Everyone is capable of working magic somewhere.

At the beginning of her new book, Bernadette Jiwa speaks poignantly about her brother Johnny; I can only imagine some tragedy behind these words:

‘He was the most magnificent person who had everything he needed, and he didn’t know it.’*

I want you to know that you are a magician and I want you to know exactly what your magic is.

I was supporting my daughter-in-law yesterday as she graduated with a Jewellery and Silversmithing degree.  Karolina produces amazingly imaginative and beautiful items – part of her magic, I am often spellbound by the designs.

The proceedings began with a moment of reflection from Honorary Chaplain Richard Frazer speaking about how there is data, then information, then knowledge, and then there is wisdom, and he concluded by urging the graduates to take their degrees of knowledge into the world and to gain wisdom.

Wisdom is real magic and it is always meaningful.

This magic takes who we are and what we have and what we know and all of our experiences and our passions and dreams and hopes, and makes something extraordinary to present to the world.

As I replayed yesterday’s stream of hundreds of students receiving their various degrees, I found myself wondering about what kind of magic they’ll bring into the world.  I also found myself thinking about all the people who’ve never been part of a degree ceremony, who nevertheless are capable of magic too – every person is qualified to bring something meaningful into the world.

Degreed or not, everyone everyone discovers there’s no straight line to making magic. We’re so used to straight lines – straight lines on this webpage, all the lists we make, the ten things we need to do to get from here to a happier future – but straight is what we impose on a curvy world.

Maybe I made some progress yesterday but tomorrow I can mess up and have to begin again.  Welcome to the curve.  I may fail a hundred times but if I understand life has no straight lines then I can grow stronger.

‘The best way to verify if you are alive is by checking you like variations.’**

This sounds curvy, and yet, this is where we can make our magic, where we can play with the random and chaotic and find our creativity.

‘The greatest gift you can give a person is to see who she is and to reflect that back to her, when we help people to be who they want to be, to take back somee of the permission they deny themselves, we are doing our best, most meaningful work.’*

(*From Bernadette Jiwa’s Meaningful.)
(**From Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile.)

Between the darkness of night and the lightness of day there’s been the most beautiful dawn: a hiatus in the universe, it’s a moment of wonder and magic, alive with possibility.

It’s a moment in which we can do something imaginative with what we have received.

My friend Dan said this about something we’re both involved in:

“We have to keep doing the scary stuff, else we’ll just keep doing the same stuff and not very well.”*

There’s a scene in Star Trek Generations when Jean Luc Picard is trying to enlist the help of James T Kirk, but the former captain of the USS Enterprise is content with a place in the Nexus – a Paradise ribbon moving across the galaxy.  That is, until they go for a horse-ride and a jump leaves Kirk feeling nothing – it’s not real and he knows he cannot live in the not real.

Between taking in from others and the world around us, and making our contributions, there’s generative place – and when we explore the potential of this place with others, something dynamic happens:

‘The revolutionary force in this century is the awakening of a deep generative human capacity – the I-in-Now.’**

(*Dan said this about VOXedinburgh which always feels like jumping a void.)
(**From Otto Scharmer’s Theory U.)

‘Natural things – living things in particular – are like language we only faintly remember.  It is as if creation has been dismembered sometime in the past and all things are limbs we have lost that will make us whole if only we can recall them.’*

We are simply more ourselves when we join with others, the universe, and with the future.  These things comes to our aid but they are not who we are.

Someone sits down with others to tell their story.  They are not their story.

This is a gift they bestow, but they are neither the gifts they receive nor the gifts they give:

‘there is a middle phase in the process of the gifted self: between sympathy and pride, between the reception and the bestowal, lies a moment in which new identity comes to life as the old identity perishes’.**

The person continues to tell their story.  I listen to what they have done and what has been done to them.  I wonder whether there is another story:

These things are not me.  I, the person I am, breathe these in and breathe them out.  I am the moment in between the breathings, the moment of magic receiving something old,which dies, and bringing something new to life.

(*From Lewis Hyde’s The Gift.)
(**Lewis Hyde in The Gift, reflecting on Walt Whitman’s breathing in and breathing out.)

The universe doesn’t reveal its secrets to the half-hearted, but to those who are willing to fully engage.

“To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,
All rewritten to me, and I must get what the writing means.”*

This isn’t like reading a book.  The universe must be breathed in, consumed – as a prime experience.

Half-heartedness plays it safe.  There’s risk involved in breathing deeply, exerting ourselves in pursuit of something which matters.  Risk asks us for everything from us, to be full-hearted:

‘Vulnerability is not knowing victory or defeat, it’s understanding the necessity of both; it’s engaging.  It’s being all in.’**

Our creativity increases as we move from the familiar to the unfamiliar, as we take our “art” into new lives and new places and new scenarios, to breathe these in deeply and then having to breathe out.

The half-hearted find it easy to pass comment on how you could do things better or differently, or not at all, whilst never stepping out of what they’ve always known and done.  Trying to read the universe from the outside, they will always be fearful of taking deeper breaths.

‘”Can I get to exquisite without having to feel really vulnerable?”  “No.”‘**

We’ll never be perfect an we’ll never be complete, but we;re enough and have enough to begin.  Maybe the only hope for the half-hearted is to ‘Embrace your flaws’^ and step into deeper life.

(*Walt Whitman, quoted in Lewis Hyde’s The Gift.)
(**From Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly.)
(^From Rohit Bhargava’s Non-Obvious; Bhargava is reflecting on what he sees as the trend of Unperfection)

This morning I watched the dawn.  The promise of a new day lit up the few clouds with orange and salmon-pink.

I am grateful for this gift of beauty, feeling as if it was meant for me alone.

Timely, then, that I should be reading these words from poet Walt Whitman:

“Dazzling and tremendous how quickly the sunrise would kill me, if I could not now and always send sunrise out of me.”*

Whitman spoke of the two phases of the artist’s labour as sympathy and pride: breathing in and breathing out.  The poet inhales, being sympathetic to the dawn, but then must exhale, if he is to live.  Asserting himself, then, he shares himself with others – the poet’s pride.

With gratitude, we receive our gift of this dawn, this new day, and find we cannot hold it within ourselves, we cannot hold our breath.  We must exhale, offer something out, and this something is different to what we inhaled.  We have made more of it, we have generated something new.

I thought the dawn would soon be over and give way to the day, but it continued for most of an hour.  Perhaps at this time of year the dawns are slow.  And then, oh my.

The brightest white light completed this beginning.

So I am wondering.  Do those who awaken more slowly to what they are able to give out to others bring the brightest light?

(*Walt Whitman, quoted in Lewis Hyde’s The Gift.)

You can follow Santiago Swallow on Twitter.  He has over 8,000 followers and has posted more than 900 tweets.

The main thing you need to know about Santiago is that he doesn’t exist: he’s a social experiment.  At his height he had tens of thousands of followers when Kevin Ashton wrote a glowing article about him, but:

‘As a social experiment, Ashton had created Swallow’s profile a mere three days before, purchased thousands of fake Twitter followers for him and set up a fake WordPress account behind all of it.  The total investment for all these efforts came to a grand total of $68 and two hours of set up time.’*

Santiago Swallow’s complete fabrication presents a quick and cheap possibility for creating our own online personas.

However, real life is far more compelling.

Cheryl Song’s fingerprint art also caught my attention this morning.  The fingerprint is made up of the names of writers and their writings.**  Which made me wonder: what if we each were able to identify the different influences, influencers, values, talents, passions we could create our own unique fingerprint to impress upon the world and leave behind as our legacy.

Our persona doesn’t happen in two hours and photoshop but in thousands of hours of unique exploration of life in all its fullness:

‘Read, look to other areas, use different learning mediums, ask better questions, reflect, reopen to ideas, be surrounded by learners, and prioritise learning.^

(*From Rohit Bhargava’s Non-Obvious.  Bhargava tells this story as an example of a trend he predicted for 2015 and named Experimedia; ‘Content creators use social experiments and real life interactions to study human behaviour in unique new ways and build more realistic and entertaining narratives.’)
(**From Laura Damon-Moore and Erinn Batykefer’s The Artist’s Library.)
(^From Michael Heppell’s The Edge.)

“The idea of … is a simple one.  It will be a place for people to find happiness and knowledge.  It will be a place for parents and children to share pleasant times in one another’s company: a place for teachers and pupils to discover greater ways of understanding and education. Here the older generation can recapture the nostalgia of days gone by, and the younger generation can savour the challenge of the future.”*

Fanciful?

I left out one word: Disneyland.  This is Walt Disney’s 1953 pitch to potential financial backers for his first theme park.

Disney’s dream includes a picture or story of what would happen in this park.  Behind it lay his own dissatisfaction with existing amusement parks which lacked a coherent story.

On reading this, I found myself reflecting on my own dissatisfaction with the dearth of opportunities people have to connect to and pursue what really matters to them and that can make a difference to others.

My dream is a simple one.  It is for there to be a place where people can come to know their deep creativity and how much they have to give.  It will be a place for anyone, regardless of their past or background or identity has another opportunity to shape an opening and deepening life which embraces both themselves and others.

Creativity, generosity, enjoyment.

Fanciful?

“I just thought, in order to make a difference, something needed to be done.  I wanted to have an impact.  I wanted to create something substantially better than what came before.”**

(*Walt Disney, quoted in Joseph Pine and James Gilmore’s The Experience Economy.)
(**Elon Musk, quoted in Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler’s Bold.)

‘Many see a supposedly good thing but still in an old way, which is to say, with their old self, from the egoic position of self-advantage and self-importance’*

We have to see new things in new ways, especially the gifts which come to us.  The awakening of the gift depends on it – what it is we must do with our lives.  So too awakening to the gift – aligning our lives to this purpose, remembering that the gift asks us to grow up and be worthy of it.

This alignment, or new way of seeing, will find us exploring unknown limits.  We’re on a journey forwards, sometimes with maps, always with the compass provided by the gift.  Seth Godin names this movement forward zooming:

‘Zooming is about stretching your limits without it threatening your foundations.  It’s about handling new ideas, new opportunities and new challenges without triggering the change-avoidance reflex.  You already zoom everyday … doing the same things as usual only different.’

Zooming doesn’t mean straight lines.  Moving forward what we love to do, even when we align our lives with the gift, still doesn’t mean straight lines. We’ll always be paradoxical creatures, living in a paradoxical world.  Write Daniel Wilson has his sentient humanoid Nine Oh Two speaks these words:

‘Peering down at the straight lines of my legs, I contemplate their machined perfection.  Nature does not create straight lines.  Only men do that.  All around me are fractal spirals hidden in the patterns of leaves, the wirl of falling snow, and even the placement of the debris on the ground.  I have names for the patterns I see in nature: Natural distribution.  Beta.  Gamma.  Poisson.  Divichlet.’**

And with it,almost infinite variation and possibility.

(*From Richard Rohr’s Eager to Love.)
(**From Daniel Wilson’s Robogenesis.  This reflection caught my attention because the phrase no straight lines describes many things to me and I purposefully avoid straight lines in my doodles.)

There’s something hidden and unknown in your life.  Some treasure, which, when uncovered, will delight you and those with whom you share it – some way of thinking, relating, or behaving – something you hadn’t recognised before.

A second thing.  You can buy a Mood Meter app as “a gift of self-awareness to yourself, and to others.”  The app promises that using it will help build emotional intelligence.

Our moods and emotions can also be hidden and unknown to us.  We usually focus on what’s happening to us and what our thinking, and ignore what we’re feeling.  But feeling energy and excitement assists us in uncovering the hidden treasures in our lives.  What de-energises or feels negative (e.g., sadness, helplessness, guilt, anger, disappointment, criticism, etc.) helps us to act: is this something to give up, or do we need to learn more hard or soft skills, or is this something to pass on, or do I need to embrace the feeling?

The third thing that can be described as hidden and unknown is found in the questions: What kind of mood do I put others in?

To uncover these things makes it possible for us to do three things which are important to living our life as fully as we can:

Suspending the old ways of seeing and understanding;
Diving deeply into what we are uncovering and knowing; and,
Letting go of what hinders and to taking hold of what now matters to us.

Repeat.

I am not one person, I am many.

I am not who I was twenty, ten, or even three years ago, and I am not who I will be in ten years or twenty years time.  I am many different people held together by a narrative arc or story.

Again, my life has been, and is being, shaped by the lives of many others: I sat and named many of them this morning.

I seem to be acknowledging this more and more most, and am opening myself to what others bring to me.  I am becoming more connected: perhaps I am becoming we.

Some of the people I brought to mind at the beginning of the day made and make small changes in me, and some made and make large changes.

All of this makes it possible for me to follow Seth Godin’s advice when it come to what we each must do:

‘Don’t wait for it.  Pick yourself.  Teach yourself.’*

It also means I make myself available to esemplastic communities so we might create even more with and through one another.

And because of this, because I am not who I was yesterday, and there are many helping me, and because we can create together, I have hope.

(*From Seth Godin’s Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?)