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Ecology of caring and giving

3/5/2014

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It's funny how some of the big events in life sometimes don't inspire you very much to write about them. It's almost as if they drain you of energy and enthusiasm for thinking about them any more. Our recent benefit gig for Ollie feels like that.. by our own measures it was a success. We packed the hall with nearly 150 people. We raised £2300 for the two cancer charities we were supporting and the feedback we received was very positive and sometimes highly complementary and people genuinely seemed to be having a good time. Our music was some of the best we have achieved and we combined really well with two other musicians, and we sold over 40 CDs. The effort was considerable from everyone involved - the band worked hard and we were all wiped out by the end. All my family helped with the organisation and sales of drinks and making sure that things ran smoothly. I was very proud of them.  Furthermore we had good publicity on local radio and at least two more gigs on the back of it as well as a new working relationship with the musicians that we worked with. I thought I would find writing about it a joyful experience but for some unexplained reason I can't muster the energy. This lethargy is also affecting other things I'm doing. It's a strange experience for me and I can't explain it. 

To rekindle my energy and enthusiasm for writing something I thought I'd look again at Ollie's unfolding story on his website, Facebook page (which has 149 friends) and the YouCaring webpage hosting 410 donations given by friends and people who don't know Ollie or his family. I found the messages of support, love and friendship, and the stories of things that people had done to raise money truly inspiring. Many people had not just given but organised or hosted some sort of event like raffles, auctions, pub quizzes, table top sales, coffee mornings. One person had run a marathon and a group of office workers had donated their lottery winnings foregoing the pleasure of a fun night out. Ollie's illness and the journey his family are making have touched many people and made them want to give and in some cases create events that encourage others to give. So that one little boy's fight against cancer has spawned a whole ecology of action aimed at raising money both directly for the Lovis family and more generally for charities that are helping other children with cancer. This is a wonderful story and it shows how a horrible situation can inspire many people to do something positive and good. And it made me feel good that I and my band have been a part of this ecology of love and support to achieve something worthwhile on behalf of friends in need.

The band was happy to keep going with the fund raising using the Song for Ollie as a way of focusing attention on the issue of children with cancer. I set up our own YouCaring webpage and linked this to the Freeworld's website which now hosts 8 tracks of our CD which can be downloaded free with encouragement to donate. I set ourselves (myself) the target of raising £1000 for Children with Cancer and my sister was brilliant in kick starting the campaign with a £100 donation. 

So on reflection all sorts of actions, new ideas, new products, new relationships and friendships have grown out of this ecological process. Ollie has inspired many people to do many new things. He is the inspiration for much human enterprise and creativity and has enabled many people to feel better about themselves because they have connected in some small but deeply human way to his life story. 

This story has given me another perspective on the idea of ecologies for learning and achieving something we value so I wrote a piece for the next issue of Lifewide Magazine

song_for_ollie.pdf
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'Nebulous'  Song of Hope for Ollie
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Creativity narrative

23/11/2013

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I love working with the talented illustrator Kiboko Hachiyon to try and turn abstract ideas into images that convey meanings in different and often more powerful ways than the written word alone. I wanted to create an image for my talk  that embodied the ideas of creative thought, development and production which results in innovation. I had a some scenes that Kiboko had produced that I wanted to re-use so I made a mock up (prototype?) of the narrative on a powerpoint slide with suggestions for additional pictures to complete the narrative. 

The result is shown above and it tells the story of a young man listening to his ipod and looking at some cakes and having the idea of creating a cake that when you eat it plays the tunes you like to hear. He knew that this was the first time he had ever had the idea so it was new to him and when he mentioned it to other people he could see it was also novel for them. The more he thought about it the more he could see the potential and the more he became motivated to make such a cake. His passion drove him to sit at his computer for hours working out what he had to do and finding out waht he needed to know in order to achieve his ambition. He began experimenting making cakes and also building the electronics mindful of costs and health and safety issues. 

Notwithstanding the complexity and difficulty of the challenge he is successful and one day he produces a musical cake at a price that people are willing buy. He also manages to persuade a local bakery to produce the cakes for him. He has
created a new product that is valued and judged to be new and different to any other cake by the people who want to buy it and a business would like to sell it.

We can apply this narrative to any process in which creativity is involved - including this narrative picture, in which a someone imagines something for the first time and is inspired to try to turn their idea into something tangible. They spend time and effort researching and developing their idea, perhaps drawing in other people to help them and if necessary raising money to fund their experiments. Eventually they are able to realise their idea in a form that can be enjoyed or utilised by other people.

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Becoming the Person I am

11/2/2013

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We spend all of our lives becoming the person we are but rarely stand back and analyse what it entails at the level of our daily lives - preferring to see our growth as a mysterious phenomenon. I have discovered I get great benefit from producing things, usually with other people, that cause me to think about my own circumstances. The latest issue of Lifewide Magazine which I worked on with the editor Jenny Willis focuses on the question of how we become the person we want, need or ought to be. Our Magazine is our most important vehicle for exploring different dimensions of the phenomenon of lifewide learning and development and the process of 'making' involving searching for, commissioning and writing content, and commissioning illustrations and working with the artist always exposes me to new ideas and reshapes my understandings. This issue was particularly significant in this respect. So many of the articles reveal just how precious the chance we have is to use our life to become the person that we try to be so that at the end of our life we are thankful for being that person and have no regrets that we were not someone else. Of course life throws things at us or takes us in all sorts of directions which we would not ask for and this is the reality of what we have to work with. But we can and should be inspired by the people who, through their own actions, show us how to live a life of purpose and meaning that influences and benefits all around them.
I had a fascinating and illuminating conversation with my daughter about how she thought she had become the person she is. She has clearly thought deeply about who she is and how she has become the person she is and what affects her day to day in being the person she wants to be. It was deeply personal and meaningful and I learnt so much from  the conversation.
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Telling stories about yourself

1/3/2012

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Telling a story about myself and the people in my life, seems to me to be so much more interesting and engaging than saying, 'I'm keeping a diary', or I'm recording my experiences and achievements!

There is always a reason for telling a story. Stories, after all, contain and convey our wisdom, and our intuitive knowing. They go beyond facts into feelings. They engage the whole of us--our minds and our hearts. 'By storying my life, that is, by telling about the incidents that give my life meaning I make sense out of it. I begin to connect the dots of my experience and as I do, gracefully, artistically, memorably, I invite you to go inside and begin to connect your own dots to make sense out of your own experience.  Michale Gabriel  Learning and Growing through Stories 

I have never been any good at keeping a diary, the discipline of writing about ' myself and other more important matters' to quote Charles Handy, has never really featured in my own self-management processes. I've always told myself that there are always more important things to do.  Yet I advocate the benefits of this to others and I helped develop the PDP policy that has led to the process of recording and reflecting on personal activity being systematised in higher education. But as I have begun exploring again the way our lifewide enterprise shapes who we are I can no longer avoid it, I have created a need and a purpose for it.  But what is 'it?' I started about a month ago with a word diary, and I'm glad I did. Just writing stuff down in the medium I am most comfortable with is easy.

I also tried out a few free blogging sites but I found that none of them really encouraged me. Then my son recommended the weebly to me. Weebly is free (although there is a pro-version if you want to host a lot of media). I found it simple and intuitive to use and over a few days I got sucked in to creating my own website which I set up around the two these of lifelong journey and lifewide activity. I found the tools easy to use and they made me feel creative and this made all the difference to me. I felt I was creating something useful and aesthetically appealing (at least to me) and because of this I kept tinkering and playing. After a week of onscreen prompts telling me I was only 65% complete. I bit the bullet and set up a blog (which I can password protect) and I began telling my stories.  I backdated it with the material I had saved in word and so it developed quickly to the point where I thought I had achieved something useful and now I find it easy to add a new story every few days.

It isn't easy to make time to do these sorts of things, and I know I have more time know than I used to, but there is a hurdle to get over called 'getting started' and this is the point at which persistence is often weakest until we reach the point of ownership, where we take pride in what we have produced. I have no idea how long I will persist but I am at least developing the habit and I have changed my will to be involved (my intrinsic motivation) because I believe I have a need and I can see value in what I'm doing. Perhaps these are essential pre-requisites for participation in PDP recording/reflecting processes.

In a world swamped by information we need the ability to make sense of our experiences and ourselves in those experiences and telling our stories to ourselves is a good way of doing this. We also need to distil, organise and communicate the complex information that makes up our life and so the capability to communicate  our stories to others is important. I also think that we all need to be inspired, and there is nothing quite like someone's life stories, to inspire. So telling stories in a variety of ways and through a variety of media is a capability that we all need. Perhaps these are the less explicit reasons for the recording processes we are trying to encourage in higher education and CPD practices through personal development planning.

Most of my stories so far are text-based with the odd photo and sometimes a bit of audio. But I can see the value of using media in a more creative way to tell a story and I have made this one of my development objectives. This story, by National Geographic photographer Dewitt Jones about an incident in his professional life, is one that I find really inspiring. It conveys the wisdom of someone who has thought deeply about his work, not only the technical side but the way he inhabits his work spaces and the way he sees the situation, makes decisions about what to do and how to do it and then acts to get the results that he knows will eventually emerge from his actions. 

Postscript 09/03/12
I have just come across an inspiring TED talk by Andrew Stanton a film director of some repute. He told a story about his life backwards and drew out of the story some really important points about story telling in film making. I thought there were some good points for story telling   To engage me with your story  - 'make me care,'  ''give me the promise of a good story - a well told promise propells you forward to the end', 'make me work to work things out for myself but hide the fact', 'make me wonder how it will all conclude - give it tension',  'tell me who you are', 'enthuse wonder'...
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    Purpose

    To develop my understandings of how I learn and develop through all parts of my life by recording and reflecting on my own life as it happens.
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    I have a rough plan but most of what I do emerges from the circumstances of my life 
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