The airbag moment

It is Monday morning and you are heading into work, late for an important meeting. Traffic is banked up on the freeway, moving at a snail’s pace, and by the time you hit the city you’re ready to burst. Every muscle in your body is focused on that meeting, five minutes in the future. You are blasting through town like the proverbial maniac. Nothing is going to stop you now.

Until a woman with a baby stroller steps out onto the road in front of you.

You hit the brakes and swerve across the centre line – straight into the path of a bus! Hauling the steering wheel about – it’s too late! You slide to your doom in a chorus of tyres. At the last moment, the bus swerves – CRASH! – you are spinning like a top across the street. You bounce off vehicles, sideswipe the kerb, THUD! The car vaults to forty five degrees before slamming its tyres back on the bitumen.

You’re wedged behind the airbag, staring back up the street. Someone raps on the side window. You burst into tears.

If you’ve experienced a car accident, you’ll know how, in the blink of an eye, your whole sense of being can change. One moment you are homing in on a temporal target – a definite event in the future. The next moment you are alive and that’s the whole story. The shock of the event wakes you up. You find yourself at existential ground zero.

You might call it an airbag moment. Heidegger calls it a moment of vision.

Simple but important things come to mind. You realize that you are someone’s mother, father, sister, brother, husband, wife, daughter, son. You want to call these people and tell them that you love them. You tell yourself that, from now on, you’ll put more effort into these relationships, for they are your most valuable assets in life. And for a brief, all-too-brief moment, you have the sense that all your powers and capacities, all your hopes and dreams and plans and visions, all the possibilities and opportunities and stuff that you take for granted on a daily basis – all of it is a gift. If you’d hit that bus you’d have lost it all and never appreciated the fullness of the gift. But you saw your death coming and lived to tell the tale.

Congratulations! You’ve had a moment of vision.

It happens in an Augenblick, says Heidegger – the blink of an eye. Suddenly, everything has changed. It is not that you are transported out of your concrete situation. On the contrary, you find that you are very much in the situation, but the situation itself has changed. Now it is your situation – the situation of a living individual taking stock of him or herself at a precise moment in life.

Heidegger describes this as an experience of fate. In the moment of vision, we come face to face with the ’simplicity of our fate’.

Beautiful things: a Stoic cure for consumerism

The Stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius was used to being surrounded by beautiful things. But all too often, the affairs of the Empire would take him away from Rome, to defend the borders against the Goths, the Parthians, or the Persians. For the greater part of his life, Marcus was forced to endure the rigors of the battlefield, where beauty was rare and brutality the order of the day.

To maintain his composure through these years of hardship and toil, Marcus sought to transform his perception of the objects he desired. Rather than think of beautiful things – clothes, jewelry, food, art and architecture – in the manner that they were commonly perceived, he sought to see them as simple material objects and evaluate them accordingly.

In his notebook, Marcus presented this as a simple technique:

‘When we have meat before us and other food, we must say to ourselves: “This is the dead body of a fish, and this is the dead body of a bird or of a pig, and again, this Falernian [wine] is only a little grape juice, and this purple robe some sheep’s wool died with the blood of a shellfish” … so that we see what kinds of things they are. This is how we should act throughout life: where there are things that seem worthy of great estimation, we ought to lay them bare and look at their worthlessness and strip them of all the words by which they are exalted. For the outward show [of things] is a wonderful perverter of reason, and when we are certain the things we are dealing with are worth the trouble, that is when it cheats us most’ (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 6.13).

Learning how to love

I caused some confusion (and a little consternation) at my brother’s wedding when I announced, in a speech before family and friends, that I didn’t know what love is, but I had always been interested in learning. It was supposed to be a Socratic gesture, but it backfired. I had forgotten, of course, that weddings are places where the idea of love is not called into question. Fortunately, no one made sense of what I was talking about and I was duly ignored.

In my defense, I was simply recounting one of my favorite of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas about learning how to love. This comes from The Joyful Wisdom (Die Frohliche Wissenschaft) of 1882. I hope you come to love it as much as I do.

‘One must learn how to love. — This is what happens to us in music: First one has to learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate it and delimit it as a separate life. Then it requires some exertion and good will to tolerate it in spite of its strangeness, to be patient with its appearances and expression, and kindhearted about its oddity. Finally, there comes a moment when we are used to it, when we sense that we should miss it if it were missing; and now it continues to compel and enchant us relentlessly until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers who desire nothing better from the world than it and only it.

But that is what happens to us not only in music. That is how we have learned to love all things that we now love. In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fairmindedness, and gentleness with what is strange; gradually, it sheds its veil and turns out to be a new and indescribable beauty. That is its thanks for our hospitality. Even those who love themselves will have learned it in this way; for there is no other way. Love, too, has to be learned’.

Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom (also trans. The Gay Science), aphorism 334.

Innovate to change the frame

Making any genuine change in life calls for innovation. Sure, you can throw yourself into the cut and thrust of changing circumstance, see what happens. But the play of events can only change you so much. There comes a point where you have to take an active role — re-imagining life and acting to redefine it. That’s a moment of personal innovation.

At the same time, innovation implies change. The great innovators are powerful agents of change — they aspire to change the world. Even if one only intends to transform the order of practice in a restricted domain, the same rule applies. Innovation is an aspirational pursuit. The will to innovation says: ‘Aspire to change the frame’.

I’m developing a perspective on innovation as an aspirational pursuit. By ‘aspirational’, I mean that innovation can be more than just a tool of entrepreneurship but a dynamic catalyst for personal empowerment and elevation. The following theses indicate the direction that the ideas are taking. These theses aren’t intended to describe every act of innovation. They are provocative ideals intended as spurs to thought.

Thesis #1: The logic of innovation is: change the part to change the whole. Innovate to change the frame.

Innovation bears upon a specific aspect of the whole. But it should aspire to transform the whole as such. The initial thing is to develop a conception of the whole that you intend to transform. Perhaps this is the set of styles, approaches and techniques employed in your creative discipline. Perhaps it is a restricted set of techniques comprising a creative method. Perhaps it is a commercial market, or the order of practice in a institution or a business unit. It could be a traffic system, a military strategy, or a political culture. Whatever the whole, an aspirational innovation should seek to transform the frame of reference on this context completely. Innovate to change the frame.

Thesis #2: Identify what’s empowering about transforming the whole.

Challenging the order of things is hard. Our thinking is couched within habits and rituals that stifle creative thought. Innovation requires you to break out of all that. It is usually necessary to prepare yourself first.

Think about how the innovation stands to empower you. How might it boost your spirit, kindle new energies, heighten your capacities to act and exist? How might it open up new time-lines and existential possibilities, freeing space on the horizon and reinvigorating life? You’ll need to be fired up and hungry for change to take that soaring leap of imagination beyond the limits of convention. Innovation shouldn’t only transform the whole — it should transform you in the process.

From this I get a third aspirational thesis:

Thesis #3: Innovate to transform your life as a whole.

Commit your person to the process of innovation. Step into the fires of creation — emerge renewed. Innovators shouldn’t lack for ambition.

Anatomy of desire

Diogenes the Cynic lived in a barrel. When Alexander the Great asked him: ‘What can I do for you?’, he replied: ‘Please step out of my sun’.

Diogenes could have asked for anything — wealth, power, fame. But he chose to sit in the sun. What a fabulous example of philosophical asceticism!

Philosophers through the ages agree that to change ourselves for the better, we must get a grip on our desires. Does this mean limiting our desire, desiring less? Perhaps it simply means distinguishing good and bad desires — desiring those things that make us happy and healthy and rejecting the contrary.

More than an American dream

On November 4, 2008, Americans said ‘yes’ to life. They looked to the future and saw an America that was different to yesterday. And they affirmed the change. They affirmed the promise of an unknown future.

Pundits and strategists will analyze the success of the Obama campaign for years to come. But the reason that Obama triumphed is clear. He campaigned on a ticket of change in times that were crying for it. He ran a disciplined campaign, and built an unprecedented grassroots movement that raised record sums of money. Most importantly, he offered the American people the chance of believing in themselves again. He achieved this, not through jingoistic flag-waving and the rejection of things un-American, but by calling upon the heroic spirit that has seen America through its darkest days.

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson weren’t born heroes but became heroic by the disposition they assumed in relation to their times. Obama reminds us that we too can be heroic, providing that we confront the need for change and see change for what it can be and is — a positive way ahead.

In times of change, this is more than just an American dream.

Creating futures

The future that we’ve been counting on for decades is unsustainable. Our task today, as individuals and societies, is to create a new vision of the future.

Bobby Kennedy said: ‘The future is not a gift: it is an achievement. Every generation helps make its own future. This is the essential challenge of the present’.

It is time we told a new story about ourselves. Are we the late-born children of the oil age, helpless and trembling on the brink of collapse? Or are we the early members of that heroic generation tasked with changing the world – the first generation of a new era of globalized co-operation and eco-consciousness?

Be warned: how you respond may change your life.

Affirmation and eternal return

Alexis was in love with life. Fresh out of art school in Fremantle, Australia, she’d picked up a scholarship to study photography under a famous Parisian photographer. Her mother had urged caution, but Alexis persisted – and thank goodness! The course – and Paris itself – was everything that she’d hoped. Her French sponsor found her an apartment in the Latin Quarter, just a stone’s throw from the Place Saint-Michel. Alexis would stroll along the Seine in the evening, up the Champs Elysées to take pictures of the Arc de Triomphe in the flurry of lights. After two months documenting daily life on the streets of Paris, she had enough material for an exhibition. Alexis felt like she was at the heart of life. Things could go anywhere from here.

One night Alexis was speaking to an old friend in Australia. They were reminiscing about their student days, which the friend dearly missed.

‘Do you remember Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return?’ the friend asked. ‘If I had to choose one time of my life to live out again and again, it would be art school days’.

Alexis, for her part, was ambivalent about the ‘good old days’. She realized then that if there were a time in her life that she would have again and again, it would be her time in Paris, not Fremantle. The more that she reflected on this, the more her life seemed to come into focus. Looking out her window at the bustling streets, she imagined Nietzsche’s demon coming into her room and making her the offer of Eternal Return. Alexis could hear herself reply:

‘Yes. You are a god and I have never heard anything more divine’.

Reflections on empowerment

Don’t underestimate the desire to think and learn. You know what Parmenides said — thinking and being are the same.

Don’t underestimate the wonder in discovering a new sentiment or passion. Do you remember the first time you fell in love?

Don’t underestimate the value of learning a new activity, or acquiring the ability to tackle a new task. These things can transform lives.

Don’t underestimate the human need to be and belong. To say ‘I am…’ and have that mean something… It gives meaning to life.

What do these things have in common? They are forms of empowerment.

No one knows what they are capable of thinking, feeling, doing, or being. The adventure of life is to find out.

Change as adventure

Change doesn’t need to be something that we passively endure. Through philosophical reflection, it is possible to turn our anxiety about change around. We can change the way that we experience change, such that we no longer perceive it as a battle and ordeal, but as an opportunity – an opportunity to change ourselves for the better, to explore new ways of living and being.

We must learn to see the opportunity in change. We must learn to make the decisive shift from passivity to empowerment, from seeing change as an ordeal to seeing change as an adventure.

True leaders know what to do with change. They see what’s empowering in it.