From Going Round in Circles
To creating paths for others
You find yourself on the edge of the world,
On the edge of everything you’ve known,
On the edge of a circle that cannot be drawn,
Only followed.
David Whyte. Sometimes (and other poems)
There are moments when I feel like I'm going round in circles, watching other people go round in circles, as together we watch things seemingly disintegrate around us.
Then I remember that we’re not really going round in circles; we are wandering in unfamiliar territory. Instead of obsessing about watching the familiar disintegrate, we must pay attention to the patterns we create for others.
It can be challenging when we have mortgages to pay and loved ones to look after. However, these are the times to find ourselves in, and we must adapt if we and those we love are to thrive.
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
Viktor Frankl adapted by Steven R. Covey
When there are many spaces to choose from, the challenge is to find the right one and focus on it.
We are all different, and the space we each choose is likely to be equally different. It is a combination of the logical and the emotional—something that engages the whole of us, even if we're not quite sure why. Tyson Yunkaporta talks of us having a thinking brain and a thinking-feeling brain, and we need to give it the room to guide us.
Too often, the former occupies all our time, and we don't leave space for the latter. We need to change that.
In my Outside the Walls blog on Sunday, I discussed the idea that change comes from the centre because those at the top are too invested in the status quo, and those at the bottom lack the resources. The middle connects the edge to the centre. Without it, both are lost. We need those who can keep the centre healthy.
At present, as AI is integrated into everything, whether we want it or not, and our politics edge into ever more into unthinking populism, we need the centre.
Technology and politics are dissolving the middle, even as it offers the best opportunities to find the spaces that, as artisans, we can most constructively affect.
Over the next weeks, I’m going to focus Outside the Walls on the spaces to be found in the middle, and here on New Artisans, what we might do when we have found a space to choose as our own.
For today's blog, however, I want to look briefly at somebody who's been doing what I'm writing about while I've been writing about it.
I have known David Chabeaux for over a decade. He is a Musician, Actor, Coach, and all-round good egg. Like many of us, for whom doing our best work means not being employed by an organisation, he has had to compromise, improvise, sacrifice and find other ways just to get by.
He is an exemplar for me of someone who is at home, if not always comfortable, on the edge of everything we’ve known, on the edge of a circle that cannot be drawn.
And this week, as I write, his work is being shown in London at the Raindance Film Festival.
How good is that?
Throughout my time with him, he has always been clear about where his space was: describing, communicating, and enthusing the rest of us about the Band movement that was his Grandfather’s driving force and which shaped David’s early life. It’s a compelling story. For both of them, the “space” was not a job; a job enabled them to find the resources to fill the space.
We all have a space people need us to occupy, and show them the way.
When he’s back, I’m going to see if he’ll do a short podcast with me to talk about his relationship with the space he is filling for the rest of us. Or, if you want to cut out the middle man, you can mail him at davidchabeaux@gmail.com
So, maybe we can start our conversation on Wednesday there. Do you know, or have a sense of the space you want to occupy that will shine a light for others?