Emergent properties tend to have deep truths. They bubble up organically, like they were just waiting to be discovered all along. The best way to cultivate their growth is to learn how not to suppress them, how to get out of your own way.
Read MoreEFFORT
Success only comes from doing the thing that you want to say “you’ve done”, but that doesn’t always mean that you’re going to have a good time doing it.
Read MoreDOUBLE RAINBOW
Sometimes there are moments of beauty or epiphany or surprise that simply need to exist in the moments you experience them. You have to make peace with the thought that there simply won’t be a “later”. There won’t be a “future”. There won’t be a “payoff”. There is the experience, right now, and you just so happen to be lucky enough to experience it.
Read MoreDESPAIR (2nd in a two part series)
In despair we often find our most honest voices and our wellsprings of motivation. In despair we can neither hide nor deceive ourselves about what makes us feel things deeply. In despair we are forced to try and change what we must change, because to live but a single additional day similarly burdened would be untenable, unthinkable. Despair propels our creative engines to make our own pain more bearable.
Read MoreELATION (1st of a two part series)
Filled with lightness your heart is so full: it's not crazy at all to think the novel that you've been longing to write could just come out, right now— I'll just drop into my seat for a moment or two, sketch it out—easy!—and fill in the blanks this afternoon! Anything is possible. Songs come into being unbidden. Hunger makes you feel good, as if those cranky pangs were just life's way of helping you savor your own wonderful, scintillating senses. You must have been doing something substantial to grow so hungry, right? Right on!
Read MoreIN THE BEGINNING
Even the largest, most influential creations begin with the intangibility of an idea. Just because some ideas are easy to generate does not indicate whether they will grow and thrive.
Read MoreVISITING PLACES YOU WOULDN’T CHOOSE TO VISIT
You wouldn’t have signed up for the experience if you had a choice. Choice is the great luxury, the downy pillow beneath a tired head in a private sleeping car on a long journey. Reality is a seat in steerage on a wooden bench, with inadequate ventilation and a colicky baby in the row behind you.
Read MoreTHE COLLISION OF IMAGININGS
In the main hall the ceiling will soar above everyone, underground, with near magical light shining on opportunities and courageous perseverance and solidified resolutions of city officials, consultants by the score, and financiers. The transit station will declare the power of some, but it will profoundly serve the diverse needs of all.
Read MoreWHERE IT COMES FROM
Where does the mass of what we know come from? Sometimes the wellspring simply surprises me, and other days I nod my head in respectful remembrance. The balance of each day is an accumulation of past experience, and to forget our sources is to forget ourselves.
Read MoreI HAVEN'T MET YOU YET
None of us are born knowing all of the people who will have an influence on our lives. We accumulate those names over time, and soon thereafter they feel like they've always been a part of our experience.
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