Without a doubt, your little idea is going to grow. We’re rooting for your acorn to turn into an oak tree.

But bringing that acorn to the lumberyard, hoping to make a sale … you’re wasting your time and their time too.

Most people are waiting for a proven, tested and popular solution.*
(Seth Godin)

The acorn is not the finished article, it’s natures way of making more oak trees.  Give it time, nurture it.  Lots of acorns don’t grow into anything, but with some intervention, it’s likely that every one would at least make it to a sprout, if not a sapling.

The other thing is, whatever it is we’ve been looking at as an acorn may not be an acorn at all when we take a closer look.  Then the last thing it’s going to produce is an oak tree.

Flannery O’Connor made the important point for us:

“In art the self becomes self-forgetful.”**

We find our art where the past and the future merge into the deep present, where we don’t notice if this is or is not what we ought to be doing but we’re simply immersed, exploring, producing.  When we find our art we no longer see ourselves.

When we lose sight of our art it can be because we are becoming more conscious of what others are doing and comparing ourselves.  Elle Luna writes:

‘And we might even find ourselves as adults still living in a world of should from childhood that were have not consciously examined.’^

Whether implicit or explicit, shoulds are the things others think we ought to be doing or we think we ought to be doing like others.

Just last night I heard someone speak about how their own artwork was unfolding.  I found myself thinking, I ought to be doing something like that.  Then I caught myself, and I laugh.  I do not have this person’s taste and interests, I don’t have their talents and abilities, how could I possibly do what they do?  A few years ago we’d walked together through the things this person loves to do.  What I love is to help people do what they want to do.  Claudia Madrazu writes about her diary initiative (development of intelligence through art):

‘start the session by performing a physical activity that enables them to bring their attention to the present moment, feel their body, name their emotions and be connected to themselves’.^^

Because we can’t be anyone else.

This is what we learn when we become self-forgetful: this is who we are and this is our art.

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: Selling acorns at the lumberyard.)
(**Flannery O’Connor, quoted in Lewis Hyde’s The Gift.)
(^From Elle Luna’s The Crossroads of Should and Must.)
(^^From Drawn Together Through Visual Practice.)

Silence will speak more to you in a day than the world of voices can teach you in a lifetime.
Find silence.  Find solitude – and having discovered her riches, bind her to your heart.*
(Frances Roberts)

Do you find your quiet talents going unused and unnoticed in a world that values bravado, celebrity, publicity, and money?’**
(Keri Smith)

Have you ever been in one of those situations where everyone in the group is sharing something.  You can feel the pressure building as more people say something.  With five minutes to go, you go around the circle and realise everyone has made at least one contribution, except for you.  What can you say?  Something profound, but what?

I wish I could say I’ve cracked it, that I now feel comfortable being one of those, perhaps the only one, not to say anything out loud.

Terry Tempest Williams writes about the irony of our existence:

“We are infinitesimal in the grand scheme of evolution, a tiny organism on Earth.  And yet, personally, collectively, we are changing the planet through our voracity, the velocity of our reach, our desires, our ambitions, and our appetites.  We multiply, our hunger multiplies, and our insatiable craving accelerates.

Consumption is a progressive disease.

We believe in more, more possessions, more power, more war.  Anywhere, everywhere our advance of aggression continues.”^

This behaviour is anything but quiet and Williams continues by pointing out where the un-quiet begins:

“My aggression toward myself is the first war.

Wilderness is an antidote to the war within ourselves.”^

We discover things about ourselves in solitude and silence that we can never find in the whirl and swirl with others or the world of constant sound.  A moment of presence, though, is able to connect our small self with the largeness that we are a part of and which fills us.  There’s something about this exploration of smallness that leads to the discovery and experience of something big.

This in turn alters the way we create and enter space with others.  This is a different way of being with others than those whom Martin Buber identifies as having We-We relationships:

‘Theirs is a sheltered, childish world in which no individuality has yet emerged.’^^

Buber ultimately wants to reveal the richness of the I-Thou relationship, a term full of Richard Rohr’s re-spect:

‘We know things in their depth only by the second gaze of love.’^^

I know you, but do I know thou?

In solitude and silence, we’re offered an opportunity to discover our “I am” in relationship and connection to everyone and everything.  Silence and solitude are neither empty nor lonely spaces, but overwhelmingly rich and full:

‘Wonder is a beautiful style of perception; when you wonder at something, your mind voyages deep into its possibility and nature.  You linger among its presence.’*^

(*Frances Roberts, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(**From Keri Smith’s The Wander Society.)
(^Terry Tempest Williams, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: The Hour of Land.)
(^^From Richard Rohr’s The Divine Dance.)
(*^From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)

We start by locating our best self – the self that accepts, that chooses possibility over fear – the self that welcomes the new, and actually carves a path for it.*
(Kelvy Bird)

The Hall of Fame that matters most of all is the one we enter because we are being most fully who we are.**

(*Kelvy Bird, from Drawn Together Through Visual Practice.)
(**Congratulations to Seth Godin for whom this is true.)

Awe is the moment when ego surrenders to wonder.*
(Terry Tempest Williams)

In a little video accompanying his book The 8th Habit, Steven Covey invites a number of people to place rocks, small stones, and sand into a large glass bowl.  Some begin by placing the small elements into the bowl, ending with trying to force the large rocks in – these things just won’t fit.

Then someone places the rocks in first, followed by the stones, finally pouring the sand in, and everything fits.  The point Covey is wanting to make is that we have to put in place the larger things in life then everything else will fit.

When we focus on the small things, we find an effective diversion to dealing with the larger things we need to but a poor way for finding life in all its fullness.

The larger things are always moving us towards a life of more: see more, feel more, do more.

(*Terry Tempest Williams, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: The Hour of Land.)

This is a plea.

When we measure by the norm everyone misses out.  Difference often requires a space of recognition.

A life of requirement is lived by the person who makes this space available to others.

It’s everyday magic and we need more of it.

It’s one of the in-words.

If you check it out in most online dictionaries it will tell you that an entrepreneur is someone who starts a business.

Unhelpful!

Basically, an entrepreneur is someone who sees a need and acts to meet it.

The protagonist is an ancient character at the heart of a story.

The entrepreneur is revealing to us that we’re all able to be protagonists today.

Others haven’t spotted this path but you have.  Others may join you, but for now you are alone.

Is this path an aspiration or an ambition?

We sometimes use the words together or interchangeably, but they’re different.

Ambition is about going around to obtain – originally, canvassing votes.

Inspiration is about breathing into.

One feel more like an accomplishment, the other a process – we cannot breathe in and in and in, there has to be breathing out.

The Heath brothers write about how:

‘We will never know our reach unless we stretch.’*

They identify what stretching is all about:

‘The promise of stretching is not success, it’s learning.  It’s self insight.  It’s the promise of gleaning the answers to some of the most important and vexing questions of our lives: What do we want? What can we do?  Who can we be?  What can we endure?’*

And because we cannot breathe in and in or out and out, here’s the other side of this from Albert Schweitzer:

“I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who sought and found out how to serve.”**

Perhaps ambition alone makes us forget what is possible, as Martin Buber pointed out:

‘Men prefer to forget how many possibilities are open to them.’^

For now, you have spotted this path, does it lead you to some ambition or will it teach you how to breathe?

(*From Chip and Dan Heath’s The Power of Moments.)
(**Albert Schweitzer, quoted in Seth Godin’s Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?)
(^From Martin Buber’s I and Thou.)

Despair all too readily embraces the ills it foresees; hope is an energy and arouses the mind to explore every possibility to combat them […].*
(Thornton Wilder)

Instead of starting with your goals and working backwards, you started with no goals at all.**
(Chip and Dan Heath)

Hope is important when it comes to restoring the future, that is, the dreams we or others once had but have given up on.

To hold that something that does not yet exist is possible means that we have a goal, and when we have a goal we can take steps in the now, facing the reality of how things are and to make changes.

Making changes involves doing things differently, being engaged in the unfamiliar, and therefore involving the risk of failing.  Failure is undervalued although it leads us into seeing more:

‘Action leads to insight more often than insight leads to action.’**

Here, Chip and Dan Heath are identifying the need to “stretch for insight.”  Setting goals and working backwards is a critical way for seeing the change-steps that are individually or collectively necessary.  Those changes will take us into unfamiliar territory, where our old competencies and knowledge don’t work so well.  Theory U’s Otto Scharmer would suggest that we try some prototyping, producing “version 0.8” ideas designed to help us fail and learn and to try again; Seth Godin would encourage “zooming,” stretching who we are and what we do into the unfamiliar.

This way of seeing and acting is itself a future hope.  We’re imagining the possibility of stretching and failing and learning as normal components of lifelong learning and contributing.  We can then work backwards to see where our schools, universities, and businesses are working for or against this, we are seeing more and then we can begin to explore different ways.

Albert Camus spoke about how labour and intelligence are a:

‘single nobility, that their truth and, above all, their effectiveness lie in union’

[…]

The rule of our action, the secret of our resistance can be easily stated: everything that humiliates labour also humiliates intelligence, and vice versa.’^

I hope for labour that dignifies intelligence and intelligence that dignifies labour – a growth mindset over a fixed one.

(*Thornton Wilder, quoted in Eugene Peterson’s A Long Obedience in the Same Direction.)
(**From Chip and Dan Heath’s The Power of Moments.)
(^From Albert Camus’ Create Dangerously.)

We’re the latest instalment of the great human story as it moves from our deep past through the present and into our future.  It will continue beyond our reach into the lives of others yet to be born.  As in the past, so it is now, and so it will be in the future, this story will have be grandiose mixture of despair and hope, of problems and solutions, of ugliness and beauty.  As Eugene Peterson rightly observes:

‘To be human is to be in trouble.’**

Hopefully, though, we are seeing life on Earth moving towards improving in an all-embracing way.  The agricultural and industrial revolutions changed human life in many good ways – improving nutrition, employment and education to name a few – but we also know these have had bequeathed disconnection, depersonalisation, and de-skilling – again to name a few things.

Richard Sennett points out that these revolutions brought change from a different place.  Change happened faster but not always better:

‘Mechanical change came to the labour force rather than from within the labour movement.’^

Seth Godin envisages a group of people bringing hope from a different place:

‘Entrepreneurship is a chance to trade a solution to someone who has a problem that needs solving.  Solve more problems, solve bigger problems, solve problems more widely and you’re an entrepreneur.  It’s tempting to industrialise this work, to make it something with rules and bosses and processes.  But that’s not the heart of it.  The work is to solve problems in a way that you’re proud of.’^^

Artists are another group of who bring something different, when:

‘Artists reflect their times through lenses that influence insight and action, in themselves and in others.  In the face of great art, we find our spirits lifted, our views challenged and sometimes our very foundation of understanding tectonically shifted.  Arts moves us and out species evolves with this kind of internal striving.’*^

When it comes to human evolution and our impact on the planet, and now into the solar system, imagination changes everything.  Instead of randomness moving us from the past to the present, imagination allows us to imagine a different future, making it possible for us to live differently to create the imagined in the present.

Of this tribe, Ursula Le Guin writes:

‘To ask questions which must be asked yet cannot be answered, to create images which can be neither forgotten nor explained – this is the privilege of the most courageous artists.’^*

These entrepreneurs and artists may not look like they are bringing solutions.  First they make clear the problem.  This may be as far as some can take us, and we should be thankful for them.  It’s not that some are born to be artists and entrepreneurs, rather it’s a way of thinking, feeling and doing we each can learn in accord with our differences.

Our revolutions have brought us into a world of abundance, making it possible to produce more faster.  Look more closely, though, we see how a lot of this is sameness, and abundance that is sameness feels more like scarcity.

This is a scarcity of the things in which we are different.  When we’re living our “different,” we’ll sometimes be a question and sometimes an answer, sometimes a problem and sometimes a solution, but, if we’re getting this right, we’ll see a richer planet for all its species, a richer neighbour, and a richer self.

(*A play on Yesterday shows another day is here, an illustration in Ruth Krauss and Maurice Sendak’s Open House For Butterflies.)
(**From Eugene Peterson’s A Long Obedience in the Same Direction.)
(^From Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman.)
(^^From Seth Godin’s blog: Entrepreneurship is not a job.)
(*^Kelvy Bird, from Drawn Together Through Visual Practice.)
(^*From Ursula Le Guin’s Words Are My Matter.)

I see our national parks as our ongoing struggle as a diverse people to create circles of reverence in a time of collective cynicism where we are wary of being moved by anything but our own clever perspective… The nature of our national parks is bound to the nature of our own humility, our capacity to stay open and curious in a world that instead beckons closure through fear.

[…]

Our national parks are blood. They are more than scenery, they are portals and thresholds of wonder, an open door that swings back and forth from our past to our future.*
(Terry Tempest-Williams)

Mountains can be obstacles or achievements.

They can be places to be lost or places where we get found.

They can be places to escape or places to gain perspective.

However we see a mountain, climbing them often demands effort.

All of these things mean mountains provide us with great metaphors and analogies.  Never mind the elephant in the room, what about the mountain?:

‘There is something bigger going on, which is establishing cultural norms, appropriate behaviour and mindset are essential for organisational well-being.’**

Hugh Macleod is reflecting on the bigger issue behind the recent Starbucks’ cultural blindness.  There are coffees to be made, tables to be cleared, profit sheets demanding our attention.  Who has time to to look at the mountain, never mind climb it?

‘If we only pay attention to things that we can measure, we will only pay attention to the things that are easily measurable.  And in the process, we will miss a lot.’^

Okay, mountains have summits that can be measured, but beyond this, there’s a transformative story to be found through climbing

(*Terry Tempest-Williams, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: The Hour of Land.)
(**From gapingvoid’s blog: Make mine a bias-free latte.)
(^From Youngme Moon’s Different.)