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I don’t know where I am going to be living in two or three months time – a prospect that fills me with a mixture of exhilaration and gut-wrenching fear. In my manifesto, “Purposive Drift: making it up as we go along”, I wrote, “The world is a place of incredible variety, rich in the potential for new experiences, a whole canvas of of the unfamiliar and unknown, filled with possibilities for change”. I also hinted that many of our ways of being and thinking obscure that hope filled fact.
I don’t know where I am going to be living, because we have decided to sell our house and move somewhere else. The notion being that in that way we can create a context where we have more options and more freedom of action – a step into “the unfamiliar and unknown, filled with possibilities for change”.
This, I suspect, is one of the problems of living a life of purposive drift. While there is a certain excitement about leaping into the dark, there is also the fear that one might be removing the ground beneath your feet.
I am reminded of an early version of the computer game, “Prince of Persia”. There comes a point in the game where there seems no way forward, every exit seems blocked. The solution to this dilemma is to take a running leap from a wide pillar, with an abyss on either side, plunging into the darkness where it is revealed that there is ledge, which if you grab on to it and haul yourself up there is an exit to the next level of the game.
Shifting context, something I advise might some times be necessary, can feel like this. Some times it is easy. When I last took a decision on this scale, my decision to leave a full-time job in education, where I had been working for some fourteen years, it was easy. Although I didn’t know what I was going to do, the combination of the cushion of a modest redundancy package and the knowledge that with our new Nu-Labour styled senior management I would be unable to operate in a creative and productive way, meant that getting out seemed the only sensible option. Watching talented and creative colleagues crumbling in a culture of compliance and seeing all the positive things we had built up over the years fading away confirmed that it had been the right thing to do.
But, my sense is that more often than not a decision to shift context is more ambiguous than that. This morning as I made myself a coffee, looked out of the door leading to the garden, where there is a lilac tree, that has absorbed some of my mother’s ashes, the pond where the last of her koi lives and then climbed up the stairs past my son’s room, the bedroom I share with Mimi and then up some more stairs to my nicotine stained office, I could almost physically feel the network of people, things and memories that are embedded in this place and the sense of knowing where I am located in that complex web of networks.
Moving out of the web of the familiar is a disconcerting prospect, even when you know that doing so carries a promise of freedom. Which is why I have a certain sympathy for people who feel that they are stuck in a context which they feel is slowly diminishing them, but can see no way out. All that I can say to them, and myself, is that stepping out the familiar into the unfamiliar may be a less drastic step than it feels, for:
“The world is a place of incredible variety, rich in the potential for new experiences, a whole canvas of of the unfamiliar and unknown, filled with possibilities for change.”

Trevor Pateman has focussed my attention on something I hadn’t really thought about before; the importance of unlearning. There’s a lot to think about here and I am pretty certain he’s on to something significant if mostly neglected. Meanwhile, while I digest this idea here is his take on the role of unlearning in intellectual adventure:
“Though I am quite conventionally admiring of those who manage to remain monogamous for long marital lives, I despair a bit over people who stay with the same ideas, the same theories, the same subjects, throughout their intellectual lives. Often enough, it seems that they are living off what they banked in their academic youth. They are failing to move on and out. But moving on is what the intellectual life is about; it is what makes it an adventure rather than an entrenchment. This is not (though it could be) an apology for diletanntism – for what the Utopian socialist Charles Fourier called the butterfly passion. No more than an artist starts with a style or a writer starts with a voice, but rather they have to achieve these things, so an intellectual life does not start with a vision but rather has to achieve one. And it is achievable only through movement, not through the reiteration of what one read in one’s youth. (When, for example, I did know What Marx Said, because I read it fairly conscientiously. Now I have lapsed and I no longer know. That is how it should be).”

I’ve used this quote before, but it seems timely to resurrect it:
“I see humanity as a family that has hardly met. I see the meeting of people, bodies, thoughts, emotions or actions as the start of most change. Each link created by a meeting is like a filament, which, if they were all visible, would make the world look as though it is covered in gossamer. Every individual is connected to others, loosely or closely, by a unique combination of filaments which stretch across the frontiers of space and time. Every individual assembles past loyalties, present needs and visions of the future in a web of different contours, with the help of heterogeneous elements borrowed from other individuals; and this constant give-and-take has been the main stimulus of humanity’s energy. Once people see themselves as influencing one another, they cannot be merely victims: anyone, however modest, then becomes a person capable of making a difference, minute though it may be, to the shape of reality. New attitudes are not promulgated by law, but spread, almost like an infection, from one person to another.”
Theodore Zeldin “An Intimate History of Humanity”, Minerva, 1995, pp465-466

“The world can only be grateful for the precision and insistence with which doctors remind it of the dangers of smoking; that is their job. But the suspicion here is that the passions and uses to which that information is being put are wildly dispropotionate to the danger that tobacco poses – particularly other people’s smoke. For the moment, cigarettes have become the focus or fetish of puritanical prohibitions like those that, in the past, periodically constrained freedom and censored pleasure in the name of protecting the collective well-being from harm, but always under the darker suspicion of wishing to increase state control or to control other interests.”
(Richard Klein, “Cigarettes are sublime”, Picador, 1995, pp15)

Thanks to a post by Pat Kane about plans for a new School in New York, my morning was brightened. Here, at last, are some people rethinking the nature of schooling in a sensible way, with a million dollar grant from the MacArthur Foundation to support its planning and development:
“The new school has been conceived as a dynamic learning system that takes its cues from the way games are designed, shared and played. All players in the school ­ teachers, students, parents and administrators ­ will be empowered to innovate using 21st century literacies that are native to games and design. This means learning to think about the world as a set of in interconnected systems that can be affected or changed through action and choice, the ability to navigate complex information networks, the power to build worlds and tell stories, to see collaboration in competition, and communicate across diverse social spaces. It means that students and teachers will engage in their own learning in powerful ways.”

Words to ponder from Mark Pesce:
“People who don’t fight over anything else do fight over money. Money (particularly in the United States) is so fraught, so overloaded with meaning, that it nearly always evokes some sort of neurotic reaction. Money means survival. Money means freedom. Money means choice. It may not buy happiness, but, as Mae West once remarked, “I’ve been poor, and I’ve been rich, and rich is better.” Money is so intensely evocative that we have been forced to develop elaborate and relatively fool-proof systems to handle it. Banks and other financial institutions exist precisely because people are rarely rational with their own money: these institutions serve as the collective superego we employ when confronted with choices about money. That these institutions – such as BCCI, or Arthur Andersen – periodically abandon these principles in the pursuit of profit indicates the huge gravitational strength of wealth.
Social scientists and neuropsychologists have recently begun to test the human drive to wealth. One of the most significant findings – released just a few months ago – indicates that we each have an innate sense of fairness in every financial transaction, and we’re more than willing to walk away from a transaction which we deem unfair. Furthermore, we’re willing to punish others for perpetrating those transactions. This cognitive “center of fairness” is one of the last areas of the brain to develop fully – it marks the final stage of adulthood, appearing reliably in adults after about age 22. This means our sense of fairness draws upon many of the foundational cognitive structures of the brain, which help us to understand value, social ranking, need, and so forth. Only when these systems are in place can we develop a notion of fairness. And if any of these systems fail – as does happen, on occasion – psychologists can predict an individual’s descent into psychopathology. Being fair is perhaps our highest cognitive achievement as individuals, and thus – quite rightly – it is marked as the beginning of wisdom.”

Dan Wieden, the Wieden in Wieden + Kennedy, gets it right when he says:
“I think it’s important that if you’re going to be innovative, that there’s not a process for everything. Sometimes it seems that if you’re never lost you’re never going to wind up any place new. It’s only if you’re willing to be completely fucked-up that you’re going to do anything important.”

I dug out this quote from Jane Jacobs yesterday for a comment I made on Dave Pollard’s “How to save the world” site. I was then going to use it in a much longer post I was going to write, but thought, “sod she says it better than me”. So here it is:
“In its very nature, successful economic development has to be open-ended rather than goal orientated, and has to make itself up expediently and empirically as it goes along. For one thing, unforeseeable problems arise. The people who developed agriculture couldn’t foresee soil depletion. The people who developed the automobile couldn’t foresee acid rain. Earlier I defined economic development as a process of continually improvising in a context that makes injecting improvisations into everyday life feasible. We might amplify this by calling development an improvisational drift into unprecedented kinds of work that that carry unprecedented problems, then drifting into improvised solutions, which carry further unprecedented work carrying unprecedented problems …”
(Jane Jacobs, “Cities and the Wealth of Nations”, Pelican Books, 1986, pp221-222)

Simon Caulkin has a great article about voom-voom capitalism in today’s Observer. As he points out:
“While it is greatly to the taste of the capital markets, the private equity management style runs up hard against what people say they want from work. According to studies such as Roffey Park’s annual ‘management agenda’, most people are still more motivated by making a difference, by recognition and by doing a good job and feeling good about it than anything else. Put bluntly, beyond a certain point most people want meaning from work rather than money.”
And then goes on to says:
“Such concerns might seem to cut little ice in the face of the high returns being claimed by the most successful private equity and hedge funds, quite apart from the extraordinary amounts being pocketed by those in charge of them. Despite what people privately think, money talks louder than anything else, doesn’t it?
Yet even in this ultra-hardnosed world, the human factor has a habit of biting back. Last week the Financial Times noted that staff at top investment banks in London, struggling to cope with record deal volumes, were so overstretched that they were in danger of making costly mistakes. One consultant noted: ‘The temptation is to drive your people harder. But there is a limit. There could be a danger of people slipping up.'”
And concludes:
“It’s a delicious irony: the boiler room of today’s voom-voom capitalism at risk of blowing up under the pressures it is imposing on others in the name of the virtuous disciplines of private equity. Down on the shop floor, whether in the City or a Land Rover plant in Solihull, you take the ‘man’ out of management at your peril.”

My repressed pedant has leapt out of the closet again. Looking at feeds related to Purposive Drift in Bloglines, I took a closer look at 37Days. There I found a quote I loved by Albert Einstein. So then I did a quick google to see if I could find any context. Could I find any? No. If anybody knows when, where and in what context he said/wrote it, I’d love to hear from you. In the meantime, here it is, naked and alone, pushing it up to about 30,301 on google:
“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”