We are together.

It’s a creative act to turn information into knowledge into understanding into wisdom.

Critical to a more imaginative future is the finding of one another.  Austin Leon shares Brian Eno’s concept of a scenes:

‘Under [Eno’s] model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals – artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other Tastemakers – who make up an “ecology of talent […] a whole scene of people who were supporting each other, looking at each other’s work, , copying from each other, stealing ideas, and contributing ideas.”‘*

Whilst not demeaning the individual talents brought into the scenius, if you think you have to be pretty darn exceptional to belong twith others you’d be wrong.  It’s the softer skills that become far more important:

‘Being a valuable part of a scenius is not necessarily about how smart or talented you are, but about what you have to contribute – the ideas you share, the quality of the connections you make, and the conversations you start.’*

Whether it’s to work on something personal, some idea or hope for the future, or something that’s vexing us with work, finding each other is simply a better way of moving forward.

‘Scarcity appears when wealth cannot flow.’

(*From Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work.)
(**From Lewis Hyde’s The Gift.)

‘Défense d’afficher.  Do not advertise.  And yet there she is.  Elle s’affiche.  She shows herself.  She shows up against the city.’*

Others might do that but we don’t.

We’re different, better, special.

At least, this is the story we tell ourselves.

It’s 1929 and a woman stops to light a cigarette in front of  a notice saying “do not advertise.”  Photographer Marianne Breslauer captures this moment.  I reflect, when we simply do what we must do others may notice.

Edgar Schein writes about the importance of helping to what it is to be human:

‘Helping is, therefore, both a routine process of exchange that is the basis of all social behaviour and a special process that sometimes interrupts the normal flow and must be handled with particular sensitivity.’**

We are not different.  We are everyone, and there’s a way of expressing ourselves within this reality that generally and specifically makes the world a little better.

“What do you want to bring into being [hiddenly]?”^

(*From Lauren Belkin’s Flaneuse.)
(**From Edgar Schein’s Helping.)
(From U.Lab – hiddenly added by me.)

‘All those meetings you have tomorrow – they were just cancelled.  The boss wants you to do something productive instead.

What would yo do with that time?  What would you initiate?’*

Ken Mogi writes about the flow people experience in their work when they focus on the here and now, telling the story of Japanese whisky being produced in a country that has no barley or peat.  Apparently theses weren’t big enough obstacles to interrupt a passion.

‘Time is eternity living dangerously.’**

Says John O’Donohue.

Flow isn’t about size but about pursuing something that’s exceptional and exquisite, and when something gets n the way then we need to remove it.

Elle Luna writes of this:

‘it starts as a whisper, a call from somewhere far away’.^

A year before I had read these words, I’d found myself wondering whether there are two whispers: the one from inside and the one from outside.  What is calling to you and what are you calling and responding to?

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about how we must not let anything get in the way of this:

“The essential thing ‘in heaven and earth’ is […] that there should be a long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the one run, something which has made life worth living.”^^

We’d grab the chance of having the unimportant being cancelled by someone else, but the reality is we have the opportunity to do some of the cancelling ourselves.

(*From Seth Godin’s blog Cancelled.)
(**From John O’Donohue’s Anam Cara.)
(*From Elle Luna’s essay The Crossroads of Should and Must.)
(^^Frierich Nietzsche, quoted in Eugene Peterson’s A Long Obedience in the Same Direction.)

Two people are deep in conversation, sharing what they are up to, moving beyond the small talk, exploring something that has moved one and then both of them.  It doesn’t have to be a big something big to be something deep.  In this mutuality of sharing there is a waiting on each other, giving and receiving.

‘We must remain attentive in order to be able to receive.’*

John O’Donohue is suggesting there needs to be openness for this kind of interaction to take place.  A conversation yesterday explored compassion in which we considered compassion for self.  Was this the in-thing it appears to have become?  My memory went to some graffiti I’d spotted on a bridge spanning the Arno river as it flowed through Florence: “I am mine, before I am ever anyone else’s.”

‘Every day each one of us is given the gift of new neutrons and plastic cortical cells; only we can decide what our brains will become.’**

Jonah Lehrer is writing about how we are codes needing contexts:

‘Our human DNA is defined by its malleability of possible meanings, it is a code that requires context.’**

We are who we are in interaction with our environments, and I think particularly of human environments:

‘What makes is human and what makes each of us his or her own human is […] how our cells, in dialogue with out environment, feed back to our DNA, changing the way we read ourselves.’**

This context people includes strangers.  Our interactions with those around us, Kio Stark argues, may be some of the most hopeful things that happen in our experience in this world.  She’s helping me to understand compassion in a different way: compassion is what happens between me and my context, especially with people:

‘Everything really interesting that happens between strangers begins when you bend invisible rules in positive ways.’^

These rules are how we may stare, gaze, and pay civil inattention and attention to one another.  One such bending of these rules is in the use of triangulation.  Instead of directly interacting with someone, we use something else to test the waters:

‘A point of triangulation such as a funny child, a musician playing […] can prompt an exchange […].  Suddenly its a space of interaction.’

Stark continues:

‘Learning to see what has been hidden from you carries the thrill of secret knowledge.  It’s also practical knowledge. […] It helps you to pull yourself into a transformed social landscape, one that is open and rich with surprising, fleeting, affirming connections.’^

Some might say that this positing of compassion being everywhere is to demean it.  Others believe compassion to be something too soft as to be useful in their work of thinking and actioning.  Stark brings the truth home, that it’s only invisible, but it’s a basic way of operating for all of us:

‘So much of this happens beneath the level of logic and reason.  It’s all gut, instinct, memory. sensory information, and fantastically subtle cues.’^

This also carries a warning about the dangers we meet though our technology:

‘In networked spaces – online, in apps, in games – this all goes to hell.  The body is missing.’^

Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber underline the impossibility of separating ourselves from what I am suggesting is an existence we can only experience through compassion:

‘even if it were possible to maintain a disembodied brain, that brain would not be able to think

[…]

“far from being a cold engine for processing information, neural connections are shaped by emotion”‘.^^

If I go back to the original conversation I mention, there seems to be no possibility of compassion for self without compassion from others.  In my understanding of my talents, my teacher for an amazing day of discovery, Chip Anderson, taught us as a group that there is no understanding of our own talents without an understanding of one another’s.  Berg and Seeber tell of how,

‘it is not an illusion when a class goes well, we all think better; recent research agrees that weare all more clever’.^^

My understanding and experience is, openness is a key skill to becoming more aware of, and developing, our compassion: opening our mind, our heart, and our will.

Then I read this from Karen Armstrong:

‘Compassion requires us to open our hearts and minds to all others.’*^

It does appear to be that increasing our openness is the key.

(*John O’Donohue, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(**From Jonah Lehrer’s Proust was a Neuroscientist.)
(^From Kio Stark’s When Strangers Meet.)
(^^From Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber’s The Slow Professor, including a quote from David Brooks.)
(*^From Karen Armstrong’s Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life.)

Turning up and doing what we do is the beginning of everything that turns out to matter.

Brian McLaren describes this beginning in three words: Here!  Now!  O!*

If we turn up doing the things we do best, maybe something wonderful will ensue.

Ken Mogi reflects on the accidental production of the beautiful yohen tenmoku bowls:

‘The beauty of the starry bowls is so sublime precisely because these items were produced out of unconscious endeavour.’*

I understand what Mogi is getting at.  The people who made these bowls couldn’t point to them and say, I knew what I was doing when I made that.” People are still trying to replicate the results.  But these crafts-people turned up every day doing what they do best.

Sometimes happy accidents happen.  But they happen because we turn up giving our best:

‘Being in the flow is all about treasuring the being in the here and now.’**

Richard Sennett “adds” an interesting point – the callus is the symbol of turning up:

‘By protecting the nerve endings in the hand, the callus makes the art of probing less hesitant […] the callus both sensitises the hand to minute physical spaces and stimulates the sensation at the fingertips.’^

Turning up and doing our work provides us with calluses, the possibility of doing finer work more deeply, opening us to the complex and perplexing – the latter being the challenge in life we must respond to.

(*From Brian McLaren’s Naked Spirituality.)
(**Fom Ken Mogi’s The Little Book of Ikigai.)
(^From Richard Sennet’s The Craftsman.)

‘A drab looking cage produces a drab looking brain.’*

‘We are anxiety-ridden animals.  Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-preoccupied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals the world.’**

One of the things I have appreciated since having an operation to remove a cataract is how colours are way brighter and sharper than I thought they were.  I find myself closing one eye and then the other, playing between the foggy image of the world my left eye can make out and the brightness of the world in right.

I’d been told to expect this but thought my world wouldn’t have been affected this much.  There’s something revelatory about what lies beyond the veil.

Iris Murdoch writes about humans being ‘anxiety-ridden animals,’ continues to write about beauty:

‘The surprise is a product of the fact that, as Plato pointed out, beauty is the only spiritual thing which we love by instinct.’*

Do we know there is something more beyond our drab cages?   I don’t think we intend this drabness for one another.  We don’t design our education systems and life expectations and work environments in this way, but we underestimate the value of beauty for our brains.  As I suggest in my doodle, beauty is in the eye of the beholder – I’m not trying to tell someone what is beautiful and what is not.  The only condition I would hope for is that our kind of beauty improves the lives of those around us.

‘Unless there is an obvious reason to do otherwise, most of us passively accept decision problems as they are framed and therefore rarely have an opportunity to discover the extent to which our preferences are frame-bound rather than reality-bound.’^

We need to take a closer look, not only around us, but inside too.  Erwin McManus warns us that our sense of identity is critical when it comes to the future:

‘Sometimes, though, it’s not people who keep its in the past; it’s our own sense of identity.’^^

Just as Murdoch speaks of spiritual things, so does McManus at this point:

‘The most spiritual thing you will do today is to choose.’^^

Today, I choose beauty.  Let me see where that takes me.

(*From Jonah Lehrer’s Proust was a Neuroscientist.)
(**From Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good.)
(^From Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow.)
(^^From Erwin McManus’ The Last Arrow.)

‘We were living the process as we created it.”*

Joseph Jaworski is articulating the experience I’ve come to value deeply, namely to live in the process of creating together what is being anticipated as a goal:

‘At the very core of our union as partners is a shared passion for using our skills for positive change in our world, as well as having fun while doing excellent work.’**

Lisa Arora and Robert Mittman won’t be forming a company together anytime soon but they often bring together Arora’s graphic facilitation and Mittman’s strategising work with companies in collaborations.

What they’re exploring on a professional level is available on different levels.  I’m grateful to those who have helped me develop an idea through informal partnering, and sometimes formally in one-off or a series of actual ventures – some of these have had financial implications and others not.  They’re all marked by playfulness.

This is one of the qualities these partnerships are marked by.  Playfulness is respected by all concerned as a means of moving from stuckness to movement.  It means partnership-yokes are easy, making the burden of work lighter.   I’ve worked in partnerships where the opposite has been the case – the yoke is awkward and “rubbing,” and the load feels as if it’s doubled not reduced.  This kind of yokefulness means both or all are working as hard when apart as together.  It’s a generative thing, it’s like being born over and over together:

‘[George] Eliot was right: to be alive is to be ceaselessly beginning.’^

(*From Joseph Jaworski’s Source.)
(**Lisa Arora and Robert Mittman in Drawn Together Through Visual Practice.)
(^From Jonah Lehrer’s Proust was a Neuroscientist.)

Perhaps the person who won’t allow you to move forward into the future is you.

You tried something : it didn’t work.

You related to someone badly: you won’t try that again.

You made things worse for those you love by taking a risk: nothing is worth messing up again.

You showed yourself to be a fraud when it came to your role: you’ll keep your head down and simply get on with things in the background now.

Forgiveness, though, has a remarkable way of opening life up.  Otherwise we pace back and forth within a decreasing space in life. Jonah Lehrer picked something up from George Eliot which is very helpful for us:

‘She believed that the most essential element of human nature was its malleability, the way each of us can “will ourselves to change.”‘*

Unforgiveness does not allow change to happen, forgiveness does.  And it comes to us fresh each day.  Okay, yesterday, we messed up.  Learn from it, imagine how you would or should have done it, start over.

(*From Jonah Lehrer’s Proust was a Neuroscientist.)

This library, it
is a people portkey of
possibilities,
where imagination and
reality join and scheme.*

Who spoke to us our favourite words?  Words that changed something, still change something, hold us in this way of change?

Seth Godin introduces me to samizdat:

‘Samizdat (Russian: самизда́т; IPA: [səmɨzˈdat]) was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader. This grassroots practice to evade official Soviet censorship was fraught with danger, as harsh punishments were meted out to people caught possessing or copying censored materials. Vladimir Bukovsky summarized it as follows: “Samizdat: I write it myself, edit it myself, censor it myself, publish it myself, distribute it myself, and spend jail time for it myself.”^[1]‘**

I may pass forward subversively-good words but there’s a point at which I must begin to form my own:

‘But writing it–writing it is the true disruption. Because the act of saying it, saying it clearly, saying it aloud, this is what galvanizes people and leads to action.’^

Perhaps, from an unusual source, Tom Hodgkinson helps us to see there are at least two parts too this prooduction.  Hodgkinson, co-founder of The Idler Academy writes some practical things about spreadsheets for running a business:

‘There are two types of cost: the cost of actual materials […] and the cost incurred every month to run things […] called ‘overheads.’^^

Our words come from our changing lives.  We have to invest in the things which make change at the deepest levels of our lives – then we’ll have something worth saying.

It’s always more about ‘the direction of depth rather than distance.’*^  And if we look deep, we might find more than we expected already there.

(*Some tanka for a #libraryofawesome exploration – a library of the future in which the people bring the resources and together create something new.)
(**Samizdat article, from Wikipedia.)
(^From Seth Godin’s blog Samizdat is in the writing.)
(^^From Tom Hodgkinson’s Business for Bohemians.)
(*^From Kosuke Koyama’s Three Mile an Hour God.)