The Direction of Intention

Truly Powerful People (311)

Posted on January 16, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

311.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

I am perpetually making lists. Well, to be more specific, I am making one list that has no end. It grows everyday. It is self-generating; when I check one thing off the list, I scribble three new things on the list. It is my “to-do” list. It is my attempt to remember my intentions, to contain the details that an intention inspires, to locate myself in time and space relative to my creation.

I am an “out-of-sight-out-of-mind kind of guy. If I turn the page on my list it no longer exists. If I turn the page my intention becomes untethered and like a hot air balloon floats up, catches the currents of air and disappears (beautifully) over the horizon of my mind. Without my list I lapse into the illusion that I have nothing to do and begin looking for things to create or projects to initiate. Turning the page can (and has) lead to serious over commitment and keystone cop-esque racing about. Newly headless chickens do what I do when I’ve made new projects and new lists and then turned back a page to find that I already had a list.

Since page turning defeats the purpose I’ve created a ritual in my list-making. My ritual has grown over time and now has more to do with aesthetics than it does with functionality. I simply do not turn the page until my list is unreadable. I do not turn the page until my list is visually beautiful. I add things to do in the between spaces. I stack to-do items on top of old things to do. I write vertically up the margins, I circle empty space and fill it in with reminders of things already on the page. Soon, the visual aspects of the list take over and I start to design. Checking things off the list provides visual counter balance. Check boxes move the eyes, different color pens are useful, and punctuation is a dynamite design element. Sometimes I pretend that the new note to myself is emphatic so I can use multiple exclamation points. Stars are good and I’ve found that there are different kinds of stars for different kinds of emphasis and effect. Jackson Pollock has nothing on my list. It is a visual record of my dance in this life.

When my list is absolutely unreadable and unbelievably beautiful and visually stimulating, I transfer the things that still need doing on to a new page. If I don’t remember stuff it probably didn’t need doing in the first place. It always feels so clean! There is so much space! There is nothing like open space to remind me of the infinite opportunities available each day of my life. I choose what goes on the list. And to think that I used to hate making lists!

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Truly Powerful People (310)

Posted on January 15, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

310.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Roger and I are sitting in the back of the theatre. The performance is over and the audience is slowly leaving. Roger sets down his pen and his note pad. Roger directed this production, Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen, and he took notes throughout the performance. He is quiet, clearly meditating on something and I ask what is on his mind. He says, “I work really hard at the details, at making the production and performances specific. I think that 97% of what I do is lost on the audience. They only get a little bit of it, maybe only 3 percent.” He lapses again into silence and I see a thought strike him, his head literally bobs at the impact.

“What?” I ask.

He smiles and responds, “It just occurred to me that it is not the same 3 percent.” He can see that I don’t understand so he continues, “Each person in the audience might only get 3 percent of what I intend, but it’s not the same 3 percent as the person sitting next to them. They see a different 3 percent. The work matters in a different way to different people.”

Another lapse of silence and then Roger stands and says, “Anyway, it doesn’t matter what they get. It only matters that I have done my best to give them my 100 percent. To offer my best work, that’s all I can do.”

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Truly Powerful People (309)

Posted on January 14, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

309.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

It is 1989 and I am showing Jim my paintings for the first time. I am shy about sharing my work because Jim is a great and accomplished artist. I admire him and am still in the phase of believing myself a fraud. I’d tried to discourage this moment but he insisted. Now, I pull out my paintings one-by-one and quietly reveal them –and myself.

He is kind and asks questions about the story behind each painting. He asks about process and impulse. We talk about who influences my work, painters and writers that I admire. Finally, as I am carefully returning the paintings to storage, he asks a question that puzzles me and stops me cold. “What are the spheres about?”

“Spheres? What do you mean?”

He smiled and said, “I thought as much. In each of your paintings, every single one, there are three spheres. You have no idea, do you?”

I began pulling the paintings, one-by-one, out of storage. Now I am seeing my paintings for the first time. It is just as he said: in each of my paintings are three distinct spheres. Each spheres exists as the point of a triangle. The paintings are stacked all around me. Jim laughs long and hard at the look of utter disbelief on my face. I’d painted them and I’d never seen them before!

He said, “You’re not nearly the fraud that you think you are.” I’m embarrassed. In addition to being confused and disoriented by the spheres, he has seen through my mask and I feel naked, exposed. He asked, “Why is it that an artist is the last to know that he or she is an artist?” He looked at me and said, “You’ll begin to see the spheres that you paint when you learn to see yourself for what you truly are. See yourself as you are, not as what you assume others want you to be.”

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Truly Powerful People (308)

Posted on January 13, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

308.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Like all good actors who are in the midst of a casting dry spell, Chris had a project in his back pocket, a one-man play called Dirt that he’d always wanted to do. He was saving it until the time was right. He’d been fortunate since arriving in New York after graduate school; he was cast regularly in plays and independent films and then, as most artist’s experience, for no apparent reason, the well went dry.

As a young actor in his native Austria he’d seen a production of Dirt and was deeply impacted by the play. It is a dark complex play. It is relevant to the world and a challenge for an actor to undertake. It is not too dramatic to say that the play grabbed Chris’s imagination; it held on to him and would not let go. It is a play well known in the German speaking world but had never had a production in English. With no work on the horizon and no casting agents calling, Chris recognized that the time was right. The play was calling.

It is a herculean task to produce a play in the best of circumstances. There is a theatre to rent, money to raise, technical staff to hire, designers to engage, props, lights, costumes, directors, and rehearsal space. When you are an unemployed actor the mountain to climb grows higher as you climb it. He produced it, rehearsed it, and performed it to rave reviews. The success of the first production led to a second and a third. Then a fourth production called. And 4 years later Chris is working with a screenwriter to create the film version.

I talked with Chris today and he told me that he has the feeling that he was supposed to do this play. He had to do the first production. He had to do it. It was always with him and would not let go of his imagination. Somehow,” he said, “I have become its steward. This play and its message is his to bring to the world. He has grown through its challenges. He said, “I think the play chose me.”

Isn’t it true, looking back on your life, that sometimes the story chooses you?

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Truly Powerful People (307)

Posted on January 12, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

307.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

She was deeply moved by the conversation. We were talking with a group about interconnectivity and the global impact of small actions – and the reverse, the impact on your life by the larger happenings in the world. She was moved because she recognized how easy it is to say, “This is how the events in the world are impacting my life;” it is much more difficult to accept that your choices and actions impact the world in a significant way. Someone in the group said, “I understand it in an abstract way but it is hard for me to believe that my small life has any impact on the world.”

We imagine ourselves so small.

For a moment the group was quiet and then she offered this story: she told us that many years ago she had a cat and periodically the cat suffered respiratory attacks. The vet diagnosed the cat with asthma but she wondered how could the asthma be periodic? What was triggering these attacks? They seemed random. The vet confirmed that the attacks were not allergies. One day, the answer struck her like a thunderbolt. She was the trigger of the cat’s asthma! The cat had the asthma attacks every time she was feeling anxious. She thought her anxiety was a result of the cat’s attacks but the opposite was true. She said, “It sounds like such a little thing but it opened my eyes; if my cat’s suffering was triggered by my anxiety, what else was I triggering?” She didn’t want her cat to suffer so she made changes in her life. And her life changed.

It is the little stories that send big ripples. The teacher that said to the student, “You can…,” or the parent that tells the child, “Follow your dream…,” or the friend who says, “Why not try….” Everything that’s moved the world forward started with one tiny moment of encouragement, one small choice not to carry the anxiety forward another day.

Who might you be if you recognized that your actions, especially the small actions, set into motion ripples that shake the world?

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Truly Powerful People (306)

Posted on January 11, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

306.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Horatio gave me two great gifts last night (well, in truth, there were more than two but I’d make his head swell were I to admit it).

First, he told me he was going to hold my head in the toilet, drown me in the porcelain pool, until I told more stories within these posts. “I want examples from real life!” he exclaimed. “Practice what you preach!” He is, of course, right. He is also quite a bit taller than I am and fully capable of making good on his threat. I love a good story and sometimes tell them. Lora would caution you to remember that I am given to exaggerating details – I call that good story telling, and she once threw a frozen leg of lamb at me feet. I danced like she was shooting at my boots. No toes were broken and she made me eat the leg of lamb later that night. Imagine my trauma.

Second, in the bar after the Pinter film, Horatio cautioned me to pay attention to my language (he took a play from my playbook!) and helped me see that I too often set up oppositions: for instance, I regularly assert that process is better than outcome. It’s not. It is more accurate to say that I believe outcome nests within process as a finite game nests within and infinite game. We need both. I believe that if you pay attention to the process, the quality of your relationships in the moment, the outcomes will take care of themselves. If you focus on the outcomes to the exclusion of the process (i.e. standardized tests, bottom lines, the ends justify the means, weighing our interests against our values), you will end up asking yourself, “What’s it all about?” You will end up justifying and defending your actions.

Everyone deserves a friend like Horatio. I mean it. I’m not exaggerating. I’m not saying it just to keep my head out of the commode. Really.

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Truly Powerful People (305)

Posted on January 10, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

305.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Just outside my bedroom window, attached to the upper right frame of the window, a spider has spun a web. She’s been there for months. At first she was a passing fancy, something I noticed or not; now, she is part of my morning ritual. When I wake up, the first thing I do is look to the corner to see if she is still there.

I live on the 4th floor in a building that sits on a peninsula. The winds that come off the Puget Sound can be ferocious and my building is on the front line; there is nothing to break the wind between my apartment and the Sound. I have watched with amazement how my spider is buffeted by the winds and yet seems unaffected. Her web pulses and violently vibrates with the wind and she seems to be napping. I have been in more than a few earthquakes and my spider’s ride with the wind is longer and more fierce than any quake that I’ve experienced. She rides the power of nature (so far); there is no resistance to it. There is no point in resisting it and she knows this far better than I.

Now that I’m invested in her life I am busy wrapping stories around her experiences. My window does not seem to be a great place to build a web either for food or protection. I wonder about her choices and how did she get so high in the first place? I wonder if the wave motion of her web makes her seasick as it surely would make me queasy (and attaining sea legs for a spider is either less or more complex than it is for me and my two points of contact). Not only that, but she lives in a vertical plane and I wonder if she experiences gravity like I do. And, if she doesn’t, what does she experience?

I know one day I will wake up and she will be gone and I will wonder if she left by choice or was carried away. Perhaps she just let go. In any case, she has been a great teacher and has inspired some wonderful questions and more than one inner reflection (How do I live with such ease and ride the winds with as much grace? What is it to construct your world to flex and adapt to the changes and forces of life?). I imagine that, were she human, she’d tell me not to fret so much. “Spin your web,” she’d say, “you have no control over the winds or how many bugs fly your way. Do your part, the rest is out of your hands.”

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Truly Powerful People (304)

Posted on January 9, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

304.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

When I think about focus placement I return again and again to Declan Donnellan’s book, The Actor and the Target. It’s about the actor’s process but the concepts in the book apply to life beyond the stage.

The first of the six rules of the target is deceptively simple: There is always a target. He writes, “You can never know what you are doing until you first know what you are doing it to.”

I like this rule because it eliminates separation and it accents connectivity. No one lives in a vacuum. We are, all of us, agents of action. We want. We desire. We pursue. And every action, to be known, must have a focus. Every verb needs an object. Your actions matter. They have impact on something or someone. Always.

When we are lost, when we are convinced that we don’t know what we are doing, we focus on the “I” or the “not knowing.” A focus on the “I” is a focus on what we are trying to get. With a shift of focus from the “I” to the target there also comes a shift of intention for getting something to what we bring to IT. Considering the target places the focus outside of us – and provides a bigger picture that includes others – and that’s when knowing what you are doing becomes possible.

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Truly Powerful People (303)

Posted on January 8, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

303.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

In high school biology I remember dissecting frogs. We had a worksheet that guided our dissection, identifying internal organs, muscle groups, and the skeleton. We analyzed the component parts of a frog’s body, reducing it to smaller and smaller parts, reducing the small parts to even smaller component parts until we were looking at cells beneath a microscope. The lesson was designed for us to understand how all of those components, when reassembled, combined to be the body of a frog. Even then I was aware of how dependent my education was upon dissection and reduction: we diagramed sentences, we divided history into centuries, into decades, into years, into months, and so on. Synthesis, an action that is the opposite of analysis, was rare and generally discouraged.

As Joe recently said, “analysis is comfortable.” It leads us to believe that we know, that we are competent. If we can reduce it to its component parts then we can talk about it. We can agree on the functional purpose of the heart of the frog. The road of analysis leads to the city of Rules in the county of Doctrine in the state of Objectivity. It is useful, practical, and only half of the picture.

Synthesis is a walk in the other direction. It leads to greater and greater questions. It is to step toward uncertainty, to entertain possibilities, to have differing perceptions and points of view. To synthesize is to engage. To synthesize is to step into the picture and experience the frog hopping through your fingers. It is to touch life. It is another way of knowing, the kind that cannot be isolated or contained. It is the kind of knowing that requires poetry to articulate.

Our bias is our blind spot: to contain is not the same as to comprehend. There are many ways of knowing. To fully grasp what has value and what does not requires both analysis and synthesis. Our analysis bias is the line tripping educators and business alike. The test can tell you some things. The data can describe some things. There are a myriad of other things that tests and bottom lines can’t illuminate.

The same tenet applies to you. How much time do you spend analyzing your self, dissecting yourself, reducing your life to the component parts, focusing on the outcomes? Do you ever see your life as an ongoing process, as a miracle of connectivity, as a step into the unknown (do you really believe that you are containable, knowable)?

Think on this: To analyze the component parts of the frog it is necessary first to kill it. Do not be surprised when analyzing yourself that you wonder if you really matter or are confused about the greater meaning of life. To reach those experiences you first have to put down your scalpel and step into the dance.

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Truly Powerful People (302)

Posted on January 7, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

302.

Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

I moved to Seattle over a decade ago. My move was not planned. It was spontaneous, reactive, and felt like a leap into the unknown. It felt like a leap into the unknown because it was a leap unknown. I didn’t have a job or an intention. I didn’t know anyone and more to the point, no one knew me. There was no role to fulfill, no expectations, no identity that I had to uphold. It took me a few weeks to realize how much of my life was defined by the day-to-day relationships I had before my move. Suddenly, I was undefined. I was unknown to others. I was unknown to myself. It was both liberating and disorienting.

As I met new friends I was conscious of how I told the story of myself. I was amused and often surprised by story I told. What did I share of my past? What did I withhold? What did I need them to know? What did I want to scrub from my definition? What was true? What is truth? What is the difference between experience and interpretation? I was conscious of how my new friends told their stories and identified themselves, too. It was like a game. I began to understand how we story ourselves every moment of everyday: we tell ourselves and the people in our lives a story of who we believe we are. We tell the story of what we do or wish we did, we tell the story of what we have or do not have, of what we fear to do or have mastered. And, most significantly, I recognized that the story is not fixed, it is fluid, it is dynamic.

I recognized that the healthy people in my life knew that they were dynamic and not fixed. Their story was vibrant and relational. The powerful people were not investing great amounts of energy in claiming their identity like a miner claims territory. They did not need others to see the world as they saw it; they needed to engage with multiple perspectives not eliminate them. Growth to the truly powerful is expanding consciousness. Their energy is directed at the creation of life and not the perpetual creation of rules and boundaries. They were not fixed; they were fluid. The truly powerful people were not enabling others or themselves.

I’ve learned (from experience) that this quality of fixed or fluid story reveals the root: a fixed story is a story of fear. A fixed story is looking for power in others. A fluid stroy is rooted in love and knows itself as powerful; the story is not about need, it is about gift. It is a story lived through what you bring to life.

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