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Re-invention

I work with people who want something different than they have: more money, better business, a life. In some cases, being unhappy in their current circumstances, they are looking to re-invent themselves. In M.G. Vassanji’s book, Nostalgia, the characters have a chance to do that not through hard work and dedication, but through money. If you have enough money, you can buy a new personality and a new life in the future that Vassanji has created.

I see this bringing up, at least, two moral questions: is it right that the rich can choose a different life and the poor are stuck with their lot; and what happens to the young/not re-invented who are not able to get jobs because the others don’t die or retire?

These are just two questions that are raised in this fascinating book about a possible near future where part of the world is barricaded behind a wall. Living in these times, the book does seem to be an extrapolation of a possible future give our current trajectory: nuclear accidents, a great income divide, separations of us vs them, engineered immortality.

These thoughts are woven through the novel that follows a doctor who patches re-invented clients whose past leaks through into their current life.

A very special childhood, very dear to me, and poignant, but it is fake–my fiction. There must be components of real memory in this narrative, themes that were preserved from my previous life, others that were invented exclusively for this one. My previous data of course was destroyed. There’s a thriving industry promising to connect people to their real origins. People end up unhappy with their current lives, and some even desire to go back to what they are told they were. But I loved the happy childhood of my memory. Recalling it was like reading a portion of some classic novel. From that idyllic foundation of my current GN life I have looked ahead, and achieved my successes in my own quiet way. I have served society.
Page 55, Nostalgia, M.G. Vassanji

This book has so many layers that a close reading or at least a book club discussion should be a requirement.

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Where Did I Leave It? Finding My Great Work

Michael Bungay Stanier has been in my inbox for years now. As an insecure coach, I am compelled to learn from the best. He is one of those. His napkin-sized book, Find Your Great Work, gives me an idea, which is its mission.

I am particularly partial to the maps 4 – 6: Choices. The book is a quick look at 12 exercises that help you find work that matters. After discovering your great work–work that lights you up, you have a better chance of feeling engaged, empowered & in the flow–all the buzz works for finding the meaning in your work. Map 4 takes you through the challenge of creating space, in your life, to do your great work. There is a whirlwind around all of us that pulls us in a dozen different directions. You need to “get clear on what you’re willing to give up and what you’re not by deciding what’s negotiable and what isn’t.” (pg 64)

The map has you define everything that is going on in your life as non-negotiable, feels non-negotiable–but maybe not, and negotiable. One key to this exercise is knowing that we have a choice for just about everything. We might not exercise it. Don’t like your boss? You have a choice whether you stay in your job or not. Staying might be non-negotiable, or it might feel like it is, and it isn’t. Running through these hard choices can help us understand why we are where we are, if we want to change, accepting what we can’t and changing what we can.

Once you have your list, you will need to consider:

  • “What has become clear? What are you seeing as more important than you realized? Less important?
  • Are you giving due time and space to the things you say are non-negotiable? Are they the first things you book in and hold as you allocate your time and energy?
  • What do the non-negotiable items bring you? And at what cost? What are you holding on to here?
  • If you had to move 3 items from ‘non-negotiable’ to ‘feels like non-negotiable’ what would they be? How does that free things up?
  • Knowing now what’s really important, what can you start to say No to?” (pg 68)

This is one of the exercises in the book which punches way above its weight class because

Even though we might find ourselves in situations we wouldn’t pick.

Even though we carry with us all the uncertainty and history of who we are and where we come from.

Things only get interesting when you take full responsibility for the choices you make.

Finding Your Great Work, Michael Bungay Stanier, page 16
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Where Good Ideas Come From: Germinating Innovation

I picked this book off my bookshelf to see if it would help me with some background for an idea generation workshop I was planning. In the interest of “I don’t know enough,” I thought that if I knew “Where Good Ideas Come From,” I could design a workshop around those concepts.

Steven Johnson wrote the kind of book I love. One where I can learn some fun facts that I store in my brain and bring out as a kind of party trick, like the air conditioner was invented by a guy named Carrier who was commissioned to help a newspaper control the humidity in their printing room (pg 280) or that with only four molecules (methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water) and electricity, the building blocks for life (sugars, lipids, and nucleic acids) can be created (pg 49).

Great for a party, but how is this useful for a workshop?

This book gave me some great back story for moving innovation forward, like McGyver-ing is entertaining and can allow for an eclectic assemblage of disparate parts only when a problem is staring you in the face. As the video illustrates, in attempting to have individuals create ideas, I discovered that connecting the participants in an open environment where ideas can flourish in unregulated channels encourages dynamic patterns of innovation through liquid networks, slow hunches, serendipity and noise (pg 232). I am excited to play around in the muck of idea generation.

As an aside, I am fascinated by the Charles Darwin quote that, as Johnson states show Darwin “oscillates between two structuring metaphors that govern all his work: the complex interdependencies of the tangled bank, and the war of nature; the symbiotic connections of an ecosystem and the survival of the fittest.” (pg 238)

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us…Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life…

Pg 238, Steven Johnson,
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Ehrengard: Strongly Feminine

Some books arrive on my book shelf by mysterious means. I suspect I picked this one up to discover the magic of Isak Dinesen’s writing. She is also known as Karen Blixen of “Out of Africa” fame. Ehrengard is called a fairy tale on the back of book blurb. There is a stunning princess and handsome prince. This story, though, uses them as a setting for the real tale of Ehrengard.

The narrator is a court painter who sees the world with Dinesen’s painterly eye:

“Imagine to yourself that you be quietly stepping into a painting by Claude Lorrain, and that the landscape around you becomes alive with balsamic breezes wafting and violets turning the mountain sided into long gentle waves of blue…

The Goddess of Love, the Lady Venus herself, has entrusted me with the work, and I have only followed her instructions.”

pg 32 – Ehrengard

In this story, we follow Herr Cazotte around as he creates a scene where he is attempting to seduce the princess’s fair handmaiden.

I wonder, what would she be thinking as all this plays out.

Ehrengard is the only daughter from a strong military family bred in the mountains of northern Europe. Several times Herr Cazotte refers to her as an Amazon. In this scene, though, that descriptive was probably not what came to his mind because, even in the third person narration, his feelings shine through:

The great artist was gentle and courteous, if a little impersonal, in his manner with the highborn maiden. From his rich treasury of knowledge he took out for her benefit strange tales of ancient times, theories of art and life and fancies of his own on the phenomena of existence. He entertained her, too, with narrations of his own eventful life, dwelling on the days when he was a poor boy in shabby clothes, or slightly touching on his triumphs at academic and courts, and sprinkling his talk with accounts of the life of outcasts in dark streets or with bits of scandal from sublime places.

He found that the girl has read little and lent her books from his exclusive library or read out to her in the shade of the big trees. Poetry, new to her, puzzled and fascinated her. Herr Cazotte had a voice made for reciting poetry and had often been asked to read by princesses and beaux-esprits. At times he would lower the book with a finger in it and go on reciting with his eyes in the tree crowns.

On a very lovely evening he had been reading to her in the garden and was slowly accompanying her back to the house, when he stopped and made her stop with him by a foundation representing Leda and the swan and repeated a stanza from the poem they had last read together. He was silent for a while, the girl was silent with him, and as he turned toward her he found her young face very still.

“A penny for your thoughts, my Lady Ehrengard,” he said.

She looked at him, and for a moment a very slight blush slid over her face.

“I was not,” after a pause she answered him slowly and gravely, “really thinking of anything at all.”

He had no doubt that here, as ever, she was speaking the truth.

pg 52 – Ehrengard

What was she thinking? Besides, finally silence.

Herr Cazotte seems to make the assumption that she is an uneducated country maiden. Even if the girls were left to needlepoint, they were also taught the management of the household. Ehrengard would have, also, would have learned a lot from the antics of her four brothers. Much can be gleaned from watching and listening. Women have learned that well over the years. Outside of her duties, she seems quite meditative. Herr Cazotte sees her as simple. I can see her as strong, feminine and not interested in playing demeaning flirting games. I can see her statuesque figure enjoying a pastoral view when she is interrupted by a flea that she has no desire to acknowledge or to give platitudes.

I was concerned that this book would not be relevant in the age of #metoo. If we stand in Ehrengard’s character, we wee a woman who understands the world and walks her own path. It is a fairy tale where the happily ever after comes from being true to oneself.