“The secret of life is to have a task, something you do your entire life, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is–it must be something you cannot possibly do!”

So, what does this mean for our collective work? I think it invites us to remember this perspective in our planning and design work together. That we each of a deeper passion and inspiration that we are bringing to the project, and often we aren’t even entirely clear about what this is. I’ve spent the bulk of three decades exploring this ‘task’ of mine and only recently has it become more clear to me that my deep motivation is to help create more of the sublime and extraordinary and transformative in life. And that my particular focus for this work of mine is in the arena of Sustainable Development and Ecologically Oriented Restoration.

Becoming more clear about my own ‘task’ or calling allows me to feel much more congruent about how I can help others and the kind of help I can offer. It also makes it easier for people I may work with to have a sense of whether my approach to what they think they need may be a good fit. And in working on project planning, we can have an eye out for the particular gifts and visions that each project team member brings. Then coming up with ways to invite more of these ‘gift’s to come to life is part of the art of really good facilitation.

Along with a history of the commons I plan to write a parallel analysis of how we have imagined the creative self. We have a long tradition that takes creative work to be the fruit of individual genius working in isolation. Henry Thoreau in his cabin is the American type. But might we not as easily say that the creative mind is itself a kind of commons? A remark that Goethe made toward the end of his life gives a sample of a more communitarian tradition of artistic self-imagining:

“What am I then…? Everything that I have seen, heard, and observed I have collected and exploited. My works have been nourished by countless different individuals, by innocent and wise ones, people of intelligence and dunces. Childhood, maturity, and old age all have brought me their thoughts,… their perspectives on life. I have often reaped what others have sowed. My work is the work of a collective being that bears the name of Goethe.”

In his essay, Created Commons, Hyde explains that he “takes Goethe’s image and applies it to Thoreau to show how, despite his fabled independence, we would not have his work were it not for the remarkably rich community and communal institutions that surrounded him in Concord.”

I think this is at the heart of extraordinary sustainable development work, the brilliance of collective composition. This is not easy to create as there is a tendency in group work to focus more on differences and limitations. But to create a space where project teams can also focus on our individual and collective insights and possibilities can make an ordinary project sing.

]]> http://chazkingsley.com/2010/02/the-sublime-and-collective-creativity/feed/ 0 http://chazkingsley.com/2010/02/balancing-need-to-know-with-unknown-possibilities/ http://chazkingsley.com/2010/02/balancing-need-to-know-with-unknown-possibilities/#comments Fri, 05 Feb 2010 02:31:10 +0000 Charles http://chazkingsley.com/?p=359 I have been talking with a couple clients recently about creating community brainstorming sessions to see what ideas could be discovered for projects the clients have been working on. I had suggested that there was little to lose and if one good idea came out of the discussion, it would prove very valuable. The cost of pulling this sort of thing together would probably be less than $1000. I couldn’t understand the clients lack of enthusiasm for the idea. Then in talking with parts of the client teams, it came out that the clients wanted to have a better sense of the answers and direction first.

I felt disappointed at the lost opportunity for the clients and me for a bit of work. But I also had a renewed appreciation for the desire to ‘know’ what one is doing or wants before having conversations with broader stakeholders. I’ve seen this in working with city planning bureaus and developers and myself, that there is a resistance to communicate when there isn’t a clear sense of knowing and progress. How do we balance this want to know first with the possible opportunities of engaging in open ended communication that invites discovery and insight and relationship building. I laugh as I know how true this is for me, even in this blog. That I ’should’ communicate some clear insights and knowledge and then I feel shy to share confusion and doubt and ‘unknowing’.

No matter how much experience I have with finding value and insight from being open to the questions and not knowing, I still fight with the internal voice that wants to know and be on top of things. It seems worth bringing  more awareness of both of these sides in all of us and the projects we work on. Because it does seem like we need both the knowing and the not knowing to create things in our life that are truly special. The ‘knowing’ stuff helps us get things done. The less familiar ‘not knowing’ is usually where the mysteries and insights and deeper creativity hide out, waiting for the opportunity to be discovered.

This film reminds me of  my own life and of work I do with clients. One of my primary visions, with myself and working with others, is being to appreciate our own complexities and the richness of what it is to be human. And that there are rarely easy answers. And that we are filled with paradoxes…. that we love and we dislike; that we feel optimistic and despair, that we can be productive and stuck; and that we can feel confident and inadequate. So much in our lives and culture suggests there are obvious answers, usually in the product or service being offered. My experience suggests that life is far more mysterious and surprising and our very complexity is at the heart of what makes life so rich. The hard work  is of discovering more of all of who we are ,what we deeply care about and that we can never fully know any of these things. But the fun is in the exploring and uncovering the underlying potentials within ourselves, our relationships, our homes and our work and then finding enlivening ways to express ourselves.

I’d love to hear from any of you about other films that you feel have gotten to the heart of this carnival of life.