Age and the Artisan
Age and the Artisan
Being Ready. The Artisan in us can emerge at any time.
A thing without oppositions ipso facto does not exist … existence lies in opposition.
CS Peirce
One of the things I’m beginning to understand is that the artisan in us can emerge at any time. It will wait patiently until the time is right, even if it won’t wait forever. Evoking the artisan in us is an act of will.
James Hillman’s “Acorn Theory” has been a powerful metaphor as I’ve thought about the artisan. His theory is that each of us represents something unique, capable of making a significant difference in the world, no matter how small. We each have the potential to be the human version of the flap of a butterflies wing that triggers a change of events we may never see or be part of but which matters. (Article link below)
One of the beauties of metaphors is that they don’t have to be factually true; they point us at ideas and insights that escape the constraints of known fact to illuminate something we do not yet know but sense. They sit in a space between knowledge and belief, a liminal space of not yet knowing. Hillman’s acorn is such an idea that points at something in us that sits between ideas of nature and nurture and which, given the right nutrients, reveals something in us that defies that binary lens.
Acorns are patient. Sometimes, they might germinate where they fall or find themselves carried by birds, picked up in the wheels of a vehicle, or perhaps by a child to be planted in a pot and find themselves somewhere very different to where they started, in conditions from benign to hostile, and have to make the best of where they end up. The same is true, I believe, for us. Education is what others do to us; learning is what we choose to become who we are capable of being.
Hillman suggests that while we cannot choose our acorn, we can do something about providing the conditions for it to grow. That feels right, and warrants making sure we respect it, and its needs.
Our culture makes it difficult. Our education system is predicated on the efficient creation of skills that will benefit the economy, with our children tested and categorised until, after twenty years in education, we plant them out, often carrying significant debt to service, to find their own way in the world—harsh conditions for an acorn to take root in. Some defy the odds and find ways to harness their uniqueness outside of the world of jobs to become entrepreneurs or stars who we admire, thinking that somehow they are different to us rather than recognising the different soil in which they found themselves. It remains indisputably true that the greatest predictor of success in our culture in the West is being born to wealthy parents. There are Cinderellas, but they are the exception to the rule. Maybe we need more acorns to be given the room to flourish…
So what happens to our acorns whilst we’re busy paying for the education designed to serve others more than us, whilst we’re paying rent, mortgages and raising children? And importantly, what happens when our peak economic usefulness is brought to an unexpected end by technology, redundant skills, or cheaper alternatives elsewhere? We can’t blame the organisations - they are doing what they have been designed and incentivised to do. To go back to an animal metaphor, they are like a Pointer who has detected a scent. When the prey instinct cuts in, you can shout and wave your arms as much as you like. They’re not listening.
The thought led me to the idea of acknowledging our acorn. I thought about my own experience and that of the many others I have worked with as a coach/mentor over the years in the context of the publicity being given to getting over fifties “back into work”. It is different for each of us, but the idea of going back into a corporate existence, having left, brings up images of an additional circle of Danté’s Hell. That said, current conditions make the possibility of either not leaving or rejoining that circle in our fifties a real possibility. How do we create better conditions for those whose acorns are emerging?
As somewhere to start thinking about it, I divided our “lives in service of work” into four simple stages.
Initial Education. From age two to roughly twenty two, the point at which graduates enter the world of work, prepared and categorised in terms of economic contribution.
Career. From age twenty-two to fifty. During this time, we find our place in the world of work. A few will be on a stellar path, but most of us will have plateaued into a comfortable but increasingly fragile rut, most likely via a handful of different employers. As we become more expensive, we become more vulnerable to employers identifying more profitable alternatives, from technology to cheaper but hungry entrants whose appetite for long hours and other ways of making their mark and whose incremental profitability to the employer is greater than ours. We find ourselves in the “Danger Zone”.
Post Career. At this point, if we’re fortunate, we may have developed sufficient mastery of an area to be difficult to replace, or we may have taken that mastery and gone independent. Again, if we’re lucky, the hold that debt and bringing up family has eased, and we have more options open to us. If we’re prepared, it is a time of risk, opportunity, and a chance to assert independence from employer oversight.
Post Work. What we used to think of as retirement before lifespans extended and made it a significant chunk of our lives rather than a brief interlude before death. A time now to be reckoned with.
I took a walk and wondered what the acorn might think of this simple categorisation. I imagined it struggling to survive during initial education as anything that stuck its head above the surface of the STEM landscape got quickly weeded out. Then, an increasing sense of frustration at being kept down less by the system and more by the fear of stepping out of line and endangering career progression in an area that held no interest for it at all. Eventually, somewhere in middle age and late career, it could take no more and decided to appear, ready or not.
There’s an old saying that the best time to plant a tree was thirty years ago and that the second best time is now. I suggest the same adage might apply to our acorn because it will appear for most of us, and it would be better to be ready for it than to start from scratch.
How might we do that? I think being ready for the point where fear and excitement sit side by side as we contemplate our future is a matter of coherence, as I wrote about last week.
One of the most important elements in achieving coherence is capacity - particularly having enough of it to give the acorn room to develop and not be suffocated by the pressures of short-term performance in the service of an inevitably finite career. Even though we cannot be clear about what our own particularly acorn may look and feel like, we can choose to be ready for it to take root, or we can choose to be surprised.
When it comes to having capacity available, around a third seems to occur often, from traffic on motorways to river flows, fields lying fallow, and all align with what we are learning from complexity theory and the nature of chaos. Having surplus capacity is not inefficient; it’s essential. We are no different. The third is where the acorn can take root.
Creating the space is both a discipline and a practice. We cannot put it off until later (unless we want surprises), and the core elements we have discussed in considering the artisan - community, craft and coherence - are all important. Things we have always known to be important - ritual, ceremony, rites of passage - all have a place.
There is a wonderful library of resources that can help us prepare the ground for the artisan in us, whenever it chooses to make itself known. I’ve put a link below to Nick Cave’s excellent book and Rick Rubin’s. I am researching others to add to it.
Between now and the end of March, I will be considering that and how we might shape this space that is New Artisans to serve it better, and look forward to sharing those with you.
Until then, have a great weekend- and cut yourself a little slack…..
Coming Up
On Tuesday 21st February, 6:00 pm UK, James Gairdner of Heresy Consulting will be with us to talk about psychodynamics of organisations. I find it exciting and provocative to look at our relationships with organisations and something more generative than the normal HR dialogues. It promises to be a session not to be missed.
Resources from this week’s post
The Soul’s Code - James Hillman.
Acorn Theory - Summary by Christina Cattai on Medium
Faith, Hope and Carnage. Nick Cave and Séan O’Hagan. A review in the Guardian of a wonderful reflection on the process of ageing.
The Creative Act. Rick Rubin. More food for thought. Guardian Review.
We've been brought up and conditioned to working in organisations as what we do. It affects our status, our financial options and much else. The challenge I see is that conditions are changing faster than organisations, and the disposable variable is employees. The end result is that we need to make conscious decisions about the risk/benefit analysis of working for others, versus that of independence. It can be hard, particularly when we have debt based obligations and the HR hype is about "engagement", but whatever we do, keeping our independence options warm and tested is more than sensible.
It's both a practice and a discipline too to say no to traditional stages of life and work. The world is not a benign and loving place when you know from a young age that most of what you have been told to think and do is based on widespread, entrenched illusions.
For those among us who chose other ways of learning and living, our priorities seem to be changing (or at least what has emerged from many conversations I've had in the last years) as we get older to wanting a minimum of financial ground beneath our feet and the maximum freedom to make our own decisions about how to flourish.
I'm also enjoying and finding "Act of being creative" by Randall E Huffman helpful in finding those pathways.