Heroes Not Zombies

PRESENT

CREATIVITY

These two words, or concepts related to them, keep coming up for me. I read a LOT, and I have one of those minds that seems to be good at seeing connections, patterns, echoes, themes, and in all those ways these two words keep coming to mind. Whether I’m thinking about flourishing, about happiness, about health, about living a good life, about understanding what it is to be uniquely human, and most especially when I think how to be a hero not a zombie!

If you don’t want to be a zombie, you have to wake up and smell the coffee. Different thinkers and authors refer to this in different terms. Some talk about waking up from the sleeping state, others about living consciously, and yet others about living mindfully. What it amounts to is being present. Really being present. Not just being somewhere in your body while your head is in the past, worrying about the future or drifted off somewhere into the clouds. So it’s a deliberate act to be present.

I am very attracted to the ideas of the “slow movement“. If we take our time to fully savour the here and now we enrich our experience of living. Fast food, quickly prepared and gulped down with hardly time to even taste it is one kind of experience. Picking up fresh food in the local market, walking home with it, preparing it, cooking it, sitting down to savour it (whilst not doing anything else!) is quite another kind of experience.

Mindfulness is a very popular term currently (other traditions over many years have taught the same concept) The famous mindfulness meditation exercise of the single raisin is one simple way to understand experientially what it means to be present.

I often find myself sharing with patients the simple understanding that your mind can only be in one place at a time. If you are giving attention and focus to the past (remembering, ruminating, ruing?), or giving it to the future (planning, worrying, fearing?), then you aren’t giving it to the present (sensing, savouring, being?). So, if you are troubled with too much of the past or the future in your head, deliberately turning attention and focus to the present can change your inner experience instantly.

I find that having a sense of wonder, of seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, drives my attention to the present.

What about creativity? Life, it seems to me, is constantly evolving, adapting, growing, developing. It’s a dynamic phenomenon which moves as a whole in the direction of ever greater complexity, diversity and uniqueness. In fact, that’s how I see the universe story – one of continuous and ongoing creation.

Creativity is also about expression. I believe every one of us has our unique and special contribution to make to the universe through living this life. We engage with and understand the world uniquely and we react and interact with it uniquely. Those interactions are creative. In biological terms we use the word “emergent” to describe phenomena and behaviours not seen before. That’s what we do. We are complex adaptive organisms in a process of continuous development, emerging, evolving (potentially) to higher consciousness.

Whether you create through art, through music, through building, through problem solving, through being with and sharing with others…..every day, you have countless opportunities to create, to make the world anew.

What does it mean to you to be present? And how can you be more present today?

What does it mean to you to be creative? And what will you create today?