Head into the dark...
Sitting in Canary Wharf in between students. It’s a dank, grey day. I’m playing Sigur Ros and pretending I’m in an Ingmar Bergman film ....
There’s a lot to be said for saying.
Saying things out loud. Embarking on a thought without knowing where it’s going. Especially in an atmosphere or a space where you feel free to do so, where you don’t feel not judged, but observed. It’s often not until you say things out loud, or write them down, that you stabilize your thinking, or maybe de-stabilize it.
As I hear me talk, I’m always on the lookout for anything that begins to feel untoward and for the past few months I’ve become increasingly convinced that the seven words I often reference when I’m teaching one of our classes have become less right than they felt when they were conceived. Of course they work, it’s not that they don’t, it’s just that the alchemy feels imbalanced and they feel too rigid, too categorical.
Presence, Charisma, Confidence, Conversation and Self all feel spacious enough to be interpreted with objectivity. The two words I have issues with are Action and Certitude. I think they arguably have a place, just one less higher up the hierarchy of aspirational words.
Action I describe as the difference between knowing what to do and doing what you know. The cliché suggesting ‘information is power’ has always felt like a pile of poop to me. Information is information, and I know a lot of clever people who are frankly not very powerful. It’s acting on the information that makes you powerful. You may know what will make you more successful, but not have the courage of your convictions. Until you do, they won’t empower you.
Certitude I talk about as a coalescing of three things ... Opinion, Certainty and Passion. It’s a pretty obvious talent when you ascribe it to Mrs Thatcher, and indeed it’s a perception held of Dubya by his fans, that you may not agree with him, but he’s absolutely, passionately convinced that he’s doing the right thing.
I think it can be misleading at times though, since often people with high certitude are those who sit back and ask incisive questions.
I can easily make a case for both of these words, but I’m relegating them.
Because I keep hearing myself say ... ‘these seven words are neither exhaustive nor comprehensive, and of course there are words I’d like to have a place at the table, but we only have a limited amount of time together. Words like Humility and Curiosity for example.” I must have expressed this sentiment a couple of dozen times before I realized I was trying to tell me something.
Humility is one of those words that’s come to mean something entirely different from its root, so the first thing to do is reappropriate it, and give it back its original definition. The word humility comes from the Latin word for the earth, "humus." To have humility is to acknowledge your grounding, to be proud of your humanity. It has nothing to do with lowliness, self-abasement, being overly mild or meek. In fact anyone who is subservient to everyone, and puts him or herself down isn’t humble. That kind of behaviour shows incredible ego, and constant claims of inferiority are frankly unbecoming.
Humility doesn’t hold you back. It suggests a sense of your own diminishing of Ego for the pursuit of something bigger. The greatest of those I talk about .... Gandhi, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Mandela, Maya .... All of them have tremendous humility and it’s viscerally recognised by people every time they talk about or watch such individuals so completely in their truth.
Today I’m checking out the Da Vinci exhibition at the V&A, and Curiosity was one of da Vinci’s seven principles for unlocking genius, the other six being:
• Arte/Scienza - Studying the science of art and the art of science (creatively using both sides of the brain)
• Dimostrazione, a commitment to test knowledge through experience, persistence and a willingness to learn from mistakes.
• Sensazione, the continual refinement of the senses.
• Sfumato (going up in smoke) – a willingness to embrace ambiguity, paradox, uncertainty.
• Corporalita – the cultivation of grace, fitness, poise.
• Connessione – an appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things
Curiosity is both a childlike preoccupation and a touchstone of one of the finest, most complete artists the world has ever known. I’m certainly more interested in what I can’t prove than what I can. Curiosity is a hunger for knowing and thinking more deeply, a state of mind that’s a question mark rather than a full stop. Rumi told us to “sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment.”
If you feel you’ve arrived, you get it, you’ve ripened, the only thing left to do is to rot. Curiosity is for the ambitious, not determined by the greasy pole or the next big job, but ambition for being richer tomorrow than you are today. Every day.
So by all means Act with Certainty.
But then with your feet on the ground, head in to the dark.
There’s a lot to be said for saying.
Saying things out loud. Embarking on a thought without knowing where it’s going. Especially in an atmosphere or a space where you feel free to do so, where you don’t feel not judged, but observed. It’s often not until you say things out loud, or write them down, that you stabilize your thinking, or maybe de-stabilize it.
As I hear me talk, I’m always on the lookout for anything that begins to feel untoward and for the past few months I’ve become increasingly convinced that the seven words I often reference when I’m teaching one of our classes have become less right than they felt when they were conceived. Of course they work, it’s not that they don’t, it’s just that the alchemy feels imbalanced and they feel too rigid, too categorical.
Presence, Charisma, Confidence, Conversation and Self all feel spacious enough to be interpreted with objectivity. The two words I have issues with are Action and Certitude. I think they arguably have a place, just one less higher up the hierarchy of aspirational words.
Action I describe as the difference between knowing what to do and doing what you know. The cliché suggesting ‘information is power’ has always felt like a pile of poop to me. Information is information, and I know a lot of clever people who are frankly not very powerful. It’s acting on the information that makes you powerful. You may know what will make you more successful, but not have the courage of your convictions. Until you do, they won’t empower you.
Certitude I talk about as a coalescing of three things ... Opinion, Certainty and Passion. It’s a pretty obvious talent when you ascribe it to Mrs Thatcher, and indeed it’s a perception held of Dubya by his fans, that you may not agree with him, but he’s absolutely, passionately convinced that he’s doing the right thing.
I think it can be misleading at times though, since often people with high certitude are those who sit back and ask incisive questions.
I can easily make a case for both of these words, but I’m relegating them.
Because I keep hearing myself say ... ‘these seven words are neither exhaustive nor comprehensive, and of course there are words I’d like to have a place at the table, but we only have a limited amount of time together. Words like Humility and Curiosity for example.” I must have expressed this sentiment a couple of dozen times before I realized I was trying to tell me something.
Humility is one of those words that’s come to mean something entirely different from its root, so the first thing to do is reappropriate it, and give it back its original definition. The word humility comes from the Latin word for the earth, "humus." To have humility is to acknowledge your grounding, to be proud of your humanity. It has nothing to do with lowliness, self-abasement, being overly mild or meek. In fact anyone who is subservient to everyone, and puts him or herself down isn’t humble. That kind of behaviour shows incredible ego, and constant claims of inferiority are frankly unbecoming.
Humility doesn’t hold you back. It suggests a sense of your own diminishing of Ego for the pursuit of something bigger. The greatest of those I talk about .... Gandhi, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Mandela, Maya .... All of them have tremendous humility and it’s viscerally recognised by people every time they talk about or watch such individuals so completely in their truth.
Today I’m checking out the Da Vinci exhibition at the V&A, and Curiosity was one of da Vinci’s seven principles for unlocking genius, the other six being:
• Arte/Scienza - Studying the science of art and the art of science (creatively using both sides of the brain)
• Dimostrazione, a commitment to test knowledge through experience, persistence and a willingness to learn from mistakes.
• Sensazione, the continual refinement of the senses.
• Sfumato (going up in smoke) – a willingness to embrace ambiguity, paradox, uncertainty.
• Corporalita – the cultivation of grace, fitness, poise.
• Connessione – an appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things
Curiosity is both a childlike preoccupation and a touchstone of one of the finest, most complete artists the world has ever known. I’m certainly more interested in what I can’t prove than what I can. Curiosity is a hunger for knowing and thinking more deeply, a state of mind that’s a question mark rather than a full stop. Rumi told us to “sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment.”
If you feel you’ve arrived, you get it, you’ve ripened, the only thing left to do is to rot. Curiosity is for the ambitious, not determined by the greasy pole or the next big job, but ambition for being richer tomorrow than you are today. Every day.
So by all means Act with Certainty.
But then with your feet on the ground, head in to the dark.
posted by Caroline at 7:13 AM
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