You have important life experience and knowledge that no one else has. Establish a creative practice, and you can use that knowledge to start making a difference right away. In the process, you’ll learn more and become stronger, more resilient, and capable so you can make an even bigger difference. And you can do this with whatever time and resources you have available. A creative practice is both simple enough to start right away and challenging enough to provide you with a lifetime of meaningful work.
We are all world creators, and we need to find our way back into that role in society. Our ancestors created the world we live in today. Now it’s our turn to redesign the world so that we can survive and thrive far into the future. I’m not talking about the fiction writer who creates imagined worlds or whole universes as settings for their stories. As a world creator, we’re not responsible for creating or recreating the entire world by ourself; our role is to improve some small part of the world with the whole world in mind. Our power comes in our numbers and our ability to breathe life into some part of the world through creativity.
Like a doctor has a medical practice, a world creator has a creative practice. A creative practice can be a full-time job or a hobby, but it’s essential work. If we want to give our children and grandchildren a world worth receiving, it’s work we need to start today.
The work of our time
And it’s our work to do. If we don’t, who else is going to do it? The people and organizations that caused problems like climate change are the same ones who are benefitting from the system. They have no incentive to create a fundamentally different world. They do have an incentive to pretend they’re fixing it: to keep us quiet.
So we’re bypassing them and building the new world among the dying relics of the old. We’re turning our backs on the ways that damage the planet and destroy people’s spirits, and we’re creating new ways that regenerate both planet and people. We don’t have much time to make the old ways irrelevant, so we work with a seriousness and urgency that belie our mission to bring joy and life to the world.
The Great Turning
Joanna Macy has talked and written about the Great Turning as being one of the stories that could become our future reality. It describes a future in which we have turned away from the ways that destroy us and turned toward the ways that bring greater life to the world. In her assessment, realizing the Great Turning will require stopping the damage as quickly as possible, building new life-sustaining world systems, and perhaps most importantly, achieving a shift in consciousness in enough people that we see the world and our relationship to it differently.
In my thinking, these requirements define humanity’s canvas: the workspace we need to be focused on so we can bring about the Great Turning. Humanity’s canvas consists of three big movements that are all already underway: Collective Actualization, Design Revolution, and Global Regeneration. Collective actualization is the movement toward shifting ourselves and others to a new level of consciousness. It includes mindfulness, self help and authentic relationship work among others. The design revolution is how we build a world that works for all humanity, redesigning our institutions, industries and other world systems so they are more generative and equitable. And the global regeneration movement includes all the ways we are trying to save and rebuild Earth’s natural systems and the environment.
If these are areas are humanity’s canvas, then the creative practice is how we paint the Great Turning into being.
Your creative practice
So what is a creative practice? It’s a process that is deceptively simple on the surface but complex enough underneath that it will serve as a useful guide for a lifetime. The basic process is a repeating cycle. A cycle may be as short as an hour or as long as weeks or months depending on the work you choose to do. Here are the steps:
- Compile a list of meaningful work that needs doing.
- Choose what work is yours to do, right now.
- Do the work.
- Go back to step 1.
That’s all there is to it. A few simple steps repeated over and over. You have total control over what you decide is work that needs doing and what you choose to do.
Work that needs doing
Each cycle starts with looking for work that needs doing. The phrase seems simple enough, but deciding what needs doing is not easy. To be clear, work that moves us toward the Great Turning is the work that needs doing. Look to the three major movements—collective actualization, design revolution, and global regeneration—for guidance.
If someone else is doing the work, then generally speaking, it’s being done and does not need doing. This is important because it really questions the role of competition in this kind of work. If you look around and see that someone is doing the work you want to do, it’s better to join with them and support them rather than compete against them. It’s cooperation and collaboration over competition. If we’re intentionally working to make the world better, we find that we don’t need competition to keep costs as low as possible or to innovate. Our motivation isn’t to outcompete, but to serve people.
Work that needs doing can come from the ideas of other people who need some help realizing their ideas. In those cases, you can offer your time and expertise to help them move forward. In some cases, you’ll be the one who sees what needs doing. You’ll look around and wonder why no one has fixed this problem that’s in front of you. Maybe because no one else can see it the way that you do.
Yours to do
Once you have a small list of work that needs doing, you chose what work is yours to do, right now. What can you start today? Which work fits your skills and interests? What seems the most urgent? What motivates you? Choose that work and get to it.
Your experience and knowledge are key considerations when choosing something that’s yours to do. If I’m a computer programmer, I’m probably not going to volunteer to do free surgery with Doctor’s Without Borders. That’s obvious, but think about what you know, then look for ways you can build on it, or expand it by taking on something that’s in your wheelhouse, but maybe still a bit of a challenge. It won’t work very well to dive into something that’s going to overwhelm you and burn you out and which you won’t be able to deliver successfully.
Once that work is done, you start the process over and look for more work that needs doing. Finishing the previous work probably taught you something, so you’re not quite the same person you were when you started the last cycle. Are you able to take on something more difficult? If yes, then go for it. This is how you change the world for the better and change yourself for the better at the same time.
Getting Started
To start finding work that needs doing, start with searching online for causes you know about that have meaning for you. Look at the websites that come up. Scan for volunteer opportunities and job listing to see where you can contribute. Look for organizations that have a local presence, or go to a local non-profit you’ve heard of, and ask how you can help.
Start by choosing simple things that you can do easily and work your way up to more difficult tasks. You don’t have to worry about whether the work you choose is the perfect work and place for you to be. The cycle is short, so if you don’t like what you’re doing, you can move on. If you choose something that’s overwhelming, you can drop it and find something else. You’re not locked into your first choice, so just choose something, learn from it, and move on.
It’s important to know that you have everything that you need right now. You don’t need to prepare to become a world creator. Just find some time and work on something that makes the lives of other people better, and you’re on your way. Granted, there is work that needs doing that may be too much for you right now. That’s fine; start with what you know, learn from your experiences, and build from there.
Refining the process
Over time, you’ll find that you’re capable of doing things that you couldn’t before. That’s partly a matter of increasing your skills, but it also involves increasing your wisdom. Be open to learning more about yourself as part of this process. As you’re more honest with yourself about your motivations, try to feed those motives that help you grow toward a more whole human being and starve the ones that are based on selfishness. Try to find the courage to take on work that really challenges you, emotionally, physically and intellectually. Learn to trust you intuition. Keep your mind open and don’t be afraid to admit when you’re wrong.
All of these ways of developing as a person will make you a more effective world creator. It’s not selfish to focus on creating a better you, especially if you use that wisdom in your creative practice.
Get to work
The time, experience and effort of world creators like us is a hugely underutilized resource for creating a better world. If only a few of us dedicated a few hours a week to our creative practice, big changes would happen quickly. Individuals like us, cooperating and collaborating with others are the engines of change, and we need to harness that power and put it to good use right now.
You are a world creator with experience and knowledge that no one else has. Go out there and make things happen. Go out there and change the world for the better. Together we can build a world that frees humanity to thrive far into the future.
Still have questions? Contact me and let’s talk.
