Mary Panttaja

Michael Pollan in “The Botany of Desire” beautifully lays out how species can evolve patterns and mechanisms to help each other through the process of living together in a common enviroment : bees and flowers, sharks and cleaner fish, humans and fruit. The mechanisms get more complex. Fruits meet a need (or desire according to Pollan) of humans and humans provide a service to the fruit. The evolutionary participants uncovered another active member of its neighborhood and found a way to build a relationship that helps the gene pool to survive.

The apple is one of his interesting examples. It has an relatively unusual survival tactic in that its primary form of reproduction produces an excess of variety—its mechanism focuses on the “new ways to get along”-part of the simple evolutionary pattern. So it creates an incredible array of new options. It can always evolve rapidly to meet changes in its environment, which gives it stability in maintaining and spreading its genes as a species. But any given form of the apple is doomed, as cross-polinated seeds do not breed true to the parents. But this pattern of mechanistic evolution is great for another species who comes into contact with the apple: humans. There are lots of kinds of apples with a great many different qualities. And we found many that met some of our needs and desires: sweet, dependable food sources. And, importantly, we discovered that we could control the reproduction of those features we like through cloning and grafting genetic material.

So the apple-human mechanism is based on the apple producing a lot of variety genetically, and the human controlling the apples genetic variation (when it wants) with its awareness and intelligence. The apple’s genes are spread over the planet and people have a manageable food source. The overall mechanism is built out of the skills and needs of independent species. The mechanisms together build a preponderance of potential that the future will continue to meet their needs and desires.

Successful models of business, and many of the “new” business models arising in Web 2.0 style, are evolutionary mechanisms for their markets. That is, they embody mechanistic behaviors or actions that reinforce their desired state of change—growth of their audience or customer base. The early versions of these were called “viral” after one the most successful evolvers we know.

These viral mechanisms—patterns of action and use—reinforce the spread of the virus, which means the adoption of the product. The product’s growth in the marketplace is entrained by the mechanisms. You can watch the mechanism work to change and evolve the state of the market as the potential for the goal to be continually realized is increased by the mechanism.

To cause a change in the state of an organization, whether it be market growth, product development, or improved ROI, you must not just “fix” a problem, but ingrain process mechanisms that reinforce the desired path. We must create dynamic evolutionary mechanisms that default to taking us where we want to go.

One of my favorite examples is an everyday problem: for many people the garage is always a total disaster and they really want to have a clean garage. (It could be anything that is consistently arriving in our present moment which we see as a “problem”—we don’t like it, but we always have it: missing deadlines,  uphappy customers,  processes that don’t meet current needs.)

We think that what we want is just a clean garage. We think that if we had enough time and help we could just get it clean. But this is a wrong-headed idea. We don’t really want just a clean garage—that would just be a moment in time (a brief moment) when we like the state of the garage. What we really want and need is a lifestyle, or a set of mechanisms, that result in a clean garage—automatically.

What does that mean? More tomorrow.

Back to the subject of creating organizations….

I have been reading two different books that are basically about evolution: “Nonzero” by Robert Wright, and “The Botany of Desire” by Michael Pollan. One traces the power of evolutionary forces from biology through the evolution of cultures. The other illuminates the power of co-evolution, species evolving in concert for the benefit of both. Another new focus of evolutionary thought these days is the evolution of individual and group consciousness, growth in our capacity for awareness and action.

Evolution is a great model for managing our relationship to the things we are trying to create as well. Our effort to create things (lives, families, corporations, products) is just a slightly more conscious movement of that creative impulse that has evolved everything we experience.

How does the evolutionary model help us think about the choices we make?

The process of evolution itself is a creative mechanism, that is, it is a pattern of discovering success and failure through a natural mechanism of creativity. The universe has created/discovered/evolved (??) a process that results in ever more of what it is trying to create (which seems to be more diversity, awareness, complexity, and creativity.)

Once you find a functioning mechanism that through its regular actions succeeds in continuing to create what you want, or moves in the direction of what you want, you only have to allow the mechanism to keep functioning. Of course, if you are creating something new then the mechanism must allow for movement towards something you don’t want, and adjust for that. Path correction must be part of the mechanism.

So what do these mechanisms look like?

(In the case of evolution, I will, of course, be oversimplifying.)

A plant evolves by doing its thing the best way it knows how and living to create offspring that mostly know what it knows. In addition, it blends what it knows with a sexual partner in a slightly random sort of way that mixes it up—creates some new and different ways of getting by. Some of those succeed in the environment and some fail—some don’t live to create offspring, or create fewer successful offspring. So the mechanism is something like this: make more of what works and keep throwing new ideas into the mix. The “new ideas” are really important because the enviroment is not a single stable thing, but is itself changing making survival more or less likely. Biological evolution doesn’t have to know what its going for in terms of form or function—the mechanism results in life continuing to find a way in a changing world. (Of course, sometimes the mechanism comes up against an environmental change it can’t cope with—it takes times to find new ways of getting by. A meteorite was more than the dinosaurs could work their way out of.)

More about co-evolving next time.

This week I am starting to post some of the materials for my next book—not the next novel, but the book on the creative process. I am starting to play with building navigational models for how to move through the material. There are so many directions to choose from, many types of material that can address many audiences. I see that there is the capacity and ability to write books—well, not books per se, but some kind of published object—-that are totally non-linear. They can be read non-linearly, but that I can also envision writing them that way.

I knew when I was writing my novel, Illumine, that linearity was something I wanted to play with, that is, it was important that the structure of the telling of the story reflect some of the ambiguity inherent in the philosophy underlying the story. And that without some ambiguity in time and sequence the novel would not properly embody the meaning. The structure needed to reflect the meaning so the reader would experience some of the ambiguity that the subject matter represents. So the threads of the novel are woven into a texture that represents the meaning of the book itself. I have chosen a sequence for the weaving, though the material could as likely be reorganized to produce a different experience.

My next book, which is to start appearing shortly on the site catchingtheupdraft.com, is even more complex. This is one reason it has taken me so long to write it. (In fact, I have already written three versions of it and hundreds of powerpoint slides.) It is very difficult to choose an optimal entry point: for who, or which topic, or which style of reading, or which interest group?

I see that this book in particular has a whole meta-structure. It looks something like this:

• The Overall Topic (which has many flavors of explanation)
• Three Key Ingredients
• Depth: Introductory to Complex Explanations
• Voice: Personal, Coaching, Very Technical, Spiritual
• Audiences: Artists, Individuals, Organizations, Philosophers
• Media Types: Fables, Discourse, Essays, Stories
• Multi-Media: Text, Images, Audio, Video

So one of the intriguing ideas percolating on the edge between my writing and my technology research is about how to build tools that help the writer and then the reader to describe, employ, and deploy the meta-text that can structure publishing objects that are inherently non-linear. What do the meta-structures look like? How could one implement them? What do the readers do with the meta-structures? How does the whole experience with the material evolve?

I believe that this model of meta-structural writing reflects the evolution of ideas as they come into being and that perhaps now we can reflect multiple approaches to complex material in one such meta-object that includes the structure and the writing. I find it liberating to not have to find “the one” linear structure in material that does not lend itself to a single line of attack. I also think that we can produce more ambient fiction—that is, where the new model of digesting the material has more flexibility, context, and ambivalence, allowing more flexibility for the writer to reflect meaning in more complex structure.

New thoughts percolating. Now I need to research to see who is doing this and what tools are arising, and see how the meta-structures arise in the work as I go.

As we get to a certain age in America, thoughts move towards the concept of retirement. This is traditionally a movement towards less: mostly less work and less responsibility. But the second half of life isn’t primarily about stopping anything, it is now about transforming life to meet a new set of criteria. And the change in critieria, what we need and want from life, can be the most liberating concept of all.

My husband and I have arrived, with much pluck and luck, at a new frontier, likened only to a few moments when we, as young college singles, had every choice in front of us and few, if any, determined responsibilities. We then proceeded to choose and commit and engage in projects that seem to take a lifetime—all worthwhile, but in many ways determining who we were and what we needed to be doing.

But now, the children are moved on to their own lives, our one remaining parent is well and thriving, our business associates and former employees are otherwise occupied, we have our health and our capacity to work, engage, and explore. So now we have reached one of those key moments when all the choices are again on the table. No one needs us to be someone particular. Nothing requires us to be anywhere specific. No activities—except those we choose—demand our attention.

Who are we when no one needs us to be any particular thing? What are you free to be? Free to do? It seems that there is a entire world of choices that can be chosen, an entire palette of life styles that can be fashioned.

One of the keys to a whole realm of freedom is the realization that it doesn’t take much to live on the planet if one is a healthy, functioning adult with few responsibilities. Then, every responsibility you take on is either a choice or a bad habit. Sifting the bad habits from real choices is the path to freedom. Identifying what is truly meaningful beyond what is merely customary is the task. We have learned to think that freedom comes from permanent financial security, by which we used to mean a lot of money in a money market account. But nothing is certain and real financial security comes from being able to create just enough income to live the lightest (least costly) life you can imagine enjoying. So reducing what you need, reduces the number of constraints or responsibilities you have have to support, creating more freedom to do whatever it is you want.

Who do you want to be today? What do you want to do? Where do you want to go? If you let go of your constraints, untether yourself in the arising updraft of your life, what happens next?

Well, that’s the experiment we are embarked on by hook or by crook. And we intend to be writing about our experiences, how we got here, what we are discovering, and what’s interesting.

It is truly an exercise in catching the updraft.

PS. Still looking for the catchy title, theme, category for these posts. I wanted to use American Sanyasi denoting that it is the time of life beyond the requirements of a householder enabling one to walk away from some of our tethers—but that name is in use already and so I’m still searching.

Why Doing More With Less is an Important Opportunity

There have always been ways for people to create businesses and organizations that are small and controlled. But in most situations, this meant that the organization would have a small reach: a local contractor, a small printer, a regional consulting service. You could often control the quality of your partners, pick and choose who to work with, find a small consort of like-minded individuals.

But for the most part, you could only build a company with a small reach—that is, it was difficult to speak to a lot of people, or provide services across the country, or to market around the world. If you had a really big dream, a far reaching goal, you needed to build a larger organization, taking on all the subsequent distraction that size brings.

But the advances in communication and connectivity have delivered profound solutions: distributed platforms for working with partners and employees, dynamic platforms for outreach to your customers. In addition, as Chris Anderson and others point out, the means of production for some many of our products are now in the hands of individuals: I can write, print, publish, and market my own books from the comfort of my living room; film makers can write, shoot, edit, and distribute video from any where in the world and connect with an available audience; I have a single laptop on which I can develop almost any kind of software with tools that I can buy without getting up off the sofa. (One of my favorite work sites.)

Because of ubiquitous communications, powerful personal computers, and evolving software tools, delivering a product or service to market now takes:

• Less money

• Less time

• AND FEWER PEOPLE

And, from my current perspective, as one looking for ways to deliver my inspirations to the market place, I am intrigued with how important it is that it can be done with fewer people. A concentrated, inspired set of partners can deliver products and services of value to millions of people. How incredible is that? How focused can our potential be? How much can we control our efforts and minimize the possibilities of diluted potential? With fewer of us, can we be more effective at staying aligned and coherent in our goals, intentions, and actions?

Of course, most of us love to work with others and we want to have partners in crime and inspiration. But since every inspired participant can do more and be more productive, we can each leverage more of our personal potential to the fulfilling of our joint dreams, with better odds of building a organization that can truly build potential geometrically.

E.F. Schumacher, the economist, in his 1973 book, Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered, inspired a generation of us to examine our lives and and our work through another lense. As the new economic realities come into play, we can see that small is not only beautiful, but that it can be globally powerful as well.

What are you going to be doing next?

The Idea of Net Potential

We are all trying to create things—lives, families, product, projects, businesses, communities. We are trying to create a future in which our creations are part and parcel of our lives, and perhaps the lives of many others. This seems to be our role in the evolution of the cosmos—to create what inspires us. Our ability to create is measured by how all our activities and beliefs net out—productive actions minus non-productive actions. Our results are the “net” of what we do. (Along with everything else that’s going on.) So the more aligned or coherent we are in what we do (assuming we find the right trajectory) the more “net” positive motion we can cause. So we can see that sometimes we do the right thing, and sometimes we do the wrong thing. And sometimes our beliefs can conflict so we don’t really know we’re doing the wrong thing. It’s hard to get it right even for ourselves and our private goals.

But when you build an organization (family, community, business) you have to coordinate the net positive potential of everyone. Everyone has to be working toward the same goal (we call that taking aim on a trajectory.) And then the hard part, everyone needs to execute productive actions—do the right thing. And there are so many more ways now that things can go awry. The further the group expands beyond the truly inspired, the more dilute becomes the net potential. Sometimes adding a body is a net negative, not even a small net positive.

Of course, we all know this. We can see that the complexities of size in organizations is a cost. But what we sometimes don’t appreciate (and totally forgot in the year 1999) was the possibility of size producing nothing but a negative to the potential of an organization. Suddenly we spend more time on the support structures than on the creative work; more time organizing ourselves than inspiring our customers and partners. More is often less. And usually the inspired ones are distracted from their efforts by the need to support the organization.

So what does this have to do with technology and smaller companies?

In any organization you need the key inspired folks who create the product. They have the idea, understand their customer, and have the passion to make something happen. Then, it seems, you need a lot of support (management, marketing, sales, system admin, office management, etc.) Any of these roles can be fulfilled by inspired partners—but as the numbers get bigger the likelihood is that some people you hire will not come the table with the passion and engagement that the key players embody. They will be playing at another level. These folks dilute the potential of an organization. And they can be anywhere in an organization.

(There is nothing wrong with these players. I have found myself to be one when I got into an organization that had a great deal of passion for something that I didn’t share. I wasn’t a bad person and on paper I looked useful, but I had gotten in over my head with respect to my ability to really commit myself to their passion. After struggling for awhile, I figured out that I should just leave. I was a net negative to their ability to maximize their potential. I wasn’t really helping (even though I did useful things) and I wasn’t having fun either. Both good measures of whether you should be doing any particular thing.)

Modern technology enables the source, the people who are the inspired participants, to deliver their wares/message/media to their audience with a lot less support from those who might be diluting the potential. So what goes wrong? That is, how is the potential of a company diluted when it requires “bodies”, people that “have jobs” in support of the creative effort?

(Now don’t get me wrong, anyone in any role can be a source of additive potential. It’s not the role that causes net negative, it’s the level of engagement. The janitor, the marketing support team, and the system administrators can be incredible contributors to the potential of an organization. The scariest thing is to have anyone in the leadership of an organization not be an inspired, engaged participant—a net add. As an organization grows, the difficulty in managing net potential grows more quickly.)

Think about dancing. If you are dancing by yourself, and your potential is how much creative enjoyment you get, you see that you are in control of what you get out of your effort. (Any activity you love will do if dancing isn’t your thing.) But if I match you up with a partner (let’s say a friend), then the enjoyment you can extract is complicated by your need to work/understand/communication with one other. Now the possible potential, should things work out really well, is higher. But getting the necessary coordination together makes it more difficult to realize.

So imagine that I pair you with a random person. Or four random persons. How hard will it be to extract the same quality of enjoyment or quality of work, and how long will it take you to get to a level that supersedes what you could generate by yourself?

The truth is that if we very carefully choose partners who are as inspired as we are, our potential can grow exponentially. But as an organization gets larger, and we’re probably not talking about dozens of people, then the likelihood is that self-selection or hiring-selection is moving more towards being random than it is to capturing people who are truly inspired. (You can hope that they will become inspired—but they might just want the job.) And, of course, they not all uninspired, but geometrically increasing creative potential requires that the team be really focused on the same value proposition. If they are going even slightly different directions or using slightly different trajectories (in the terminology of Catching the Updraft!), then the potential does not increase, but can actually be degrading all the time. We’ve all seen this happen.

And why do I care? Well, I’m working on what happens next and I’d love to find or figure out what combination of people, technology, and business models can fuel my inspirations. I think its different than it was twenty years ago when I started my first company and I don’t want to use any old assumptions in this very different environment.

Tomorrow:
Why Doing More With Less is an Important Opportunity

A Thought Meander on New Business Model Opportunities

I have spent the last few months studying new business models, new technology, what’s happening, who’s happening. There seems to be a lot of turmoil, a lot of thrash and crash, and also a lot of steady business and technology development.

As someone who is in the midst, as always, of figuring out what wants to happen next in my life, I look on curiously to see what can apply to my situation. What can I leverage? Where can I contribute?

In my previous business endeavors, I essentially used one key skill to build a career and a company. I could learn new technologies fairly quickly and see how to leverage them in a structured fashion. My husband and I built our first consulting company by always being the earliest adopter on the block—after carefully picking the right adoptee. It was the only way a small consulting company could stay ahead of the Andersons, as it were.

So now I’m looking at what’s happening with an eye to see if there is any place for me in this dynamically changing environment, and if so, what would the opportunity look like?

One thing I see is that the new wave of extraordinary technological capabilities has enabled some incredible ideas to come to fruition. Some of them are potent, and some of them are, well, a little dorky. (There are many directions to go with these observations, many of which have been covered. Read “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson for one discussion of why technology has made the world a new place. Read Tim O’Reilly and his gang, who write on many of these opportunities.)

What’s new? Well,

• Tools are better and enable you to design and build anything more quickly.
  We have a world-wide delivery system. And it’s instant for digital products, like music, books, software.
• We have a world-communication system. You can have a conference call with any group of people distributed almost anywhere in the world.
• We have a world marketing platform that enables you to talk with your customers all day long from your bedroom.
• This is not to mention the very new things that you can build with the current technologies.

The major point for me is that suddenly you can do more with much, much less that was ever possible. And that turns out to be critical for maximizing the potential of a young organization.

(Remember the heady days at the end of the century when HR was hiring so many people per day that it was frightening? Turns out we were right to be very afraid.)

More (with less) tomorrow.

In 2001, for various reasons, some personal and some business, all of my ongoing plans and activities were interrupted, seemingly all at once: a business evaporated, a family member died, a baby was born. This is not to say that life all fell apart for me. It did not, for my immediate family was fine and healthy, my home still stood, my health and capacity to work remained. But the things that were driving my activities all fell away and it became clear that I was going to need to make new choices.

At a moment like this, it is very easy to reach out and grab one of our habitual responses—and sometimes that is helpful. But sometimes, if one can surrender to the stillness, manage to be unreactive and feel the flow of life’s direction, such a moment can allow us to align with a truer direction.

In this time of disruption, threads began to come to me. In the joy and exhaustion of the new life of my niece, a children’s illustrated book came into being along with drawings, paintings, and illustrations. In a slow meander and pilgramage to the arctic in our truck, the work on the creative process began to speak to me and flow daily onto pages in my notebook. And one night, laughing at the possibilities of making a living with children’s books or creative philosophy, to the cosmos I posed the question of how I was to pay the bills.

I awoke in the morning from a lucid dream, a very, very rare occurance in my life. The dream was a vision of the opening scene of a story, a movie really, rich and detailed, a profound situation, emotionally taut. I did not remember having such a vision before and spent an hour writing it all down as best I could. And this turned out to be the thread that became the novel. And this stream of potential, this gift of a story, has never abated. It is still there and as I work its weft and weave, it continues to flow.

Writing fiction was never, ever a dream of mine. It was never an idea that came into my head. But this story is an updraft for me, an original source. And part of my confidence in it is its ongoing resourcefulness, the depth to which I can plumb it. Notice, that I do not believe that I make any of it up, but that it is present and I am able to pull it in. That is the best way I can describe my relationship to it.

And so, I can find the precise moment when this updraft came into my consciousness, when everything aligned and I was still enough to see life present it to me, when I was open to new possibilities, even, I would say, searching for my path, but without any particular ideas of what it would be.

And this is not to say that this book is necessarily good, or that it will be successful (though those things are possible in the future). In the arising world there are creative endeavors to be engaged in and learned from regardless of any measure of success that we might have for them. Businesses that falter, writers who still need to grow, philosophies that never quite take wing, these are the ways that the universe evolves. Capacity and skill are continuing to grow. One of the things we know from the creative philosophy is that concern for the state of the outcome is a disabling relationship to the creative process. The creative process must be free of constraints—including the one that says it must be successful. And, as it turns out, that is the best way to improve the odds of being sucessful in the creative process. If you know the result, then you are not creating anything new.

So sometimes we meditate ourselves into an internal quiet; or come to a moment when we struggle to pay attention; or sometimes life crushes our busy-ness into stillness. However we get there, in that momentary reprieve from doingness, sometimes we catch an updraft.

(Continued)

Stillness is not something we experience very often. It is hard to come by.

In fact, the opposite is more likely. Momentum, the strong tendency to stay in motion, predominates most of our lives. (And we are not talking about jogging here, we’re talking about compelling doingness, ongoing activity, mental striving.) Momentum is defined as “the impetus and driving force gained by the development of a process or course of events.” What are our lives if not a continually evolving course of events? And each of those events tends to generate it’s own momentum.

Where does all this motion come from?

• Some of our ongoing actions are truely updrafts, us catching and participating in inspired action.
• Regularly, we start or commit to extended projects—like, say, we have children or an idea for an extended product development effort. Then the momentum of life and work becomes in many ways determined for quite some time, and while it starts as an updraft, habit can keep it moving even if the updraft changes.
• We create many “support” activities in our lives or businesses (cleaning house, keeping the lawn, financial accounting). Sometimes we let these activities take over much of our effort, and over time they can lose their meaning if they don’t relate to the support of an updraft, the support of some inspired activity. Then they just become busy work, sapping our potential.
• Often, instead of catching our updraft, we adopt a goal from someone else. “That looks nice/profitable/doable.” And while, sometimes that puts us on our own path, sometimes it has nothing to do with who we are, and so, for us, there will be no updraft in it and therefore much more effort, though the other guy/company may have really had an updraft.

And I can see that all of these things have played out in my life, some more than others. I particularly fell for trying to do what others were doing because they were having some success—and surely I could do what they were doing. But it wasn’t my updraft and it was a struggle all the way. And I find it easy to get distracted by “life” stuff—fixing the house, keeping the garden, cooking the meals—and while they are an important part of life, it’s easy to let them take over. (A form of keeping up with the Joneses.) (Now sometimes these things are someone’s updraft, and sometimes they are not. Learning to know the difference is important. And difficult.)

An Illustration of the Metaphor

In the spring in northen California, the raptors, red tail hawks particularly, have a beautiful dance they do in the skies above us. They spend hours catching updrafts in the bright sun, partners looping around each other, following, spinning. They are experts at the subtle process of staying in the middle of an updraft. If the red tail hawk set his wings a certain way, deciding in advance what he should do, how he should “act”, what his “action plan” would be, he would glide out of the center of the updraft and lose it. And from there on he would have extra work to do to move upward—he would not be gliding but fighting to create upward movement. But, with a high degree of sensitivity and subtle engagement with the air current, he maximizes his potential in the updraft and soars thousands of feet into the atmosphere.

And this subtle sensitivity is why an internal state of stillness is so valuable.

Updrafts can be roaring storms and when they are, it’s not hard to get into middle of that motion. In fact, it would be hard to resist. But updrafts are equally likely, maybe more likely, to be small shifts in the current. These are easy to miss. And if you miss them, in a short time, you can be way off base. And over time, you can find yourself adrift—without inspiration or meaning, or understanding how you (or you company) got lost.

(to be continued)

(This will be a series of posts.)

This week I am delivering the third major draft of my novel, Illumine, to my readers. This happens about once a year, hopefully not indefinitely. It’s is a moment when the work of that project glides into a slow drift in the current.

The metaphor I am using for the creative process, catching the updraft, is something that I have experienced more fully with this project as my philosophical understanding of the process has been evolving in parallel to the novel work itself. Both projects have been arising together. So one of my threads in this blog is to write about my own experience.

I have talked to many friends in the last few months mentioning my work, and my enthusiasm for it. I usually use a phrase like “my work is really demanding more of my time.” “I have so much that is compelling my attention.” And they can see that the work is a passion for me that pulls me along, or, we should say, I am caught in the updraft. I have seen a pensive look in their eye, and they explain that they would like to find that passion for something. But they are not sure what it is, and they are not sure how they find it for themselves. And, though I have caught the updraft of many projects, few have been as challenging and long-lived as this one. And I can point to the precise moment that the updraft came into my life. The nature of that moment illustrates one of the important parts of catching any updraft, of finding the source of your creative passion.

Stillness

In the story of Illumine, the character George writes this passage in his journal:

“How does one find the dead point? No, the still point of surrender where one’s path arises into the light before you? And you are quiet enough to be in that moment and see the universe present it to you.

How you come to be still is a matter for the gods or your own will. You can push and prod yourself into stillness or you might land there inadvertently or the world might crush you into it.”

In 2001, all of my plans for the future came to a blinding halt—everything ran out of momentum, all the updraft and self-induce momentum fell away. In this case, events in my life came together to create a vast stillness, a profound lack of movement. And in this stillness lies the secret to finding an updraft—to being quiet enough to sense it coming through.

I will continue the story in the next post.