phase with each other so they don’t build up.  But the laser produces a very intense beam which is coherent.  The light waves build up strength because they are all going in the same direction.  This beam can do all sorts of things that ordinary light cannot.”*^

Imagination becomes coherent when it actually tries to do something.  Tries is an important word.  The word coherent for me also means “making sense.”  We find meaning – the purpose greater than ourselves – when we turn our imagination loose on reality.  It becomes laser-focused.

Avoid the path of least resistance, take your ideas and explore, experiment and prototype with them.  Every day.

(*In Star Trek, the Borg announce that resistance is futile.)
(**From Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman.)
(^From gapingvoid’s blog: You can’t take that away from me.)
(^^From Wallace Stevens’ The Necessary Angel.)
(*^David Bohm, quoted in Kelvy Bird’s Generative Scribing.)

Leave to your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything.  Everything is gestation and then bringing forth.  To let each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist’s life: in understanding as in creating.*
(Rainer Maria Rilke)

As I think back, no one directly taught me about the critical importance of solitude.

I came to value it through the testimony of people I’d “met” accidentally.  It was on no curriculum I ever experienced.

I only know I must now go there at the beginning and end of the day, that what lies in-between is richer for it.

(*Rainer Maria Rilke, outed in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Rilke on the Lonely patience of Creative Work.)

Enflourish: the art of enabling others to flourish in their lives through flourishing in our own.

Seth Godin writes about how we don’t have to be jerks to become and to remain successful:

‘For every person who has a reputation as a bully, a deal breaker, an intimidator – someone who fights for every scrap – there are many people who succeeded by weaving together disparate communities, by keeping their word, by quietly creating value.’*

A diverse world will be a more imaginative and, therefore, hopeful world.

Alan Lightman includes this lovely insight into being human his fable about creation:

‘”Each of them tries so desperately to find meaning.  In a way, doesn’t matter what particular meaning each of them finds.  As long as each create finds something to give coherence and harmony to the jumble of existence.  Perhaps it might be as simple as a discovery of their own capacities, and a thriving in their discovery.  And even if they are mortal, they are part of things.  They are part of things larger than their universe, whether they know it or not.  Wouldn’t you agree?”‘**

All those who do agree today have the opportunity to encourage and help others to discover their capacities.

Not bad for the 25th June 2018.

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: The jerk fallacy.)
(**From Alan Lightman’s Mr g.)

… I am the necessary angel of earth,
Since in my sight, you see the earth again.*
(Wallace Stevens)

My own journaling is how I’ve come to form my sense of identity and path in life.**
(Ben Hardy)

How do we make sense of what appears to be such a messy life?

So many things that are part of who we are, but how to make sense of them all?

The world is messy and at its messiest seems most healthy.  Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us if our lives, the product of this ecosystem, are both messy and healthy when we respect this.

Journaling is one way that helps us reframe, to capture the ever so many things into a story that both engages us and unfolds into the future in an endless way.  To see what we’re aware of but differently, to bring out what has been invisible or far away in the background.

It’s not guaranteed but it is a place to begin that has surprising developments.

Ben Hardy suggests not overdoing it.  Keep it fresh by journaling for short periods.  All it means is, we open the journal, we begin writing, and go with the flow.

(*From Wallace Stevens The Auroras of Autumn, quoted in The Necessary Angel.)
(**From Ben Hardy’s blog: Keeping a Daily Journal Could Change Your Life.)

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities but in the experts there are few.*
(Shunryu Suzuki)

To know there is so much we do not know is to know much.

To enter a place of solitude each day makes it possible to enter the wonder of this knowing-unknowing.

We are preparing ourselves to enter a world with others.

(*Shunryu Suzuki, quoted in Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)