The moment to show up

A theme that, happily, seems to have tipped into common-ish currency at the moment is that The Moments Matter.  The importance of moments is not new news. Nor, alas, is it new news that people can find this difficult in practice:  liking to make sense of things, our minds are active in seeking/creating the patterns that lend us the warm glow of understanding.  And we plan - of course we do - for tomorrow, next week, next year.

Two days ago I shipped Child1 off to take her part in the children’s chorus of a touring professional musical production.   She’s stepping up and stepping out.  I’m a proud Mum.  Not because of what she is doing – I’m delighted for her that she’s doing something she loves.  But because when she found out there were auditions, she said yes to the experience. And she showed up.  On dress rehearsal day, feeling nervous, not sure what would happen, worried she’d make mistakes, she showed up again. First night – showed up. Press night – smiled even more; showed up.
 
Like Child2 and many children, before anxiety prevents, she’ll keep showing up, in the moment. That’s really something to celebrate.

As we get older, we may need to unlearn a few things in order to retune our capacity for moments, to nurture our ability to live more momentously.  A recent sell-out  at the Royal Society for Arts and Manufacture (RSA) was Frederic Laloux, author of Reinventing Organisations, concerning how to become a soulful organisation.  Soulfulness in organisations, with standing room only. What a moment.  On YouTube you can hear his views, including a comment on lack of soul in education.

And so to another find through the RSA: STEAM Co.  This organisation wants to get Arts into relationship with the STEM curriculum, helping children nurture their creativity in a less boxed way.  And, thanks to STEAM Co, I have a copy of Seth Godin’s What to Do When It’s Your Turn (and it’s always your turn).  I’m lending it to my daughter next, although she may need it less than me.  To quote from Godin’s text, "What’s better – finding out that everything is OK (you got an A) or learning something?. . . The prevailing system of the educational-industrial complex puts the fear of a ‘C’ in us. . . What if instead, we decided to opt into a different path, the path of always learning?

And have you heard of the School for Health and Care Radicals?  It’s another ‘show up, choose the moment’ thing, although its intentions are for transformation (one moment at a time).
 
I could go on, because the voices are becoming many and louder.  The interest is in what might choicefully be considered and done, moment by moment, in service of a sustainable and beneficial future.

A quote from poet Mary Oliver sits by my desk: "To pay attention. This is our endless and proper work."  Combining that with Godin’s instruction that ‘it’s always your turn’ could make for an interesting and generative, possibly momentous, 2015.

Poetry in Motion

Asking increasingly beautiful questions is a a fundamentally beautiful practice that poet David Whyte encourages.  His salon series, which I joined for the past year in a small company of others, was an oasis for such explorations.  Academic pursuits, like other institutionalised endeavours, can lack life's full juice - a caricature that's all head and not much else - yet poets can provide a wellspring even there. And it's vital that they do.


Taking my academic research to a Higher Education Academy dissemination event early this year, a senior academic whose name I am sorry I didn't write down, responded enthusiastically to my interest in poetry. And, to my relief, so did others.  He asked me, "Have you read Seamus Heaney's The Redress of Poetry"? I had not. "I was lucky to hear him speak.  You should get it."  So I did.

The HEA event was something of a redress itself: a chance to glimpse exceptional attention to enthralling enquiry, enquiry finding space in which to keep breathing itself alive during troubled times for thinkers of any stripe, academic or other-wise. And in Heaney's Redress I found what I had been going on about, only put much more elegantly:

"I wanted to affirm that within our individual selves we can reconcile two orders of knowledge which we might call the practical and the poetic; to affirm also that each form of knowledge redresses the other and that the frontier between them is there for the crossing." (p201 Kindle edition).

This was implicit, he wrote, in a poem from a sequence called 'Lightenings' in his 1991 book Seeing Things.  Heaney had been considering the experience of being in two minds, of finding harmony, or not, when worldviews seem to exclude. He seemed to me to say that there might yet be fruitful redress through which different futures could be brought into being, and different relationships forged, whatever the prevailing institutional circumstance. The poem was this:

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise

Were all at prayers inside the oratory

A ship appeared above them in the air.

The anchor dragged along behind so deep

It hooked itself into the altar rails

And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope

And struggled to release it. But in vain,

"This man can't bear our life here and will drown,"

The abbott said, "unless we help him." So

They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed

back

Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

If you think, as I currently do, that organisations are conversational creations, and leadership perhaps like-wise, then you may too be heartened to consider the sort of conversations and beautiful questions that redress might enable, and might enable redress. 

If the aridity is, however, permitted to reach tongue-stilling dimensions -- as I sometimes lose heart and believe to be true -- I then wonder what form of rain dance is needed.

It's a question for us all. What poetic practice is ours to offer, to serve good sense and wiser ways?

Seamus Heaney The Redress of Poetry: Oxford lectures. Faber and Faber.  This text contains ten lectures given while the author was Professor of Poetry at Oxford (1989-1994).

David Whyte can be found here.

Practical wisdom and meta matters

Previous blog contained telling phrase “might have a moment to upload documents needed for my PhD application”.  Long story short, my first year review is imminent and explains the gap between the previous post and this one.   My PhD subject is metacognition, in adult learning, so it means me too.  As it concerns thinking about thinking, I’m obliged to consider my thinking: how meta is it, and does it help anything? Does meta matter?  Will it connect with wise(r) ways?  And what about my new identity, or occupation, or station, craft or label or. . .

I spotted Pat Thomson’s Patter debate about whether somebody doing a doctorate is a student, candidate, researcher, dr (not yet Dr) or “dottorando” (Italian), a word that contains its process nature - wave rather than particle.  My business card says I am a student; I have a student ID; I am administered as a student by institutions various.  I stopped being a director of my company, and my business partner has plenty to do other than continue it in my scholarly absence (find out what here).  My former existences, and the skills that came with them, are no longer always visible even to me.  And my children want to know why I am being so selfish as to inflict poverty of time and funds on them. Good questions.

So far, so tricky. And is any of it remotely of consequence?  I write as people's homes, livelihoods and, in some cases, lives have sunk.  Flooded away.  My quip about walking the dog having become a doggy paddle is only funny if you haven't seen the news.  Clutching at the straw that my new occupation of research is meaningful, some recent research has, unhelpfully it seems to me, indicated that choosing a meaningful life isn't going to make you happy.  Must remember to ask the vicar about that one.  And colleagues working with climate change.  And those folk trying to achieve something constructive with/about education:  encouragingly, Child1's head of music seemed overwhelmingly chipper even before his shortlisting as world’s most fortissimo teacher ever.

So, I've recently completed 15,000 words on the topic, 'What is metacognition?'  You may think it isn’t a question on everyone's lips, but it is. It sounds like:  Do you think that’s wise. . . ? What were they thinking. . . ? How could we. . . ?  What if we take a step back and think differently? 

Perhaps I can get a new chant going in the playground – “2, 4, 6, 8, Let's all metacogitate. . .”

Practical wisdom may seem elusive, but it isn’t so far away, when we find the right questions.  My superstar colleague Sarah is launching her book Bolder and Wiser, containing the voices of 20 women whose everyday living gives some clues.  From the open space sessions that colleagues from Bath Consultancy Group and the Association for Management Education and Development generously joined me for, came: "what is the ‘it’ you get when you ‘get it’?” And, “why don’t we subjugate theory in favour of noticing what we are doing to one another?" And if you haven't discovered Triarchy Press yet, have a look.

You know how sometimes you start with a particular intention and then you realise you have arrived somewhere unexpected? Best to stop there and listen.

On being a busybody

You have to love life’s sense of humour. Rather taken with the idea of giving up busyness for Lent (www.notbusy.co.uk; @TimeWisdom), and even more taken by giving up busyness in general, I managed a few days of being more than simply doing. After 48 hours I admit I became somewhat insouciant, as if perhaps I’d casually made a permanent shift. The discovery of its impermanence in no way dimmed my joy in it, so I will regard myself as non-work in progress. To have the privilege of choice but deny it would be tragic.

So, what of life’s comedy? Well, with children delivered to school on World Book Day (Hurrah for www.worldbookday.com), complete with paper plates decorated in honour of Billionaire Boy (Bumfresh Purple Bottom Nightmare!) and Captain Underpants (Tra-La-Laaaaa), wearing costumes that in one case was a shoulder-to-knee wardrobe (The Lion The Witch And) crafted with great dedication by Child 1, and with costumes almost sorted out for an imminent dance show and a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I thought I might have a moment to upload documents needed for my PhD application.

Oddly, what I didn’t think was that I might have a moment to appreciate the moments.

En coeur age

'I don't know how you've done it,' is a phrase I've heard a lot in the past couple of months, and I'd like to thank anybody who said it to me, because it contained the very heartening subtext that I was doing at least as well as folk whose capabilities I thoroughly respect. I have not kept up to the blog in recent months while I have instead attended to a school move and house move via six weeks without a home, work responsibilities and guest editing Part 2 of the e-O&P edition on Wisdom in Organisations (publication imminent). Apologies to anything I've missed out.

Oh, and a Significant Birthday floated through in the midst of all this. Some people go on a world tour or maybe throw a big party. I walked through gardens, sometimes in the rain, and had a very decent lunch. I was entirely content. I had lovely gifts and thoughtful friends who arranged an impromptu Happy Birthday while hosting my family for an Olympic visit.

So, the 'it' I've been doing seems, on balance, to be a succession of engaging moments and events, and the opportunity to admire my children's navigation of the unfolding world around them.  Put like that, perhaps I shouldn't have needed the encouragement. But, actually, I did. And I will again.

We could take the view that people who seem to be getting along just fine don't need the encouragement, but there wasn't an Olympic athlete who, even at the world-beating top of their game, said any such thing. 

So, we weren't there for the Age of the Enlightenment, but who's for creating the Age of the Encouragement, to see what such a heartening approach could achieve?

Nurture your artistry

Newly acquainted with Twitter as I am, thanks to Keren Lerner at TopLeftDesign, I here add further thanks for directing Followers to her Pinterest, where I found the quote: ‘The Earth without Art is Eh’.  

I’m a big fan of the Eh with its integral art, because the new views and explorations are much needed if our lives and businesses and earth are to sustainably co-evolve. To quote (I believe) Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘a mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions’. And to quote my young daughter after our recent visit to the Damien Hirst exhibition, ‘that was a great day Mum’.

I learn that sharing and ‘top ten’ lists are popular in the Twitterverse and so I’m joining in. 

The Arts can point us to the need for discipline and adventure in combination; to relate with who and what already exists in service of what needs to emerge. Our organisations need this and why would we want any less for our children, who must make our world sustainable or lose it? So my list is:

Ten Ways to Nurture your Artistry

You may not identify yourself as an artist but the earth needs your art:

1. Practice your ABCs: Affirm, Be Bold, Connect

2. Born to Win. If you can’t face getting the book (by James and Jongeward), at least absorb the spirit of the title and connect with the you-who-can (and so does).

3. Make Time to Think. If you want to make wise choices and changes, you have to give yourself a chance. As a coach it’s very useful and if you ever run meetings, I’d also recommend getting this book or its sequel More Time to Think (Nancy Kline) for its own 10-point list of creating beneficial thinking environments.

4. Follow Rumi’s advice: ‘Be with those who help your being. Don’t sit with indifferent people, whose breath comes cold out of their mouths.
Not these visible forms, your work is deeper.’

5. Know where you stand. Here are two sites where you can have a free exploration of your ethics and your values. (others are available!)

 http://www.moraldna.org/ and  http://goodworktoolkit.org/

6. Explore This is Not a Book or another selected not-book from Keri Smith (kerismith.com). Definitely not just one for the kids.

7. Find your gratitude. You’ll also find that annoyances become less salient and less of an energy drain.

8. Attend to your body. Rest and food shouldn’t normally be optional extras in your day if both are available to you.

9. Do something you’ve never done before. It doesn’t matter what, as long as you can cosy up and have a laugh with your conscious incompetence.

10. Find a coach. Maybe you are a rare, gifted hermit, in which case carry on. Otherwise skilled en-courage-ment can help you transform yourself and what’s around you.

Do let me know your own favourite ways to ensure Earth keeps its art. If Twitter is your way I'm @juliesallan.

Essential skills for the future?

The e-O&P edition I've been busy guest editing/curating, on the subject of wisdom in organisations (see previous blog), is nearing completion. And I'm still trying to get a bit more into it on the subject of education and how we are trying to prepare children to play their part in the emerging future.
Sir Ken Robinson has made some joyful and provocative points on the subject of creativity and education, which you'll readily find via TED Talks and the RSA Animates.  I'm sure I'll come back to these in a future blog, however in the meantime I found this article that has nine useful skills or abilities to nurture. It doesn't recommend how they should be nurtured, specifically, but all good to consider.

I'm wondering whether I'd have the same list or a different one. Maybe I'll share it with the children and see what they have to say; perhaps they already know what's needed to be able to navigate an unknown future.
DailyGood: 9 Essential Skills Kids Should Learn, by Leo Babauta
http://www.dailygood.org/view.php?sid=194