Give us half a chance and every one of us has a roaming imagination:

‘We belong on the earth.  The rhythm of the clay and its seasons sing within your heart. … Even though your body is always bound to one place, your mind is a relentless voyager.’*

‘When it comes to creative inspiration, job titles and hierarchy are meaningless.’**

There are places to work which recognise the reality of Human imagination, places in which engagement and creativity increase exponentially.

There are also places where the message is, “All we want you to do is this one thing, unquestionably – it’s what we pay you for.”

When people are not valued for who they are and what they bring, they are de-energised and disengage.  The reverse of this sees connection being formed – we’re in this together:

‘Connection is the energy that is created between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued, when they give and receive without judgement.’^

Martin Seligman goes as far as to say, out of his research, helping another person ‘produces the single most reliable momentary increase in wellbeing of any exercise we have tested.’^^

No-one needs permission to help and support another, every day being an opportunity to flex imagination: subversive alacrity.

(*From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)
(**From Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc..)
(^From Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly.)
(^^From Martin Seligman’s Flourish.)

‘The motto of the alchemists was Solve et coagulate, which means “separate and bring together.”*

‘I believe, to my core, that everybody has the potential tone creative – whatever form that creativity takes – and that to encourage such development is a noble thing.  More interesting to me, are the blocks that get in the way, often without us noticing, and hinder the creativity within any thriving company.’**

When there’s difference without love, more often than not, one side demands that the other complies, or both sides accept less.

Either way, we lose greater creativity.

We each must know how we are different and learn how to bring this to the difference of others, if some magic is going to happen.

We can often find ourselves in a world where no one steps out in their creativity for fear of dominating or causing a ruckus.  We’ve become used to everything being “okay.”  Then someone dares to share their idea and spoils it because things often become worse.

What we can often be unaware of is how we are clumsily expressing their differences, and how, if we better understand ourselves and others better, we could move forward into something quite astonishing to behold – we don’t have to step back into everyone being blandly uncreative but getting on.

Catmull points to uncertainty, instability, lack of candour, and the things we can’t see as being the issues we must overcome.  This is the world we find ourselves inhabiting; we can’t see how there can be a better place.

To keep moving forward, we must daring to separate so we can see our remarkable differences, and then bring these together with the differences of others and work some real magic.

(*From Paulo Coelho’s Aleph.)
(**From Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc..)

One way of approaching the new year is that we are each writing a story.

Within the greater story of the universe, we can pursue this as a tale of enlightenment – of knowing and being known.

There’ll be good things along the way, but we’re not pursuing good.  Good hides remarkable.  There are greater things we can shape and be engaged in.  And problems and obstacles will be the most important elements; here’s something to open this thought up from Pixar’s co-founder Ed Catmull:

‘What makes Pixar special is that we acknowledge we will always have problems, many of them hidden from our view; that we work hard to uncover these problems, even if doing so we make ourselves uncomfortable, and that we come across a problem, we marshal all our energies to solve it.’*

Over the five years of making the first all computer generated animation Toy Story, Disney offered good ideas for solving problems such as including songs – something that had worked for Disney.  But Pixar resisted the good, eventually triumphing with a throughly engaging story.

Ed Catmull and team appeared to have done “it,” but this didn’t satisfy Catmull.

The story for Catmull was not about creating story after story using the new technologies, but to build a sustainable creative culture.

Over the holidays, I’ve been communicating with someone who’s frustrated and wanting to make some changes; I think they’re beginning to write a story,  There’ll be temptations to settle for something good but less, but beyond these lies a world of deep imagination and creativity:

‘Longing is the deepest and most ancient voice in the human soul.  It is the secret source of all presence and the driving force of all creativity and imagination: longing keeps the door open and calls toward us the gifts and blessings of which our lives dream.’**

(*From Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc..)
(**From John O’Donahue’s Eternal Echoes.)

“True wisdom consists in respecting the simple things we do, for they can take us where we need to go.”*

As I first write these words down, today, I am using a journal and fountain pen.  I relish the warmth of the room, the yellowness of the artificial light I read and write by, the way I’m seated, the movement of my pen, and the scratch of the nib on paper; I breathe deeply, and notice the fullness of this moment, feeling alive in it.

John O’Donohue reminds me, life is found in us noticing and accepting who we are.  Just as I noticed the moment of writing and finding it to be full and rich alive, so too noticing who I am and what I have and to know this is enough.  The same is true for you:

‘It is wonderful to behold a person who inhabits their own dignity.  The human body is its own language.’**

(*Paulo Coelho’s interpreter Yau, from Aleph.)
(**From John O’Donahue’s Eternal Echoes.)

It’s difficult to be present when we’re in a hurry.

There’s an acute state of hurry – when we choose to hurry – and there’s a chronic state – when we’re in a constant state of hurry, but don’t notice that we are.

There’s no time to stop and reflect in a state of chronic hurry, even when we’ve stopped.

In a this state of hurry, we feel we have to be somewhere else – maybe the past- we’re running late on things, maybe the future – we have too much to do and deal with – but it’s difficult to be here.

When we hurry, we miss things, or we miss things out, and something breaks.  It’s the reason why yoga and mindfulness are becoming so popular, because we’re realising we need to find some way of slowing ourselves down to be more present to our lives and those of others.

Presence isn’t the goal, though.

The goal is to be able to bring our greater contribution of art into the world, which presence makes more possible.

All of this reminded me of when I didn’t have time for any reflection, when I found myself in a time of confinement.  If we don’t choose it, life has a way of finding a way of forcing this upon us.  I was burned out, but, out of the confinement, I emerged with a new energy and purpose.  Ever since, I’ve been including a smaller time of confinement in every day.

A new year is offering itself to each of us, the opportunity for an adventure is within the grasp of each of us; you may already be experiencing the resistance you must overcome at the threshold.  I include a ten minute exercise, below, which isn’t about hurting reflection but about confinement.*

I began 2015 with the following words; they’re worth repeating because they’re exactly where we are:

‘The adventure is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown; the powers that watch at the boundary are dangerous; to deal with them is risky, yet for anyone with competence and courage the danger fades.’**

Imagine where 366 days will take you when engaged with energy and purpose.

(*If you can gift yourself ten minutes today, then here’s something you can try (the ten minutes aren’t about hurry but confinement).  Take a notebook and pen, set a timer to ten minutes, then just write in response to: “A day in my life looks like …” and just write out what your day involves; “But what I want to include in my life is …” and write down everything which comes to mind; “Some small things I can begin to do towards this might be …” and put down everything which presents itself.  When the timer goes off, stop.  Do the same tomorrow, mindful of how, if you include the small changes, the responses to each of the prompts, above, will be different.
(**From Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces.)

What if we could shape the new year so that it would be meaningful in new and imaginative ways?

‘In the beginning was the dream. … Before anything ever was it had to be dreamed.  Everything had its beginning in possibility.  Every single thing is somehow the expression and incarnation of a thought.  If a thing had never been thought it could never be.’*

Some of this has been created because of how you’ve lived through the last twelve months, but some of it has been suppressed.

Each of us has a generative heart, imaginative and innovative centres, the outer limits of which we don’t fully know yet – they could be inexhaustible.

When we open our minds to the possibilities, suspending our ways of seeing and understanding, we will see more, including more possibilities which we are uniquely talented to realise.

Opening our lives to more is not about us but others:

‘One of [Chip’s] extraordinary talents was seeing the best in people.  He spent his whole life calling out greatness in others and applauding it, even when he saw it expressed in the smallest of ways.’**

I met Chip almost eleven years ago and mentioned him in my post this day last year.  Chip was as Erwin McManus described him – I met him for only one day but Chip’s investment in me literally changed my life.

This is what I want to fill my new year with: I’ll follow in Chip’s footsteps.

(*From John O’Donahue’s Eternal Echoes.)
(**From Erwin McManus’s Soul Cravings.)

‘Part of the wonder of being a person is the continual discoveries that you find emerging in your own self; nothing cosmically shattering, merely the unfathomable miracle of ordinary being.  This is the heart of longing which calls us to new forms of belonging.’*

I’ve travelled a great distance to get here.

I’ve journeyed through many years, and from wrong places to better places.

I know I’m not finished yet.

Whether we say it’s life or the universe or god, we’re each provided with opportunities to travel.  A new year provides us with the awareness that it’s up to us to fill it with significance: being ingenious in the way only we can be, and to love in a way only we can love.

Not to travel, to stay where we are, would be a waste of a year to do something remarkable in:

‘when you expose yourself to the opportunities that scare you, you create something scarce, something others won’t do.’**

(*From John O’Donahue’s Eternal Echoes.)
(**From Seth Godin’s Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?)

Gift 4.0.

Once upon a time, there were only a few who were seen as gifted and blessed ones – and everyone else was subject to them: Gift 1.0.

Then some people began to use the burgeoning free-market economy fuelled by travel, later industry, and finally technology – so the number of gifted and blessed grew, though everyone else still made up the masses: Gift 2.0.

Philanthropists and grant-making bodies and sports and media events then made it possible for many unknowns to be seen and heard – but still not everyone was seen as gifted and blessed: Gift 3.0.

But everyone is able to do something uniquely and wonderfully.  The question is, how can everyone take the one an only opportunity they have to express and contribute their gift?

As I pondered and reflected, I placed my feet on the floor, on the earth – representing the reality of things, but I raised my head up, to the heavens – the possibility of things: Gift 4.0.

“Wild ones
who have not been turned to stone
by the far-reaching grasp of the empire
and its programme of consumer sedation,
the killing of imagination.
Where, my friends,
have the wild ones gone?”*

‘Stuck is a state of mind and it’s curable.’**

Gift 4.0 isn’t impossible, it’s just hard because real life is not easy.

(*Joel McCerrow, quoted in The Northumbria Community’s Morning Prayer, 29 December 2015.)
(**From Seth Godin’s Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?)

There once was a before to 2015 and now there’s an after.

I took a step forward and the horizon changed; I took another and it changed again.

Really, I know I am still a before person moving towards a better after.

Here I am, at the before to 2016 and I’m imagining what my preferred after will be.

I back at the beginning again, as T. S. Eliot has helped me to see:

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

No one is just a before person; everyone can be an after person, too.

And maybe we can be helpers of one another to move from before to after.

Who is my gift for?

“Yet maybe this small and mysterious exchange of gifts remained inside me also deep and indestructible, giving my poetry light.”*

Chilean poet Pablo Neruda is reflecting on when he, as a child, found a worn toy sheep in a hole in the fence between his family home and their neighbour’s.  He left a pine cone in it’s stead, and, though he later lost the toy in a fire, this exchange of gifts directed his work.

Ideo’s Fred Dust dared to see the notion of design and product to be more than a financial transaction when he suggested:

“You’re a better designer if you love the people you’re designing for.”**

In the beginning, there is the gift.

The thing we most want to give for someone.  We must not compare ourselves with anyone else – who they are, what they have, how they express themselves.

There’s only you and what the universe has given you the opportunity to express.

And to carry this through life.

Otto Scharmer only warns us of three pitfalls: fame, money, and empire-building.^

(*Pablo Neruda, quoted in Lewis Hyde’s The Gift.)

(**Fred Dust, quoted in Bernadette Jiwa’s Meaningful.)

(^Otto Scharmer’s Theory U.)y