021: Living 'in the imaginarium': your creative life transformed
Integrating the inner and the outer work
I’m taking a break this week, away from desk and screen, so I’m re-purposing something from the archives that touches on this month’s theme of integration. It asks the question:
How do we reconcile the inner and the outer aspects of our creative work?
Creating what we want requires us to step into the ‘imaginarium of possibility.’
The resources we need are few (and low, or no, financial cost). They are: a willingness to think beyond what we know; time and space to reflect on our vision; and, perhaps, some simple tools for capturing our reflections (a journal, for example, or voicenote software).
Simple to know; not always easy to do.
Sometimes—for a number of reasons—we hold back from crossing the threshold into the imagined space of the future. We’re reluctant to embrace its possibility.
Sometimes the resistance is stronger than reluctance: it’s sheer terror. This resistance is rooted in our deep fear of change, or as a result of our human negativity bias; and/or because our culture just doesn’t value the power of imagination in the first place.
The two biggest expressions of resistance I see and hear most often are: (i) it’s too much/I can’t do it alone and (ii) it’s too big/I don’t know where to start.
It’s too much/I can’t do it alone
I’ve witnessed time and again how the energy of possibility—sometimes so present when we’re with others—drops off radically when we come to take action alone.
We need co-creators: people who can share our purpose, our imaginings and our creative desires. When we’re creating, communities of practice are vital—not just in expanding the limitations of our thinking but to equip ourselves with the courage to take the step in the first place.
I’m consistently amazed at the alchemy of what’s created when there’s a collective sense of mutual vision, commitment and trust.
This is one of the missions behind my group the Creative Courage Circle and why I created it: to provide a space to ask better questions and to benefit from the resonance when we gather in mutual curiosity. As a result, there is always a shift (sometimes almost too subtle to be perceptible) in the energetics of our connection.
This energetic shift (the result of curious individuals participating in shared discussion, reflection and creative practice) is what transports us into the imaginarium and puts us in touch with its vast possibility.
But it’s too big/I don’t know where to start
Even before we join forces with others, even before we take action, we first need to connect to our vision and commitment.
Sometimes, the only way to do this is—paradoxically—to acknowledge the limitations of that vision. Because the imaginarium of possibility is vast, sometimes beyond our comprehension. How can we prevent overwhelm (and the resulting paralysis) when we step into it?
In Four Thousand Weeks Oliver Burkeman reminds us of the fundamental, and sobering, fact of our human finitude. We have a limited amount of time alive on the planet—on average, in fact, only four thousand weeks—in which to do everything we want to do. If we’re courageous enough to embrace this fact, Burkeman says, it leads not to grief but greater ease. We surrender our desire to do everything and the intense effort-ing it takes. Then we use this fact to clarify our decision-making and galvanise us into action.
When it comes to activism, Burkeman suggests that we ‘consolidate our care’:
We’re exposed, these days, to an unending stream of atrocities and injustice – each of which might have a legitimate claim on our time and our charitable donations, but which in aggregate are more than any one human could ever effectively address …
Once you grasp the mechanism operating here, it becomes easier to consciously pick your battles in charity, activism and politics: to decide that your spare time, for the next couple of years, will be spent lobbying for prison reform and helping at a local food pantry – not because fires in the Amazon or the fate of refugees don’t matter, but because you understand that to make a difference, you must focus your finite capacity to care (italics mine).
Simply put, we can’t do it all.
Nor can we do it all when it comes to creativity.
If we want to translate imagination into action, it’s vital we connect to our bigger vision—to enable us to see what writer and theologian Matthew Fox calls our ‘images of immensity.’ But this very immensity can sometimes prevent us from beginning in the first place.
In the context of creativity, ‘consolidating our care’ might mean putting aside one project in favour of another. It might mean working in an incremental way, focusing on one section at a time (one chapter of a novel; one corner of a canvas) while being mindful of its place in the bigger whole.
These incremental actions, which work on the level of structure (time, resources, organisation, systems), are important if we are to materialise what we’ve glimpsed in the imaginarium.
But this way of being with our creativity—working just at this level of structure—can end up feeling dry, routine and workaday. I know this all too well. I wrote a whole novel this way, systematising plot lines, chunking my writing time, churning through the pages with the mindset of ‘getting through it.’
There’s another way: one that invites in a sacred aspect to the creative, one that tethers the everyday reality of our actions and practices to the immense vision of the imaginarium.
If we can manage it, this tethering—the micro to the macro; the everyday to the sacred; the known to the unknown—results in an integration that leaves us feeling more vibrant and alive.
To ‘cultivate care’ is to develop our capacity for devotional discernment.
By this, I mean developing a spirit of observance and ritual to one particular piece of that vast imagarium.
We focus on the work in hand with devotion, love and intensity. This focus, this attention, is something I recently heard described as ‘devotional leadership’—a term that really speaks to me.
That devotion to the everyday needs to also include the structures we create for our work, our thinking, our creativity—resulting in an integration necessary to our creativity. This integration is what joins the (routine, everyday) action to the ‘immensity of image’ of our expansive vision: the thing that feels, sometimes, beyond us; that is bigger than our understanding, bigger than us.
Our devotion is expressed through the faith of regular commitment: showing up, bringing the everyday resources we need to do the work. It is expressed, too, when we bring the energy of intention of our bigger vision: experiencing it almost like a homeopathic essence of the whole imaginarium. Despite being tiny in volume, that essence is powerful.
Devotional leadership means turning up, day after day, to practise the sacred in the container of the everyday.
If you have rituals or practices that help you with your creativity, I’d love to hear about them and how and why they work for you. Let’s find ways to co-create and elevate each other’s artistic and self-expression.
Love, Rachel
p.s. Normal service resumes next week with a brand new theme …
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