Get Shouty

Autumn never seems easy.

It has a very distinct flavours: it’s burning leaves; and blue sky sunny days and crisp evenings; the rediscovery of red wine and raincoats; going through the rituals of putting away the carnival of summer while preparing to be tucked up for the long sleepy time of the winter months.

It’s wistful. Melancholy. Sometimes overly bright and shrill, sometimes grey and blustery. A giggle, a memory, cloud going over the sun. And on this crisp evening bitter sweetness is the order of the day.

I had a very sick friend. Very. She was diagnosed on Australia Day with cancer of the everything.

And in 12 hours I go to her funeral service. (this was written Thursday night)

I’ve been acting as her digital comms officer, the instigator of a blog to record her journey. She delivered beautiful, venerable, knock-your-socks-off posts from a clever, creative, fragile, graceful woman at the height of her magic.

She fought and feinted and made funny- but about three weeks ago the ability to write had gone. I asked her vast circle to share and now my role is as a collector of quotes and anecdotes, and the blog  a repository of precious ‘i remembers’ and ‘my favourite moments’, mad stories, and beautiful photographs from a seemingly endless stream of admirers and converts from all corners of the world. It is important to all who knew her to document all of the different perspectives of her life for her two precious children and to create a place to visit and remember. We have collectively created a living memorial to witness and celebrate our gorgeous, generous friend.

I cannot say that it has been easy. I hold all the three o’clock in the morning stories typed through tears, the constant requests for updates and information…everyone’s grief and advice and need to know. Emails sent to me from all over needed to be poured into wordpress- and as much as I tried to treat it all as Lorem Ipsum the emotion seeped through my weakening defenses.

I haven’t been able write about it to now- and I haven’t been able to able to blog with any degree of seriousness for a while. I’ve been under emotional embargo, have been trying to hold back my own tide with a dam made out of wet card board and duct tape. Well that’s over, there’s no protecting myself from the next step. I’m preparing myself to be hugged by strangers whose secrets I know and hold those whose story I share.

Today I am sad. But I have been blessed a thousand times by the love of a amazing friend, by the strength of a circle of chosen family and the good fortune of recognising that this thing we do, this blogging thing, can be just what the doctor ordered, even when doctors can do nothing at all.

I am comforted by Richard Dawkins’ theory of memes. Those are mental units: thoughts, ideas, gestures, notions, songs, beliefs, rhymes, ideals, teachings, sayings, phrases, clichés, that move from mind to mind as genes move from body to body. After a lifetime of writing, teaching, broadcasting and happily torturing people with my jokes, I will leave behind more memes than many. They will all eventually die as well, but so it goes.

I drank for many years in a tavern that had a photograph of Brendan Behan on the wall, and under it this quotation, which I memorized:

I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don’t respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.

For 57 words, that does a pretty good job of summing it up. “Kindness” covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.

I love the following story:

One of Frank Gehry’s first buildings, was a shopping mall, The Santa Monica Place. It was rigidly geometric and pale pink. He played it safe for investors and went LA-style. He hated it.

Meanwhile, as a direct creative outlet, Gehry went full out Gehry on building his own home. Envision sloping roofs, curvaceous windows, jutting peaks. Think: wacky and wildly organic.

The night of the grand opening of the Santa Monica Place, the president of the real estate company that had hired Frank was at Gehry’s home for a dinner party:

Real estate Exec: What the hell is this?, he said to Frank, looking around Gehry’s house, awestruck.
Frank: Well, I was experimenting, playing with it.
Exec: Well you must like it if it’s your house. You like it, right?
Frank: Yeah. I’m happy with how it turned out.
Exec: So then…the building you just did for us…you can’t possibly like that.
Frank: You’re right, I don’t.
Exec: Then why’d you do it?
Frank: Because I need to make a living.
Exec: Well stop it. Don’t do that kind of work anymore.
Frank: You’re right.

They shook hands that night and decided to quit everything they were working on (they were employing forty people at the time.)

“It was like jumping off a cliff,” Gehry says. “It was an amazing feeling. I was so happy from then on.”

I love the insight that being risk adverse can hide your light and shorten your horizon. Sometimes the value of compromising your vision is too high a cost. While you might have to pay the piper to follow your dreams- the dance you subsequently do may just reward you beyond your expectations.

When was the last time you did something for nothing other than it’s magnificence: it’s impossibility, the daunting nature of the task and the sheer spectacle of human endeavour? For passion alone? And how might this relate to the Passion Economy?

Oh yes: I’ve recently seen Man On Wire. Do. Yourself. A. Favour- see it.

Philippe Petit: To me, it’s really so simple, that life should be lived on the edge. You have to exercise rebellion. To refuse to tape yourself to the rules, to refuse your own success, to refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day, every year, every idea as a true challenge. Then you will live your life on the tightrope.

Last year I went on Dangerous Art Fun Travels to Spain. (I often have  daft adventures). Big on my list were magnificent, impossible structures: the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Both these constructions bend your head and make you  marvel. What binds the two buildings together for me, even if they were dreamt of over a hundred years apart,  is a passionate vision fed by the same source: that what is does not dictate what can be.

Philippe Petit: It’s impossible, that’s sure. So let’s start working.

What I think bring all of these three together in context of the Passion Economy is that none of them are possible to achieve alone. To experience their wonder you need to go through the entire journey of imagination into implementation- how, HOW, did they enlist others to make these visions real?

In Sketches of Frank Gehry Sydney Pollack and the architect talk about the collaborative creative process:

Talent is condensed frustration- that the world is not how you see it and the creative drive is to make it so

The building blocks of the Passion Economy are individuals. Talented individuals. Talented frustrated individuals white hot and waiting for an output to pour their condensed frustration into and smelt a new thing. And we live in a creative age with a huge creative class. How would it be if we could connect the passions of our creative  consumers and address their frustrations? Facilitate, educate and promote their inherent talents as members of the connected age to make a difference?

In my piece for the eBook I say:

The opportunity for brands in this space is to be and build the bridges between needs and resources for people. Between people and what they want now, and what they want the future to be. To claim ownership of a need, build a sustainable purpose, engage, enlist, inspire action and make this action a habit.

But would this work for an organisation? Is passion enough of a marketing attraction to justify it? Ellen Di Resta elaborates in her piece how:

Passion is connection. It’s human nature to seek others who share our values, and people are constantly evaluating the subtle cues that hint of such a connection

Gavin Heaton knows the magical power of passion:

In a world where business, marketing and yes, even advertising, has desaturated language of all meaning, the magical word can restore our purpose—and in so doing—transform our private and professional lives.

Perhaps passion can make magical things happen, make people believe that we could make adifference, then stand back and be in awe…of ourselves.

*Thanks to Mike for identifying some juicy salient points in each author’s piece.