It is and it isn’t.

You and me, we’re on a mission.

We know, when we produce our art, we want it to benefit someone, to contribute somewhere, to ask the vital question, or bring the solution to the problem, to inspire, to introduce goodness and beauty in some way, to listen, to serve, to care.

And if, through that thing you do, you can inspire someone to believe in and identify and explore their art, then the world has become richer, more beautiful, more hopeful.*

In these ways, this is not about you.

This is our mission.

But it is about you.

When you produce your art, you’re also working on a self-portrait; realising there’s a growing sense of satisfaction and fulfilment in your life, nothing is wasted and everything becomes more poignant – from the shadows to the bright lights.  Everything we make reveals something about who we are and who we’re becoming.

This is the classic hero tale found in myths and legends.  It’s found in these places because people have noticed this is the Human mission.

(*One of my favourite films is Pay it Forward – I wish I could remember who I lent it to, but perhaps this film, more than any other, doesn’t come back.)

Odd question.

I’ve mentioned before how one of the most important questions for the 21st century is, What does it mean to be Human?

As far as we know, at this point in the development of natural sciences, other species do not go against type: inelephant or indolphin or indog, but there are things we see in Humans we do not welcome and dub them inhuman.  It’s as if we’re saying, “We know we can do better than this.”

What if our Human journey is about becoming the best our species can be: we are becoming Human?

What if everything you are about – education, work, families and friendships – is an exploration and experimentation of this every day, and then, connecting more in relationships, producing your art, and becoming the best you you can possibly be is the best way to live the one life you have.

Of course, there’s another way of seeing this: through our industrial filter we see some will do better than others, some will have more choice in their lives than others, some will dream and others will get by.  It unconsciously inhabits our language and expectations, and sometimes slips out.  This morning I listened to excerpts from an audio-diary of what work looked like in the week of a teacher.  The phrases which screamed at me were her references to students being of low, middling, or high ability.

Let’s take a step back.  If education is about helping young people develop in order to live the rest of their lives in the best and most contributing ways they can, are we unconsciously saying these are low, middling, or high ability Humans?*  Streamed for life through our tightly defined subjects, taught and measured in narrow ways?

Although we may want to do better than this within our cultural systems, we know the enabling of every child to thrive in an environment most suitable to them is a complexity we believe to be beyond us at the moment – though, some are beginning to imagine how.  Yet, in a world moving towards a mid-century population of nine billion and more, ethnic fragmentation and fundamentalism, possible super-diseases, food shortages, environmental catastrophes, and reducing natural resources, do we have a better alternative than to engage every Human to be the best they can be towards our planet becoming more Human.

And if this sounds species-arrogant, I see becoming more Human involving a deepening understanding of how we are part of the environments we inhabit – our “sister Mother Earth”  – and the best chance our planet and other species have is for us to become Human.

(Whilst Daniel Kahneman is calling for priming studies to be more rigorous, the evidence appears to be that what we are led to believe about ourselves affects our behaviour.)

How many times have you heard this said to someone; perhaps even to you?

It’s a myth, of course.

There are things I can do and there are things I cannot.  I can accept this or face bitter disappointment.  Behind this reality, there are many reasons and choices I’ve made along the path of my life, leading to certain things being open to me and others being closed.

These are the boundaries and spaces and restrictions which inform and form my life and my art.

Now we get to value the true capacity of our lives, including our capacity to grow and develop, both ourselves as works of art, and producing the things we want to infuse with goodness for others.

Erwin McManus has been reminding me of things I first heard him share almost ten years ago: the artist has three primary colours to create from; the musician has twelve notes; and, the architect has squares, circles, and triangles.  Each set of resources seems so limited when you account for them in these ways, and yet we are overwhelmed by the way accepting these limitations allows for incredible imagination and creativity.

These lines, limitations, and rules become helpful because every day they provide us with a place to begin (the kinds of “limitations” available to artists, musicians, and architects, are also found in other expressions of Human creativity).

Only be honest about who you are and what you have and begin to craft something only you can imagine and produce, whether it be in art or creating a cafe or working with words or cleaning spaces or providing customer service or offering counselling or providing terminal care or defining creative office environments.

You may not be able to do anything you want – hopefully that myth is busted – but you can become more who you are and do more of that thing you do.

I am.  Frequently.

To dream about something is one thing, something warm and makes you feel, oh-s0-good, like eating chocolates guaranteed to be calorie-free.  We might feel that to dream when we were once unable to is an achievement in and of itself, and, in one way, it is – but only as discovering you can take a flight to your dream destination from your local airport.  It makes your trip so much more possible but doesn’t mean you’re going to take it.

Fear arrives when the thing which matters to us and that we love becomes a possibility.  In our dreams, we imagine ourselves completing our art, but in reality, following the initial excitement, there’s the overwhelming complexity we face, the loss of confidence we encounter, the multiple trials and failures before something comes together, the sheer hard work of what is necessary for this.*

The completion of our art calls for us to do the detailed stuff.  I might describe myself to others as a big-picture person, rather than a details person, and this is usually true, until it comes to my art, and then I am a detail person.  When you think about it, whatever your art is, you’ll find great detail and complexity there.  The detail is your language and your story.  And with the detail comes fear.

‘The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident.  The real one is scared to death.

(*It’s not about the 10,000 hours of deliberate practice alone, but practicing the stuff you love, which produces your genius work – the art which is remarkable and transformative.)

It can feel as if it takes a lifetime to identify and produce your art.  I sometimes say, only half-jokingly, I’m still getting there, but one day I’ll declare, “This is what I must do,” and promptly expire.

Some identify their art at an early age; I’ve already admitted I didn’t know what it was at forty five years of age.

And just listen out for how many times you’ll hear phrases like “natural talent” or “they were born to do this or that”.  And we feel we don’t have it and we weren’t.

Two things about talent, and it’s probably one thing, really.

1) Whilst some people may be born with an advantage over others (sprinters with more fast muscle – there are two types of muscle – or basketball players who are 6’8″, nature doesn’t think in terms of athletics or basketball or banking or music or politics or art).  What matters is putting in the thousands of hours of shaping something extraordinary around our particular curiosity and fascination – which may begin with our early exposure to something: Mozart to music, chess for the Polgar sisters, or golf for Tiger Woods – but nothing happens without thousands of hours of practice.*  First thing, deep or deliberate practice.

2) Turn up every day.  At the end of the day, as it at the beginning (and everything in-between), it’s about hard work, in the kind of practice which is stretching, failing, and frustrating and, yes, monotonous (which is why you really have to love something; which is why you can’t turn a Weakness into a Strength).**  The joy of your art is what brings you to the hard place of producing what has captured your heart.  Which probably means, the second thing is deep practice too.

If you’re waiting for inspiration, you’ve already had it.  If you turn up and play with the things which matter to you through practice, you might just be surprised at what emerges.

Boom.

(*I wonder whether my isolation from other children when not at school meant I had to develop my imagination – I love ideas and thinking about the future.)

(**I love the detail in Annie Dillard’s writing about nature and life, and imagine her writing in some pleasant space with sunshine coming in through a large picture window through which she observes the world.  I was staggered to read her description of how she’d lock herself away in a cinder-block room, painted mustard yellow, pull down the blind, and pin a picture of the outside world on it.)

The title of Steven Pressfield’s great book on why it’s hard to produce and contribute the art you really want to.

If you only had time to read one short, insightful book  to help see the resistance then this might be it.

As I’m twenty percent through this book on my kindle, I’m really recommending the book-so-far.*  I left Pressfield this morning listing the many traits of Resistance which sidetrack from what we really want to do, including: procrastination, getting into trouble, sex, self-dramatisation, self-medication, and victimhood – because they’re easier than producing our art.

I see integrity and wholeness (which lead to perseverance) as the powerhouse or engine-room of living creative, enjoyable, and generous lives.  Resistance will do all it can to stop us getting there.  The steps towards this powerful centre involve humility (knowing who we really are – good and bad) and gratitude (the ability to see what we really have) lived out in daily habits and practices of our making (faithfulness).  All of these require some time to reflect before acting – a scarcity in today’s world, but not impossible.

(*I also ought to say, I always read several books together – which tends to have a multiplying or magnifying effect; away from home for a couple of night’s, I’m reading this in parallel with Erwin McManus’s The Artisan Soul and Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist.)

I heard physicist Brian Cox recently, pondering the possibility of Earth being the only planet in our galaxy capable of producing and sustaining life.  His conclusion was, if this is so, how humbling.  I feel this.

Yesterday, I ended the day watching a documentary on the car maker Rolls Royce, offering a behind-the-scenes look at this prestige carmaker’s attention to detail and unrivalled craftsmanship, including the bespoke Celestial model – containing  dash and door panels encrusted with hundreds of diamonds and a roof panel  containing hundreds of optical fibres which represent an actual constellation of stars.

One universe is for all, the other for a few.  (Apologies if you own a Rolls Royce but I struggle to get it.)

Erwin McManus suggests Human creativity – our art – produces life when it is good.

If our planet is unique within our galaxy for producing life, so our lives also appear uniquely positioned for this purpose.  Plants produce more of their kind, so to animals, as the dinosaurs before them, but Humans are different.  We look out into space, dreaming one day of travelling to distant stars, and towards this, and life on Earth, we end up create and produce all kinds of things – even Rolls Royces with picnic hampers costing £20,000.

Of the two stories, the one which excites and fascinates me most is the one Brian Cox and Erwin McManus are exploring.   The better story understands how every Human is capable of living their art towards impacting others for the good, is an amazing one the Universe has gifted us.

You may not believe this.  Yet.  Perhaps it’s too fanciful or the kind of thing that happens to people who get to drive Rolls Royces or life is too busy just getting by.

Steven Pressfield confesses: ‘Most of us have two lives.  The life we live, and the unlived life within us.  Between the two stands Resistance.’

Yet, here we are on this dot in the universe, the adventure invites us to identify our art which is good, which creates life.

Once you’ve identified your art – that thing you do – you have to let go of, or reduce the time you invest in the rest.*  Unless your art is bringing intensity to many projects.

Herein lies a problem.  Humans like to keep their options open – maybe old lizard brain is keeping an escape route clear – but the result can be we never really commit to what we really want to, and ought to, focus on.

Whether we simply like to do lots of things, or we feel pressured into doing many things well, it’s often leaves us living an unfocused life, wasting energy, diverting it from what we must do.

I had to smile when I found myself doing this earlier.  I’m usually reading seven or eight books at the same time – each offering a different perspective on what I’m thinking about or working with people on.  Today I found myself wondering whether I’d miss some important insight if I didn’t read this book or that, so I dithered.

Dan Ariely suggests, to get unstuck: ‘take into account the consequences of not deciding,’ so I stuck with reading his book describe this very thing.

The catches my attention because I find myself wondering a lot about how people can overcome obstacles to do what their lives are saying they should do.  So, when it comes to our art, it’s important to identify the things which sap our energy and stop doing them, (when this isn’t an option, it’s important to use our art to manage these things creatively – turning them into a small project for what we do best, but we mustn’tt try and turn these things into our art).  One of the guys behind StrengthsFinder, Marcus Buckingham, wrote a whole book 285 pages long to help us get this.

(*This isn’t the same thing as feeding your art through a wide range of resources, interests, and curiosities.)

Our art will take us to the most liminal of places in our lives (the disorientating spaces between the familiar places) where we can fail or worse, or fulfil or better.

These will probably not be the most welcomed and enjoyed of experiences, yet, as Daniel Kahneman reminds us, it is not experiences but our memories (how we remember our experiences) which is most important to our sense of eudaimonia and joy.

Our Story turns our experiences into memories; the stories we choose from enables us to remember our experiences in many different ways.

I can’t remember what it was now, but something prompted me to see the rejection I was experiencing in a workplace as something I could use to develop myself.  When another difficult situation arose, I called on this memory to again see things positively, and, when this happened a third time, I had a number of memories to call upon.  These three years of my life contained some of the most painful and challenging experiences I’ve had to face so far, but I wouldn’t give them up because they have helped me forge what I’m doing today.

I read these words from Keith Johnstone while remembering these things, and whilst he’s thinking of helping students to create fictional stories, the truth of what he says relates to our non-fictional lives:

“It must be obvious that when someone insists that they
‘can’t think up a story’, they really mean that the ‘won’t
think up a story’ – which is OK by me, so long as they
understand it’s a refusal rather than a ‘lack of talent’.”

This isn’t about fooling ourselves into writing a fictional story for our lives, but about taking the same experiences and writing a better story.  As I’ve been writing in different posts, humility, gratitude, and faithfulness are behaviours which allow us to unlock our future lives and set them free.  It’s a raw and naked experience, which is why the best art happens in the liminal spaces.

I’ve mentioned quirks of ownership, and even “partial ownership” changes things – it’s what marketers and advertisers are trying to get us to do – imagining ourselves in this house or driving this car or wearing these shoes.  But, there’s also a positive way to use this.

When we can imagine the our experiences of life leading to different consequences we’re beginning to take ownership of a different story, and when we get to like the story so much we begin to live it, then something extraordinary happens.

Why is it so hard to do the things we want to do?  Or at least to stop doing the things we don’t want to do?

I know this in my own experience.  It doesn’t matter how true something is, it’s only really true when we give expression to it – only then do we truly value it.  And here is the problem.  We measure all things by what we already know and experience.

Let’s add Dan Ariely’s helpful Human quirks of ownership to this:

We come to love what we already have.

We focus on what we’ll lose rather than what we can gain.

We think others will value what we have as much as we do.

This is why the first step towards something new – in regard to ourselves, others, and our world – is to suspend or interrupt how we see and understand.

This has been my own experience.  I had to discover more than I knew, but that wasn’t enough.  I needed to resonate deeply with something in what I was discovering and begin to imagine what I could do, but that wasn’t enough.  I had to try out some of those imaginings, to experiment – and then things began to change.

It’s not easy.

It’s not impossible.

But it is worth it.