In the Spring Issue of Moviemaker, character actor, James Cromwell, is interviewed about his interests. He is a philosopher, someone who attempts to make sense of his life and the world, but in response to whether the ultimate goal was to understand "the meaning of life," Cromwell called understanding the booby prize. "It isn't so much in the understanding, it is in the experiencing," he says.
In the 1980s when I began networking with people outside my career field I took hold of an idea that what people needed was time to take stock of where they are so they can make the proper adjustment in how they live their life to attain their goals and be consistent with their values. The mind has always been where I have felt most comfortable but to live in the mind is like masturbation. We need the courage (for some, this is no courage but just the way they are) to express our inner life with others. Some of us do well in solitude where they hatch their ideas by themselves but most I think create better ideas interacting with others, with other people's ideas. Even in the evolution of species, reproduction involves the mingling of chromosomes from two distinct individuals. One can say that this is the biological imperative for everything we do for love, maybe an imperative that spills over into our need for society and community.
Richard Florida yesterday pronounced his belief that our future depended on our individual and communal creativity. This is based on a society that allows, maybe even encourages individual self-expression. The more diverse the community, the more individual expression becomes honed and polished into brighter, more effective ideas that benefits the whole. In this way of thinking, obstacles like economic depression, bankruptcy, the failure of financial institutions, personal tragedies like illness or loss are necessary ingredients for the hatching of powerful ideas. When we are stopped in our way by circumstance, we either change direction or become stronger in pushing our way through. Both are essential processes in how reality takes shape.
At the super session yesterday with Adobe CEO Shantanu Nerayan I chatted with scott, a wedding videomaker from Denver. He wants to produce nature videos for iTunes but meanwhile he needs wedding gigs to pay his bills. I don't have that stricture. I don't have much money but have enough to live on if I am frugal. But I don't want to live a frugal life if I can't pursue my dreams. Freud 150 years ago was right. It's a balance between immediate and delayed pleasure. Asian philosophies speak about balancing even pleasure itself with the acceptance of the non-pleasurable aspects of being alive. We can't have just what we want. To get what we want is to acknowledge that getting there would mean going where we don't want to go.
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