“Make a breakthrough as you recognize life as art”
Slacker Wisdom, For When You Feel Stuck
Follow your passion, go with the flow and be guided by the slacker within. When it’s time to change your focus and enjoy a new frontier, slacken off and feel into the flow. Where is your intuition leading you? If you are trying to solve a problem and you are just not getting anywhere, there is no point proceeding. If you are stuck, you are in a box—the easiest way to break out of the box is just slide out of it.
If you have hit a wall, remember the saying: “When the going gets tough, the tough go on holiday.”
If your passion has been blocked for too long, it is probably because you have hit the wall of rationality. Passion is expansive and hot, whereas when we rationalize we reduce and cool and, hey, even freeze our brains. If you have reasoned yourself out of your passion, be sensitive to where your intuition is directing you. The way forward with problem solving or creating a new life situation is sideways, or even backwards. If you have been banging your head against a wall for some time, what you are doing in effect is solidifying the wall.
Creativity is an open state. Creativity is a gift from the muse. It is a cyclical state by nature; it requires us to let go, get into the void and receive.
Working to create constant product, on the other hand, is a linear mechanical process and is the necessity of maintenance. In this era of change, where change is speeding up and increasing the sense of crisis, there is more opportunity. The opportunities of the 21st century are only realized through creative innovation.
The cultural integration of the world’s major cities is an exciting artefact of planetary consciousness in a global society. Innovation through cultural fusion is rapidly becoming prerequisite for today’s creative spirits.
All new innovations in the 21st century will come from the interlinking of different paradigms and cultures—creating fusions, mixing and cross-referencing. In my previous blog—Skateboarding: The Centaur Rides—I give an exciting example of the fusion of surfing, punk attitude and hip hop artistry that birthed the modern skateboard era.
Like a River
The ability to combine different processes has been termed cognitive fluidity; this is the basis for adaption and evolution throughout human history. In today’s world we can all call upon wide-spectrum cognitive fluidity (we are developing it through using the Internet, for example), which allows one, one such as yourself for example, to break out of the box of expert-led mindclosets, simply by flowing like water out of that dam box. Most of the mainstream education and media science focuses on change within the box or expanding the box, but true innovation occurs at the intersection of different endeavours, cultures, ideas and mindsets.
The Reality of Human Society Is on the Decks for a Remix
So dice the slice, start cutting the edge that cuts. There is always a photon of opportunity that your light-sensitive intuition—the soul’s technology—can pick up on. In comparison, the rational mind—although useful for crystallizing—is like a lumbering great Victorian machine.
In the book The Medici Effect, Frans Johansson starts by talking about an architect, Mick Pearce, with a passion for understanding natural systems. Mick Pearce was given the task of creating an attractive office building in hotter-than-hot Harare in Zimbabwe without using air conditioning.
He succeeded.
Termite Wisdom
Mick’s interest in ecology allowed him to draw upon termite wisdom. Termites cool their skyscraper mounds through a series of tunnels.
The size of a termite is:
The size of its mound is:
That’s a termite skyscraper.
Termite Cities are the future.
From The Medici Effect (Frans is fairly corporatized, but his essential insights are excellent):
“Termites must keep the internal temperature in their mounds at a constant 87 degrees in order to grow an essential fungus. Not an easy job since temperatures on the African plains can range from over100 degrees during the day to below 40 at night. Still, the insects manage it by ingeniously directing breezes at the base of the mound into chambers with cool, wet mud and then redirecting this cooled air to the peak. By constantly building new vents and closing old ones, they can regulate the temperature very precisely.”
Draw Upon Your Passions
So when you slacken off from a problem you will find that there is a direction that your subconscious wants you to go in. The challenge is accepting it, for when we are hell bent on problem-busting through hard struggle, we cannot believe that the relaxed, enjoyable, often leisure-based and more fun calling we are receiving is in fact the fastest way to not only solve the problem, but to completely change the context.
The things you are naturally drawn to, the stuff you love—if pursued with a truly open heart—will open the doors to enable you to innovate your life as you organically find new interconnections between your different endeavours.
Simple, but Certainly Not Easy
In a rut? Then relax and let go of the ping-pong banter of the mind and the problems will be solved and your creativity will flourish.
I know how true this is. I always have a breakthrough after letting go of something that I have struggled with. Simple, but so challenging, because all the time we have the social conditioning and collective voice that tells us just to keep slugging away to ease our guilt.
To be real about it, innovation still requires sustained focus, but first we need to get in the flow of doing something that we love doing.
We Have Always Done it That Way
One example of a problem on a collective level is the overuse of fossil fuels with the attendant pollution of the environment and the extortionate costs of travel, production and distribution. The simple solution is to use new clean ‘free’ energy technologies… Hey!... they are available to be developed and have been for decades, just waiting for us to exhaust our interest in the old energy systems. The archaic way we get our energy is an automated habit that we are heavily emotionally invested in, but it no longer works.
What Is True for Our Society Is True for Us All as Individuals
The simplicity of the creative solution is hard to accept for it undermines the security of our maintenance crew, our linear mind vanguard which thinks that the world will fall apart if we don’t keep doing more and more mechanics.
If the machine requires all of your energy, then the machine is not a tool but a master. Chuck it!
“Go forth and innovate.”
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