Mary Panttaja

Catching the Updraft—what is this about?

(Note that I’m trying to catch up each of the threads of my weft as I get started.)

One of the major threads that has been compelling me in the last few years, is the desire to come to some understanding of how and why the world? How and why humans? How and why companies? Through a great deal of study, research, meditation, and collective thinking, a group of us has evolve an understanding that satisfies us.

One of our realizations is that for people who are driven to ask such questions, a general answer won’t do. Such people have to find their own answer, even if it evolves from the study of others. (Which, for most us, it must.) In any case, it becomes necessary to delve into all the dark corners until one finds an understanding that works for your sensibilities. I and a few cohorts have spent some time driving that dark terrain and have a model that we use to explain, illuminate, and practice how to participate most effectively in the world.

What’s a model? It’s a way of thinking about things which we acknowledge is not the thing itself, but allows us to work with and predict the thing. For example, we (most of us anyway) don’t know what gravity is, but we have practical and mathematical models of how it works that we can use to predict how things will go. So it is with our model, which we call “The Arising World.”

Today I will not go into the details of the model, though you can get a sense of it on my older site which is called E-4. It describes a practical model of creativity and innovation that can be leveraged in all our activities. I will be rewriting, in this or another blog, the story of this practical philosophy of action and creativity. I am calling it “Catching the Updraft”, and it will be arriving at a website and blog shortly—or perhaps at a theatre near you!

The key, as always, is the entrance. What is the first thing people want to hear? What are the most important points? As in marketing, where you need to lead with the customer’s interests and not the product designer’s proud creations, it is critical to identify the real value propositions.

I think the real value for most people is guidance on how to act, what to do. But without a deeper understanding of where the guidance comes from, what it means, it becomes hollow and simplistic. So a balance is required: this is what is true and this is what you do about it.

The first principles are:
1) Everyone is the potential for something unique and important to arise into the world. Actually, this is true for everything. The world is the sum of all its distinct parts living their unique lives. (Later we can get into the fact that they “are” the potential, they don’t “have” the potential.)
2) If we can align ourselves with our own potential, we can have the most extraordinary and meaningful life that we can imagine. We can fulfill the purpose of our potential in the world. And if we are aligned, we will find it gloriously satisfying.
3) There are ways to find and align ourselves with our potential—the practical part.

So this is true for everything: people, families, organizations, corporations, communities. We need to answer the key question of “who am I” with a statement, not of static identity, but of a dynamic potential waiting in the wings to be realized. Mozart was his music coming into the world—he was the vehicle through which it became reality. That brilliant teacher that inspired you so, was there just to be that inspiration. Everyone has a potential to be realized.

So, in the model, your potential is arising into being along with the rest of the world—the arising world model. And, as we tell the story, it creates an updraft. You can catch the updraft and go along for the ride, freely participating in the creation, or you can miss/resist/impede the updraft and get bumped along. “Catching the updraft” is the practice of getting into the middle of your potential and riding it for all it’s worth.

And this can work for an individual’s life, an artist’s work, a company’s evolution, a project’s life cycle. All the same arising into being—just more complex alignment challenges, more challenging and intricate potentials coming into being, more difficulties identifying what the potential really is. But we are evolving a documented process that we can use to embed this thinking into our everyday actions—with diagrams and everything. So it’s a practical approach.

The beginnings of the Catching the Updraft site and blog are in the works and should be available next week some time. (I mistyped it as “Catching the Updaft!”—isn’t that interesting?)

What is your biggest question about your life or work: “How do I figure out what I should be doing?” or “How to I make what I’m doing more effective?”