Home Away from Home: Creating What’s Next from What’s Not Working
In last week’s blog, I invited you to look at the rest of this year in terms of what you want to create. This week, with 80 days left until 2012, I begin a series of posts that will take you around the Wheel in 80 days. My intention is to offer you a framework you can use to achieve something new by the end of this year, and to find your own true nature on the journey.
Today, I begin where the creative process begins, at Home. In the Wheel of Creativity, Home = the Status Quo. Home is: “The way we’ve always done things.”
Albert Einstein was one of the most creative human beings the world has ever known. One of the qualities that made him so prolific was his respect for failure. Einstein knew you have to give up what you think you know in order to succeed.
“Insanity,” said Einstein, “is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Why is it that even though I know this, I continue to do these same things anyway? I continue to rely on what is familiar, what I (think I) know, to get me out of jams. I continue hoping that if I just do these things well enough, often enough, fast enough, they will somehow lead me to success. But they never do.
It’s hard to leave home.
In the creative journey, there are times for being at home and times to set out in search of something new. Integrating the two gives our lives balance and meaning.
Cross-stitch wisdom says, “Home is where the heart is.” Spiritual principles tell me, “Home is within.” In The Wheel of Creativity, Home is life as I know it today. It is all that is:
- Familiar
- Known
- Comfortable
- Predictable
- Ordered
- Stable
- Safe
In my life, Home is an enigma, a mystery just out of reach. I have an apartment in Nice, a base in Boulder and a home with my seafaring husband on a British island. I move around a lot in the physical world. It destabilizes me. But I’m coming to know (sometimes painfully) that Home is the place within that I settle into along the way.
The creative journey – the journey of life itself – brings me to the place where I have to dig deep to find that place of Home within myself. Expatriates learn this when old identities don’t fit in new places. People who travel abroad can experience it too, discovering new ways of seeing the world.
You might have a very comfortable life, but you don’t feel fulfilled. You might have a well-established business, but your methods are not working like they used to. You might love someone, but find you want something more.
Einstein knew, from a lifetime of trials and errors, that what’s not working is the starting point in the cycle of creation. He knew that you have to admit it’s not working and do something different in order to produce different results.
Giving up the way you’ve always done things, and actually creating a new result, is a journey. The Wheel of Creativity is the map. Join me through the rest of this year, for a tour around the Wheel in 80 days. Invite your friends.
I’ll meet you next week in Station 1… Hunger.
