Embrace change

There is an old saying at the casinos in Las Vegas, you have to be present to win. You have to be present when you gamble and you have to be present in business as well as in your life. And in life, as with any process, the most obvious characteristic is change. To many previous generations the world looked almost the same when it was left as it was when met for the first time. Today, change has become the norm, the fact, the constant, the certainty. By the time our generation has come and gone, more will have changed than will have stayed the same. This pace of change, this huge acceleration in the rate of growth of scientific facts and knowledge, of techniques, of invention and of advances in technology makes it all so necessary for us to recognise the world as a movement or a process and not something static.

Most of the techniques we learned so long ago at school are today obsolete or redundant, many of the facts disproved. Some of us now long for the familiar and well-known past, the good-old days. Such nostalgia does not make us or our lives any healthier. Today when commerce, politics, social structures and the international scene are changing so fast we more than ever have to make ourselves comfortable with change. We should in fact be prepared to go further - to step out of our comfort zones and embrace change, improvise and face completely new situations of which we have no forewarning with confidence, strength and courage. However, given that mankind is by nature conservative and therefore innately suspicious of change, this may be easier said than done!

To confront this challenge we have two tools at our disposal, creativeness within and creativeness without. The latter is dependent on the development and extension of existing ideas. In contrast, creativeness within is a process of inner reflection, a journey back to square one, a clean piece of paper or wax tablet. It is the creativity of a young child whose inventiveness and creativity is fresh and innocent and has no context.

In that inspirational phase of creativity you lose the past and switch off the future to become totally immersed and absorbed in the present, "to be utterly lost in the present, the matter-in-hand". When we fully concentrate or meditate on something, with no particular goal or purpose, just letting our capacities flow within, then we adapt most easily to a situation, just as water finds its natural path through falls and cracks. It is then that the fusion of the person with his world becomes a natural event. It is then that change and creativity helps us to live our lives and develop our environment from a more fully human and positive standpoint. The great Japanese painter Hokusai Katsushika once said, "If you want to draw a bird, you must become a bird".

Av Lasse Larsson 04 sep 2003 09:54