Daily pages - August 25, 2021

I’ve been cleaning up my life a little. Last week, I took time to gather all my tools and boxes of stuff in the garage, and I found that given enough storage room (which really just meant adding a large tool cabinet and freeing up a shelving unit for boxes of stuff, I don’t really have that many tools to deal with. I look at someone’s shop like Adam Savage’s in his book, and my shop is really quite simple.

It’s really nice to have everything in place, and even if I have disorganized screws and bolts, at least they’re all in the same place and more accessible. Adam Savage talks about his philosophy of having everything within sight and within reach and I don’t think I’m the same way. I prefer organized and accessible. If I know where to find it and can get to it easily, then I’m good. I have a pretty good mental inventory of my tools (probably due to the fact that there aren’t that many), and if I can go look and find what I need, I’m happy.

I’m also thinking about the Creative Practice pattern. In the shower, I found myself thinking in fairly poetic terms about its place in the center of the language. I’d like to try and capture some of that now.

Power can be defined as the capacity to change things according to our will.

Our power as individuals comes in two forms: creation and destruction. Of the two options, destruction is the easier one because the universe is endless moving toward greater entropy, greater disorder. You need only light a match and set a house alight to destroy what might have taken a lifetime to create. Sure, you’ve changed the world, but that is not the kind of change we need more of. There’s plenty of that around already.

Creation is a more difficult way to exercise power. The act of creation can be trivial or it can be meaningful; it’s the latter that creates lasting change. To create something meaningful, we need to use all our capacities as humans: our perception and sentience (Artist-Poet-Scientists), our reasoning (Comprehensive Sensemakers), and our agency or ability to act (World Creators). All three aspects of who we are must develop together for us to be most effective. This pattern is the answer to the question “what can we do to help make the world better?”

Our current world is designed to make us consumers: we each have fairly specialized knowledge, we know how to follow directions, and we think of ourselves as consumers of goods, services and information. To be effective creators, we need comprehensive knowledge, we need to know how to lead, and we need to think of ourselves as creators.

I’m getting bogged down here.

What I’m trying to get to is that creation is where our power lies. It’s what will enable us to change the world in meaningful ways. And creation takes so many forms. We create relationships as well as artifacts, and in systems thinking, both are vital. But few of us, if any, are ready immediately to create away the big problems. We all have to start somewhere, and while we may have mad skills in taking action, we may be lacking in our sensemaking or sentience capabilities. We need to both bring those capabilities in balance, and move them in a virtuous cycle to higher and higher levels.

And the way to do that is by meeting the problems where you are. If you’re unsure about what you can do, start with something that seems easy. See if it really is easy. If it is, consider challenging yourself more. There are a lot of things that need doing that are not very hard. Food banks need people to help them organize and distribute food going through their pantry. It’s a lot of important manual labor. Fill boxes until you see a different opportunity. As you outgrow a role, leave it for others to fill. Maybe even get someone you know to fill it, and make yourself a community builder. We all have skills of one kind or another; look for ways that you can use the skills you have, and think about what kinds of skills you want to add to your portfolio.

The point is, the best way to grow is to start actively taking on things that need doing. Deciding what things need doing is not always straight-forward, but we’ll get to that. We’ll look at how we can compile a list of things that need doing, then choose something that’s Yours To Do, right now. And when that’s done, we’ll look for something else and do that. We’ll do it in a way that keeps you mobile so you don’t end up somewhere where you feel stuck. The goal is to grow as a person so you’re capable of taking on the kinds of things that fewer and fewer people are qualified to take on.