Two members of my family sent me messages yesterday.  They were letting me know that the garden centre where I had been born was largely destroyed by fire on Friday night.

I’d not thought about this small patch of land for a long time, but for some reason the news affected me more than I thought it would.  My father had the house built in 1949 on five acres of land as he pursued his dream of running a market garden and, later, a garden centre.  I was the only member of the family to be born in the house back in 1959.

We then moved away in 1974 when the working of the land became too much for my father’s health.  Though my childhood years couldn’t be measured as bad as some are, they weren’t the happiest, and yet the news of the fire saddened me.  The land, the bricks, certain memories are still very much a part of why I am who I am and why I do what I do.

We are strange creatures.

I sometimes use the word humystics to describe us: hominids who are both products and walkers of the Earth, and yet mystics too, searching for and touching the unknown.  Some news about a place I have not lived or visited in decades causes me to think of so many things deeply.

All the time, the spiritual is held within the material.

It is not one or the other.

I breathe, I feel the quickening of my heart, I take a step – not as some may have expected.  Something caught my attention and my imagination and I changed direction.

Albert Camus writes about creating dangerously, about how dictatorships of whatever kind fear art, because art is more that paint-patterns on canvas, or words in lines, or clay lumped and fired:

‘Every great work makes the human face more admirable and richer, and this is its whole secret.’*

My understanding of art includes whatever someone is curious about, explores, imagines, practises and contributes.

Each has the capacity and ability to imbue a day, an activity, a breath, with far more meaning than others may think it ought to have.  And then we wait to see what happens.

Our gift may be something very practical, but Lewis Hyde reminds me that every gift has three parts: the gift itself, the spirit of the gift and the community of the gift.**

Time to play.

(*From Albert Camus” Create Dangerously.)
(**See Lewis Hyde’s The Gift.)

Our advantage is not something that we gain.  It is something we give.

It is found where our deepest joy meets the world’s greatest need.

These are different for every person but something very special happens when we hone our gift in the secret place of personal inquiry and reflection, when we develop it into something artful through great effort and when we make it available to others because we care:

‘Create an imbalance of effort and care.  Show up.  Don’t spam, in any form.’*

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: Effort in the face of near-certain rejection.)

The goal can’t be quality, not for people anyway.  It needs to be humanity.  The rough edges of caring, of improv and of connection.

If all you can do is meet spec, better be sure you can do that faster and cheaper than an AI can.*
(Seth Godin)

Like the old saying goes, people don’t remember stats, they remember stories.**
(Hugh Macleod)

I don’t know if robots get headaches, or their digital equivalent.  I know I’ve got one today, and it’s getting worse.

Robots and AI are taking on more and more of what we can do and probably without headaches slowing them down.

What are we left with? is a really important question.  It brought me back to the critical 21st Century question:

What does it mean to you to be human?

Maria Popova is asking her own questions:

‘It is, of course, an abiding question, as old as consciousness — we are material creatures that live in a material universe, yet we are capable of experiences that transcend what we can atomize into physical facts: love, joy, the full-being gladness of a Beethoven symphony on a midsummer’s night.’^

I find myself thinking that AI and robots probably not only don’t get headaches but they don’t get to begin with greed, pride and foolishness as humans do.  Yet from these starting points, the overcoming of these things on a daily basis, it often seems to me that we become most human, most imaginative and creative and loving.

Robots will do more and more of our work, life becomes more and more reduced in many ways, and yet there are untouched worlds that we get to explore as humans.

Every day.

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: We can do better than meeting spec.)
(**From gapingvoid’s blog: What’s your story?)
(^From Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Alan Lightman on the Longing for Absolutes in a Relative World and What Gives Lasting Meaning to our Lives.)

Great content starts with great stories and great stories start with thoughtfulness and intent.*
(Brian Solis)

There is today and then there is today with a little more added.

Not adding stuff from outside of us but adding from the inside.

This can be the hardest thing of all, to find the energy to make the effort to bring what we are capable of bringing.  How we bring more curiosity or focus or presence or questions or humility or gratitude or randomness … .  There’s an endless list of possibilities right under our noses.

The hardest thing of all but also the most satisfying and transformative.

(*From Brian Solis’ Once Upon a Digital Age.)

‘After all, perhaps the greatest of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent.’*
(Albert Camus)

Imagination and creativity may be at their best when addressing problems and difficulties.  Nancy Kline tells of how her father delivered a speech calling for the equality of African Americans.  He was seventeen, graduating from high school in 1920 in Tennessee:

“I just asked myself, ‘What is the most important challenge facing my generation?’  I knew immediately.

Then I asked myself, ‘And if I weren’t afraid, what would I say about it in the speech?'”**

K. M. Welland writes about how a good story needs conflict, progresses and has some unexpected element.  We are all capable of bringing the unexpected.

(*From Albert Camus’ Create Dangerously.)
(**From Nancy Kline’s More Time to Think.)

Listen to the silence. […] Silence will speak more to you in a day than the world of voices can teach you in a lifetime.*
(Frances Roberts)

What then is art?  Nothing simple, that is certain.  And it is even harder to find amid the shouts of so many people intent on simplifying everything.**
(Albert Camus)

I cannot lurch straight into the noise, how hide myself in the familiar.  I must find some asymmetry, a place for finding what I do not yet see, what I do not yet feel, what I cannot yet do.  A place to imagine.

Why do we imagine?  Is it because it is where we feel most alive?  Where the promise of some better world yet unimagined is still to be found?  Where simply is discarded for engrossing?

‘The artist constantly lives in such a state of ambiguity, incapable of negating the really and yet eternally bound to question it in its eternally unfinished aspects.’**

(*Frances Roberts, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(**From Albert Camus’ Create Dangerously.)

One thing about the future we cannot say is: This is how it’s going to be.  It hasn’t happened:

‘The future won’t be perfect.  We won’t be perfect. […] The future won’t always work.  We won’t always succeed. […] The future won’t always be fair.  But we can try […] It can be better if we let it.’*

I don’t know about you, but I like the fact that the future is uncertain in this way.  It means that this moment can be uncertain too, that it can be better than I think it might be:

“Live from day to day.  If you do so, you worry less and live more richly.”**

The present is more than simply the result of the past; without this sense of future-what-might-be, the fullness of the present remains unknown to us.

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: What is and what might be.)
(**Anne Morrow Lindbergh, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)

Life is too short not to do something that matters.*
(Hugh Macleod)

Being elegant means developing your ability to describe a concept in a beautiful, simple way.**
(Rohit Bhargava)

Here it is.  Another day to do something that matters.  What this looks like is up to you.

When we take a closer look at our lives and the needs in the world around us, we can trust one another to find something to do that makes a difference and to do this in an artistic.  Not the kind of art that has been separated from the real world but one that owns every human to be artistic, that everyone can do what they do with a swirl and panache.

This is an elegance on the far side of simplicity.  If I tried to do what you do, I’d make a hash of it.  You make it look simple, you may not even see this for yourself and undervalue what you do.

(*From gapingvoid’s blog: Why people are unhappy.)
(**From Rohit Bhargava’s Non Obvious – 2o15 edition.)

It’s not.

We can go further.  We have the capacity.

I think of Walt Whitman’s ‘child who went forth every day,’ open to the “other” ‘with wonder or pity or love or dread’.*

Reality is all there is if we stop moving.  The imagination explored through moving on changes reality.

We have not arrived.

Poverty, racism, illiteracy, gender-violence, environmental catastrophe, conflict and too much more tell us this.

(*From Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.)