Throughout this year, several bloggers will engage in a conversation here and on their blogs — asking questions of each other and responding. Others are absolutely welcome to join the conversation, as well. Learn more about the ladies of Blogversation 2012.
Lesley Ware asks today’s Blogversation question about setting the stage for a dazzling creative collaboration
I’m certain that 2012 has been my most collaborative year ever. I’m working with a handful of amazing creatives to produce cool artistic projects and programs. All these relationships have been fruitful so far (only one got stale and needed to be dissolved).
I’m finding that collaboration is difficult to define when you’re not affiliated with an organization. In my past life as a nonprofit program manager, collaboration was king. We often shared a formal agreement of how we would combine resources to reach a broader audience. As an independent artist I find myself trying to clarify the guidelines to a successful collaboration between two or more individuals.
So here’s my Blogversation question of the week:
Think about your past creative collaborations either on your blog, as an independent artist or in other settings outside a formal business structure, what are the two or three things that were established at the beginning of the relationship that helped you achieve your desired outcome? In a nutshell, what are the keys to a dazzling collaboration?
(I have my short list – and will share them at the top of the week, but I’d love to hear your ideas first)
I can see it just over the fence — a swimming pool. A lonely swimming pool.
I’m being taunted by swimming pools.
I love pools.
In my “win the lottery” fantasy, I have an enormous pool with a hot tub and water slides. I float around in a comfy inflatable raft and a handsome cabana boy brings me blender drinks.
Even a modest pool would make me giddy, though.
Imagine the torture that out our bedroom window, I can see a neighbor’s in-ground pool — and that in three years living here, I’ve never seen a human in that pool.
Now let’s compound it. At the house we rented in New Orleans for three months last year, it’s a nearly identical scene: just behind a fence is an even-nicer in-ground pool that I don’t think anyone ever uses.
Having big, lonely swimming pools close enough to hear the filter running caused me to think about the cliché of the grass always being greener on the other side.
Is it the reality or the fantasy that’s calling to me? Do I just fantasize about having a pool because I don’t have one? If I had one of these pools, would I resent the maintenance involved and eventually decide it’s not worth the bother?
What is it about seeing someone else (seemingly) underappreciate something that makes you want it more? Have you ever seen someone push away an uneaten piece of cake and suddenly become consumed with desire for that cake?
What do I have in my life that someone else is looking at longingly and wondering why I don’t appreciate it more? What wonderful things do I take for granted? What am I not taking advantage of that’s right in my own backyard?
Throughout this year, several bloggers will engage in a conversation here and on their blogs — asking questions of each other and responding. Others are absolutely welcome to join the conversation, as well. Learn more about the ladies of Blogversation 2012.
Today’s question — which should have gone up on Thursday, but apparently I did something screwy and that didn’t happen — comes from Eleanor Traubman, Creative Times, @creativetimes on Twitter:
Don’t laugh … or maybe you should … Eleanor Traubman wants to know about the role of laughter in your life.
What role does laughter, fun and humor play in your life? Who or what makes you laugh and brings out the comic in you?
Throughout this year, several bloggers will engage in a conversation here and on their blogs — asking questions of each other and responding. Others are absolutely welcome to join the conversation, as well. Learn more about the ladies of Blogversation 2012.
We’re rotating through the Blogversation participants a second time, with each blogger posing a question to the others and to any visitors who’d like to weigh in.
The schedule calls for a question from Lauren McCabe (mermaidchronicles.com, @mermaidtales on Twitter) but Lauren has an incredible convergence of goodness going on right now — she recently started a new job that’s got her immersed, she’s just bought a house and she’s newly engaged.
Wow.
So in honor of Lauren and her fiance — and for all of us — I’m asking the following question: What’s your best piece of relationship advice?
Several years ago, an elderly married couple who’d been together many decades told me the key to a happy marriage was for each partner to think they’ve gotten the better end of the bargain.
On the surface, it’s a cute little quip.
But the deeper meaning, I think, is that both partners should feel like they somehow lucked into marrying someone better than they deserve and they’ve got to hustle to keep that out-of-my-league mate happy.
By staying on your game, you keep your mate feeling that he’s the one who’s gotten the better deal — and it’s the very definition of a virtuous circle.
The alternative is the all-too-common marriage where each partner feels he or she is the only one doing anything around the house … he never brings me flowers any more and she stopped taking care of her appearance as soon as we had kids … each partner feels like they’ve got the worse end of the bargain.
Incidentally, I think this works in other relationships, too. If you treat your job like you’re lucky to be there, or treat your best friend like you’re lucky to have her, it might also have lovely benefits.
Throughout this year, several bloggers will engage in a conversation here and on their blogs — asking questions of each other and responding. Others are absolutely welcome to join the conversation, as well. Learn more about the ladies of Blogversation 2012.
Maria Stuart asks this week's Blogversation question, about whether there's a war on women.
We’re starting a second rotation of Blogversation questions this week — each of the bloggers participating in this virtual salon takes a turn posing a question to the other participants, and we’re back at the top of the batting order.
Throughout this year, several bloggers will engage in a conversation here and on their blogs — asking questions of each other and responding. Others are absolutely welcome to join the conversation, as well. Learn more about the ladies of Blogversation 2012.
We’re more than a quarter of a way through the year and we’ve just completed a full rotation of every participant in Blogversation posing a question of the others, so it seems a good time to take a step back to assess how it’s going.
I’m loving this project because I love bringing different voices and perspectives to my blog. Every week I look forward to the question that a Blogversationist will pose, showing me something about what she’s curious about or what she’s thinking about. I enjoy seeing the comments come in, and how the feedback makes me think about the question differently.
I also love that the women of the Blogversation aren’t just a half dozen of my besties who I’d talk to every week anyway — some I know well, some I barely knew before the project, some go way back, some are new friends. Having this long-distance conversation has helped me get to know them, and it’s also been fabulous to hear ideas that I might not get over brunch with the people I usually see.
So thanks to the Blogversationists for one quarter down — and before we go on to another: What have you enjoyed so far about the Blogversation? A particular post or comment, a theme, something it’s done for you?
Throughout this year, several bloggers will engage in a conversation here and on their blogs — asking questions of each other and responding. Others are absolutely welcome to join the conversation, as well. Learn more about the ladies of Blogversation 2012.
I try not to be biased — there’s been so much good conversation in the Blogversation, with thoughtful questions and compelling answers — but I am so eager to see this week’s conversation.
Often when we’re in the midst of something painful, we can’t see its full effects. We can’t see that losing a job or going through a divorce or whatever other difficult experience is going to lead us to a dramatically better place.
This week Kim Ann Curtin asks, "When did life seemingly hand you a doozie yet over time it became clear that it was the best thing that could have happened?"
One of the greatest mentors of my life is and has been the mythologist Joseph Campbell. He speaks of a conversation he had with a Taoist master in “The Power of Myth” that teaches him that we must say yes to life.
Campbell approaches the master and asks if that’s true then wouldn’t that also mean saying yes to the bad things that happen as well? And the master agrees that it would – and while it might be hard for some to accept – it is what’s true.
Saying yes to a raise, promotion or a marriage proposal from the love of your life are easy to say yes to. But being fired? Losing all your money? Watching a loved one slip into an illness that makes them a shell of the person they once were? How in hell does one say yes to that?!
And yet when I think about what primitive civilizations faced, I imagine they faced loss every hour of the day – life threatening in fact and interestingly enough they said yes all the time! This from Campbell’s Pathway’s to Bliss:
“The first, primitive orders of mythology are affirmative: they embrace life on its own terms. I don’t think any anthropologist could document a primitive mythology that was world-negating. When you realize what primitive people run up against—the pains and the agonies and the problems of simply existing—I think it’s quite amazing. I’ve studied a lot of the myths of these cultures around the world, and I can’t recall a single negative word in primitive thought with respect to existence or to the universe. World-weariness comes later with people who are living high on the hog.”
Kim Ann Curtin recently had this "yes" necklace made by Lauren Harkness. Click through to Lauren's website.
I recently had a necklace made of this empowering word to help me remember that this is how I want to live. A life that says yes to life. Yet believe me I still find it really hard to say on some days in spite of it hanging around my neck. I yearn to say it all the time and sometimes because of grace I do. One of the ways that helps me say it in the fire and the rain is when I remember times in the past when life appeared to hand me what looked like an absolute horror and yet in the long run turned out to be the very key to my freedom and in fact wound up being the very best thing that could have happened to me.
So that’s my question: When did life seemingly hand you a doozie yet over time it became clear that it was the best thing that could have happened? That, as Rilke says, life clearly was in the “right?”
Throughout this year, several bloggers will engage in a conversation here and on their blogs — asking questions of each other and responding. Others are absolutely welcome to join the conversation, as well. Learn more about the ladies of Blogversation 2012.
Lesley Ware asks today's Blogversation question about your work environment
For as long as I can remember I’ve always been hugely sensitive to the look and feel of my workspace. Lighting, sound, artwork, the chair, and sometimes even what’s around my feet all affect my mood and ultimately my ability to get stuff done.
In less than two weeks my family will be moving to another Brooklyn abode and I’m excited about having a new dedicated creative space for work. To prepare, I’ve been collecting swatches, magazine pages, paint chips and pinning inspiration on Pinterest. (http://pinterest.com/lesleyw/space-is-the-place/).
I know responses will vary based on if you work from home or an office building but I’m curious to know:
How do you set the stage for your personal workspace? Do you go for a conservative or creative office space? How does space affect your creative expression? What are your top must-haves for a blog-friendly work environment?
One of my favorite blogs, Zen Habits, recently had a blog post that inspired me to share it here — and to supplement it with my own story about letting go of the illusion of control.
‘You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.’ ~Friedrich Nietzsche
I’m going to share a productivity, planning and organizational hack that will change your life. It will yield some unpredictable results, but if you approach it the right way, it could bring some of the most amazing work of your life, along with freedom, joy, exhilaration.
What’s this miraculous hack?
It’s a simple one: let go. Let go of control and allow yourself to be swept away by the powerful currents of life. Let go of planning and embrace not know what will happen. Let go of productivity and be open to new ideas, new opportunities, spontaneous creativity.
The Case for Chaos
Consider what we’re doing when we plan our day, our week, our year: we are trying to exert control over life, and predict with our plans the course our lives will take today, this week, this year.
We are saying: this is what I’m going to do today. This is how things will go. If I get these things done, life will be good. This is my idea of what this day will hold.
Now consider this: we have absolutely no idea if any of this is true. We cannot predict the future with any kind of certainty, and the idea that we can plan based on these shaky predictions is a nice fiction, but a fiction nonetheless. We do not know what will happen today, much less the rest of the week or month. Knowing what will happen this year? What a crock!
And consider: what if we could know? What if we could accurately predict every single day, and plan each day exactly? Would this be a great thing? I submit that it would suck infinitely more than not knowing. Having foreknowledge of the future means we know what will happen each day, which means not only will our days be ridiculously boring, but we’re stuck on one unshakable path. Foreknowledge means a crazy lack of freedom.
So we don’t know what will happen, nor should we want to. We can try to plan, but those plans are not based on real knowledge and probably won’t happen, so planning is a waste of time.
What can we do instead of trying to predict what will happen, instead of planning? Learn to embrace uncertainty, and be open to change. Learn to let go of control, and surf the ever-changing wave. Let unpredictability rule, let randomness be the force of our life, let spontaneity be the rule.
Embracing Chaos for Good
Some random thoughts based on my experiments with letting go:
Work is better with chaos. While the idea of having peaceful order to our workday is a nice one, it’s an illusion. And it’s frankly boring. Work based on fun, play, and spontaneity is more interesting. Imagine a project that is started with a spontaneous idea, and then changes course as you do it, embraces the ideas of strangers, ends up in a fantastic new place you could not have possibly foreseen when you started. This is how I did my last book, The Effortless Life, and it was one of the most fun I’ve ever had on a project. It’s how I’m doing all my projects now, actually.
A year that isn’t planned. When I started Zen Habits in 2007, I had my year planned out in detail, with goals, actions and weekly plans. That, of course, was tossed out the door as soon as I started writing Zen Habits and meeting my first readers, who changed my life with their feedback and kind attention. My life was turned upside down, my plans became meaningless, and I learned that while life is unpredictable, that unpredictability can bring some amazing things.
Be open to new possibilities. I learned, that first year of Zen Habits, to be open to new opportunities. Time and time again, new doors opened for me that I didn’t know — couldn’t know — would even be there. I saw the new door opening, considered it, and went in. That happened repeatedly, and taught me that there is no way to plan a path when you don’t know what each step will bring, what changes will happen to that path as you walk along it.
Be open to strangers. Let’s say you plan your day rigidly. You’ve got your productivity system honed, you’re cranking out the tasks. You are a productivity machine! But now you randomly happen upon a stranger who says hi. You say hi back, and now you have a new opportunity: you can talk to this stranger, get to know him. But then you’d deviate from the plan! Do you stick to the plan, or talk to the stranger? Well, sticking to the plan would be more productive, and give you more control over your life. But if you talk to the stranger, you might make a new friend. You might learn something you’d never have learned otherwise. I’ve made some of my best friends like this, because I was willing to deviate from my plans and talk to a stranger.
Chaos is creativity, and creativity is chaos. They are the same thing. Creative work doesn’t happen by plan and control. Sure, some of the worlds creative geniuses were detail freaks, but they didn’t make a plan to come up with a creative genius idea — it came to them because they were open to random thoughts, explored paths no one else had thought to look down, took an idea they saw from someone else and twisted it in a new way. Creativity comes from a place of chaos, and it’s only when you open yourself to this lack of control that you can come up with your best creativity.
Some things to read: Two of the best books I’ve read recently embrace the idea of uncertainty, and they also happened to come at me from two of my best friends — both of whom I met almost randomly on the Internet. My friend Jonathan Fields wrote Uncertainty, and it’s a great exploration of some of these ideas. My friend Mary Jaksch sent me a book the other day called Bring Me the Rhinoceros that is an excellent use of Zen koans to explore similar ideas. Both books highly recommended.
When we let go of our expectations that others will make us happy, we enjoy them more. We get angry and frustrated at people because they don’t act the way we want them to. We expect others to try to make us happy, to go out of their way to give us what we want. This is not why other people exist. When we let go of these expectations, we accept people for who they are, and learn to appreciate this uniqueness.
If you don’t expect things to go as planned, you are open to the unplanned. Something might arise that is unexpected, and if you go with it, you’ll have to let go of your previous plans. This can be a wonderful thing. Many people (including the old me) get frustrated when new things come up that were unplanned, when plans go awry, but it doesn’t have to be frustrating. Just expect plans to change, or don’t really plan at all. Expect unplanned things to happen, and when they do, smile.
Embrace not knowing what will happen. This is the ultimate freedom. You don’t know what you’re going to do today, nor what will come up. You are locked into nothing. You are completely free to do anything, to pursue any creative pursuit, to try new things as they come up, to be open to meeting new people. It can be scary at first, but if you smile when you think of not knowing, you’ll soon realize it’s a joyous thing.
When you’re not focused on one outcome, you open the possibility for many outcomes. Most people are focused on specific goals (outcomes), and relentlessly pursue that outcome. They then dismiss other possibilities as distractions. But what if you have no predetermined outcome? What if you say that anywhere you end up could be good? You now open an infinite amount of possibilities, and you’re much more likely to learn something than if you only try to do the things and learn the things that support your predetermined outcome.
‘It’s a cruel and random world, but the chaos is all so beautiful.’ ~Hiromu Arakawa
You don’t need permission to reprint any article on Zen Habits — this entire blog and all my work is uncopyrighted.
My mom liked to tell a story that made it sound like I was named on a bet. Or more accurately, as a permanent “I told you so.”
If you’d met my mom, you’d buy this as totally plausible.
My mother was pregnant before ultrasounds became routine and our family doctor told her I’d be a boy born around March 1. No, my ever-cocky mom replied, it’s a girl and she’ll be born on March 17. We’ll name her Colleen because that’s St. Patrick’s Day.
I arrived one day before that, but that was close enough, apparently.
My dad disputes this story, which also isn’t surprising given how few things they agreed on in my childhood.
But it doesn’t really matter whether this is a story my mom made up later or if she concealed her true motives for liking the name Colleen from my dad.
I think the main reason she told me the story was the frustration I had with carrying such an unusual name.
According to the Social Security Administration, Colleen was the 121st most popular baby name in 1971 -- and it's dropped to 897th since then.
In an era when it seemed 97 percent of my female classmates were Michelle/Shelly, Elizabeth/Lisa, Jennifer/Jenny, I was the odd girl out.
I constantly faced people calling me something close but not quite — Kathryn, Kathleen, Kelly, Corinne, Katie — and each time I had to spell my name for someone, I wished again that my parents could have gone for Amy, Melissa or Julie.
Would you believe search engine optimization and social media helped me come around?
Whenever I sign up for a new online service, I’m virtually guaranteed of getting my preferred username cnewvine, because not only is Colleen usual, so is Newvine. Put the two together and my name is the like the vanishing point in a drawing. If I ever try to register for something and find cnewvine taken, I go back to my email to see if I previously signed up and forgot. That’s almost always the case.
Do a Google search for “Colleen Newvine” and you’ll find pages and pages of results, 99 percent of it about me. There might be another woman with my name in Fort Collins, Colo., but I’ve never been able to actually track her down to figure out if it was an attempt at identity theft or if she really exists.
Look for me on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Skype — Colleen Newvine is always me. Only me. Not hundreds of Michelles and Jennifers, but just weird-named me.
So whether it was a “told you so” by my mom or not, I appreciate that the name my parents picked 41 years ago helped me do this new media stuff a little more effectively.
Throughout this year, several bloggers will engage in a conversation here and on their blogs — asking questions of each other and responding. Others are absolutely welcome to join the conversation, as well. Learn more about the ladies of Blogversation 2012.
