This morning, I enjoyed blue skies with birds wheeling through the air, heard pigeons cooing and crows crawking.  I am part of this and it is good.

My life now seems so small.  It is passing so quickly and I want it to be enjoyable – which means I must live with creativity and generosity.

These three words – creativity, generosity, enjoyment – emerged for me when my friend Alex asked, What does it mean to be human?  This question also prompts me to name the five elemental truths.  To be human means that life is hard; we are not as special as we think, our lives are not about us, we are not in control, and we are going to die.*

I think of these as half sentences, though, inviting us to complete them.

Life is hard, but together we can make it create something full of meaning, or,

You’re not as special as you think, but you have something rare and beautiful to contribute.

Not so much about “this is how it is,” they’re anchors from which to move into adventures.  Adventures don’t have to take us to the other side of the world, but they do take us out of the ordinary.  Into something challenging and stretching.  (I am realising my challenge to doodle every day, seeing where this goes, is satisfying my love for colour.  And colour is everywhere and in everyone.

It’s time to #getcolouring.

I feel the possibility of things.  Possibility that is wide open and not prescriptive.

‘In infinite play, one chooses to be mortal inasmuch as one always plays dramatically, that is, toward the open, toward the horizon, toward surprise, where nothing can be scripted.’**

We are drama-people, not theatre-people.  Drama is unscripted and open; theatre is the opposite – you know just where it will end.  It’s in the script.

Drama people are tipping point people:

‘[T]he very idea of a tipping point centres on the long term impact of relatively small groups adopting new ideas and behaviours.’^

Such groups know that no one person knows everything, and they honour the hiddenness of things – the result of complexity with all its ifs, buts and maybes.  This is reshaping how we think about leadership: infinite games inviting everyone to contribute.

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?”^

(*Richard Rohr identifies these five “truths” from male initiation rites from  around the world, in Adam’s Return.)
(**From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)
(^From Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution.)
(^^Mary Oliver, quoted in Mindfullybeing’s Mindfulness.)

That’s a really difficult sentence for me to write.

As an introvert, everything inside of me wants to change this to, “We all have something someone else needs”

At some point, though, we have to believe in the something different and valuable that only we can bring.

Yesterday, in a TEDx event I had the privilege to be a part of, Emma spoke of how she’d come to understand herself to be a “cultured mongrel’ rather than a purist, how others couldn’t understand how she could be this and that; the important thing was that she could.  From this place she is able to make her unique contribution.

Malcolm Gladwell identified three (basic) kinds of people: connectors, mavens, and salespeople.*  I’m the middle person, the one who loves knowledge and making it available whenever and wherever.  Though I sometimes connect, and sometimes sell, I’m a maven most – so I read “company” in the following statement to be the people I meet with.

‘If you are a Knowledge-Seeker, you constantly search for information and experiences to navigate your company in a highly complex business environment.’*

I’m never happier than when I am helping others to make their unique contribution.  For me, wisdom is knowledge working in someone’s life, the result of, and the producer of, love.

Here’s the thing I’d love to hear more about, though:

What is it that you have which others need?

(*See Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.)
(**From Jim Clifton and Sangeeta Bharadwaj Badal’s Entrepreneurial StrengthsFinder.)

“We like lists because we don’t want to die.”*

Another list announces “I’m still here.”

There are day-to-day lists – the paying of bills, the work deadlines, people to get in touch with.

Then there are the lists of the things I want to do in the year: get cycling, read at least forty books, improve my doodling, get to the Academie Gallery in Florence … .

But there’s also the list of different and unexpected things – where we each identify and live our extraordinary dreams, explorers of life beyond the “good enough.”

‘The more prepared you are, the more spontaneous you can be.’**

Identifying the must do before I die thing on the third kind of list, we get to make the rules, figuring out how to do the deep practice.

This list is more hidden, though.  It often needs more time and effort to bring it to the surface.  We’ll often judge it prematurely so we don’t give it a chance of breathing.  But if, for a little while, we can suspend judgement – our ways of seeing and understanding – and allow ourselves to feel this hope or dream, we may just have given ourselves the chance of producing the “art” we most want to bring to life.

(*Umberto Eco, quoted in Chris Guillebeau’s The Happiness of Pursuit.)
(**From Chris Guillebeau’s The Happiness of Pursuit.)

Within a year of Apple bringing out the iPad, sixty four other companies had developed more than one hundred tablets between theml.*

Frans Johansson makes the point:

‘The interconnected universe we are building across cultures, industries, and other barriers makes for a hyperadaptive environment.’* because it’s hidden?

I wonder, though, what do others fail to see because they rush to follow a new trend – what are they rushing past?

There’s something really important about your curiosity, the things only you wonder about, how this makes the invisible visible.  You’re not prepared to follow the crowd, and instead you look where others don’t bother to, to connect where others fail to, seeking out the hidden thoughts, experiences, and, most of all, the unnoticed people, so that what you bring into the world to share is all your own.

You have a great respect for what is hidden; you know that many things will never be known.

(From Fran Johansson’s The Click Moment.)

My friend Steve provides a space for people to share their stories; he calls it Time For Yourself With Others.  (Which reminds me, it’s about time we had another one, Steve.)

It’s a simple but brilliant hour, in which someone gets the chance to tell their story to a small group of people, then answering a few questions, and, finally, receives encouragements on postcards from all those who’ve been listening.

In our stories, we are saying, “Find me here.”

Everyone is searching for somewhere they can call home, beyond a building, beyond a town, village or city, and when this home is a listening place, each can tell their story and be supported by those who hear it.

The listening place is where I strain to hear the important things a person’s life is saying to them, the “horizon of possibilities,” as Yuval Noah Harari names it:

‘A ‘horizon of possibilities’ means the entire spectrum of beliefs, practices and experiences that are open before a particular society, given its ecological, technological and cultural limitations.’*

What Harari is seeing for the community, I see for the individual, according to each person’s experiences, talents, passions, curiosities, and relationships.

‘Each society and each individual usually explores only a tiny fraction of their horizon of possibilities.’*

Listening places make it possible for us to explore more.  It offers an infinite game of possibilities made more powerful through a time of askesis, that is, confinement, from which our direction and energy emerges – and who knows what this might be?

Because of this, we can say, each person’s life is incomparable and unprecedented.

(*From Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.)

I wonder whether most people are who they most want to be, and how many, if given the opportunity, would make or take a change?

Making space for change is one of the most precious things we can give to another.  That a person is not judged or condemned, but given an opportunity to be their higher Self can be one of the most beautiful ways for allowing a life to be open and become.

People of peace are important members of the WE story.  When we come to one another in peace, we are exploring what can be when both or all exist as their highest Self.*  Peace is not only the absence of judgement and conflict, but the presence of hopeful and imaginative possibility.

‘I saw that if we describe revenge, greed, pride, dear, and self-righteousness as the villains – and people as the hope – we will come together to create possibility.’**

None of us want these “villains” to be part of our lives.  Allowing everyone the possibility of evicting their villains is an attitude of the infinite player, who wants as many as possible to play the game for as long as possible – the game is everything, and the game is about you and me becoming more than what we are doing:

‘Finite players play within boundaries, infinite player play with boundaries.’^

I find myself thinking of Michelangelo’s incomplete prisoners or slaves residing in Florence’s Academie Gallery, wrestling to be free from the marble they are being carved from.  And I think of the Christian apostle Paul writing to baby communities of believers in the city of Colossae, encouraging them to wear different clothes, except these clothes are kindness, compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, and love.

We do not know what we are capable of.  Every day, we are still searching for the best things to wear, our best Self.

(*The Hebrew shalom is richer than the Vulcan “Live long and prosper,” as it contains within it the hope for all we are and have and relate and touch to prosper.)
(**Roz Zander in Rosamund and Benjamin Zander’s The Art of Possibility.)
(From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)

‘The WE appears when, for the moment, we set aside the story of fear, competition, and struggle, and tell its story.’*

‘Live the questions now.’**

The best stories make it possible for us to journey into the future.  Whilst they tell of the past, they are full of humility, gratitude, and expressions of beautiful faithfulness which open up life for as many as possible.

The most ancient of human stories tell of how we have all come from one beginning.

The WE story is the great human story we are all part of, it is a tale of relationships – how we relate to one another and how we relate to the world in which we find ourselves – all fauna and flora.

At different times in history, we have seen the power of this story to overcome stories of them and us.  We see it in different times and places, only to disappear, reappearing somewhere else.  It appears where we are prepared to ask a powerfully disturbing question: “Will we journey together to somewhere neither you nor I have been to?”

The WE story is far more creative because it hopes for what cannot be seen:

‘What happens after that is not in your control, but springs spontaneously from the WE itself.’*

My personal sense of being deepens as my relationship with others and the world develops, and I know, I have hardly begun.

Whilst our ancient stories appear to preserve the past, they actually allow us to invent the future, moving us towards something rather than away from something, an infinite game of possibilities.^

(*From Rosamund and Benjamin Zander’s The Art of Possibility.)
(**Rainer Maria Rilke, quoted in the Northumbria Community’s Morning Prayer.)
(^An infinite game is marked by the aim of including as many as possible for as long as possible and changes the rules when these things are threatened, whilst a finite game seeks to include some towards a goal and always plays by the rules.)

“If you want your dream to be
Take your time, go slowly”*

“Always keep Ithaca on your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to anchor at the island when you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.”**

To see hope where others do not requires that we see slowly

Then new treasures appear along the slow road, to those who are prepared to live a slow presence – to dawdle.  I have often thought of my life as a slow journey in the same direction, yet have found myself busy with many things.

Last year, we moved into a new home.   We have waited for the Spring before working on the garden.  Gardens are another metaphor for life, for what life can produce – gardens cannot be grown quickly, natural laws attending to be attended to.

‘The person who rigorously maintains the clarity to stand confidently in the abundant universe of possibility creates an environment around him generative of certain kinds of conversations … inviting us to play in the meadows of the cooperative universe.’^

This journey explores more deeply than we had thought possible, this garden is rich in growing new possibilities, especially for others.  There are too many given up on by those who are in a hurry to move through life, to arrive at their Ithaca, unable to see many of the definitions and assumptions they are living by.

What we find for ourselves in these slow possibilities are the things which contribute to our own generativeness – specifically, I think, our integrity, wholeness, and perseverance.

Go slowly, noticing the things in which you are successful, act intuitively, grow as a result of, and, which meet your needs.  What you will find, then, is you’re creating possibilities for others.

(*Donovan Leith, quoted in the Northumbria Community’s Morning Prayer.)
(**Constantine Covafy’s Ithaca, quoted in Chris Guillebeau’s The Happiness of Pursuit.)
(^From Rosamund and Benjamin Zander’s The Art of Possibility.)

Vision is our antidote for prematurely judging.

We open our eyes and our minds towards an alternative possibility becoming reality, rather than closing down possibilities, for both ourselves and for others.  Vision is for everyone, without prejudice.

“Too many people, guilt-stricken, wounded,
Walk in regret, feel bad about failing,
apologise even for breathing.”*

It is also about now, carrying within it the reality it promises, opening a game of possibilities that can be entered into and played now.

‘When “the possibility of ideas making a difference” is spoken, at that moment ideas do make a difference.’**

A disturbingly exciting thought is that our lives can offer vision to others because of how we live out what it is we must do.

(*Andy Raine, quoted in the Northumbria Community’s Morning Prayer.)
(**From Rosamund and Benjamin Zander’s The Art of Possibility.)

Multiplication and abundance.

“You start by sketching, then you do a drawing, then you make a model, and then you go to reality – you go to the site – and then you go back to drawing.  You build a kind of circularity between drawing and then making and back again.”*

‘Then I pushed the sheets of paper all over my office, rearranging them into piles, and then a stack, the order of which I coped back onto the computer.  That’s how the book was made – hands first, then computer, then hands, then computer.  A kind of analogue to digital loop.’**

There is a to and fro-ness being lost in our digital age, a loop of skill-building is lost when a computer programme can design a building, or put together a book, or design a course, or create an advert, cleanly and in quick-time.  The digital age is made up of bits and bytes – everything being able to be broken down into small components and reassembled into an endless number of possibilities – lego-like.

In the last two days I’ve mentioned spaces of possibility and cities that listen, in which people are able to learn how to be seekers again, makers and creators joining head and heart to become crafts-people once more.  The team co-creating these spaces are very capable of putting something together quickly and efficiently, delivering a generative environment for others, but they have seen the possibility for more and are taking it slowly.  There’s no substitute for what happens in people and between people who come together with an idea, as they both encounter it as individuals and together.

Richard Sennett’s counsels, ‘simulation can be a poor substitute for tactile experience,’ ‘CAD [computer aided design] can be used to repress difficulty,’ and provides overdetermined design ruling out the messiness of life which needs to ‘abort, swerve, and evolve.’^  Sennett is encouraging us not to abdicate responsibility to the computer, but to be craft-people, using the digital tool as part of a larger creativity.  Austin Kleon offers an example of how he works between a digital space and analogue space – he doesn’t allow one to stray into the other.

We exist within randomness.  Success is far more about chance and luck than it is about predictability.  Dealing with randomness is where we find humans at the top of their game; we’re so good at dealing with it that we don’t even notice we’re doing it.  But we’re seeing more and more how our success depends on meeting people at the right time, saying yes instead of no, or no instead of yes, trying something on a flight of fancy, and so it goes on.

‘[W]e must treat unexpected problems with unexpected responses. … If we allow more people to solve problems without permission, and if we tolerate (and don’t vilify) their mistakes, then we enable much larger set of problems to be addressed.’^^

A creative loop of digital and analogue, shared with creative others, provides us with one of the most verdant fields.

(*Architect Renzo Piano, quoted in Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman.) 
(**From Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist.)
(^From Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman.)
(^^From Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc.)