Work-in-Progress.

Principle One — 🥰

BE INSPIRED: OR THE ROMANCE OF FIRST THINGS FIRST

The American philosopher Alfred North Whitehead articulates three stages of learning: romance, precision, and generalization. The big idea he constructs is that learning is a natural, rhythmic process and that everything is interconnected. Here’s how it works: First, we are immediately seduced by a new idea, a set of possibilities swirl around us, sing to us, and we are consumed by the joy of the discovery. We feel giddy and bathe in their delights. Shortly thereafter, the second stage follows, precision. Precision is accompanied by a profound desire to be exact. To get it just right. Yes, even more rigorous than that. The notes are carefully transcribed accordingly on sheet music. Lastly, and to complete the development, there’s a period of generalization in which romance and precision become intertwined. These romantic ideas, then, that we tested and honed, and made precise, can now be classified and shared. Broader still, the song enters the world, sung from the top of mountains. Inspiration takes listening and openness and understanding. The excitement of the rhythms take us beyond ourselves.

“Romance is everything”. — Gertrude Stein

Principle Two — 🕳️

STAY UNSETTLED

Problems are rarely about solutions. Instead, and contrary to popular opinion, they’re about finding the right types of questions to ask. It’s all too easy to offer ready-made solutions. It’s much harder, and much braver, to explore a different type of logic. When we settle into a framework that has been created for us, we can become complacent, lazy, and fail to jar ourselves out of the everyday. Inevitably, we overlook the obvious and we foreclose openness to inspiration and connection. A simple question must stay with us: what question(s) are we not asking ?

“Whenever we propose a solution to a problem, we ought to try as hard as we can to overthrow our solution, rather than defend it.” — Karl Popper

Principle Three — 🧐

FOCUS (WITHIN VIEW & WITHOUT)

It’s as easy to get distracted as it is to become too specialized. Life, as French philosopher Henri Bergson extols, is a matter of attention. It’s a matter of contraction and expansion, of learning how to focus, to simplify and illuminate, and utilize even ourselves. “Treat my book as a pair of glasses directed to the outside; if they don’t suit you, find another pair”, writes Gilles Deleuze of Marcel Proust. Enlarge your perspective to include everything within view and without. The inclusion of everything is a decision that requires, simultaneously, diverse and trained sensibilities. In short, an aesthetics of existence. If life is a work of art, sketches are its modus operandi. The renaissance, to be sure, wasn’t enacted by experts. It was constructed by artisans who crafted their ability to focus.

“And if any of the above-mentioned things seem impossible or impracticable to anyone, I am most readily disposed to demonstrate them in your park or in whatsoever place shall please Your Excellency, to whom I commend myself with all possible humility.”— Leonardo Da Vinci

Principle Four — 💪

DON’T BE DISCOURAGED (BY THE TRADITIONALISTS)

Traditionalists take comfort in precedence. After all, it’s reassuring to talk like everyone talks and walk on well worn paths. Customarily, the road ahead becomes predictable. Step by step, it creates conviction. It can be measured. Everything looks familiar. The cast of characters are recognized. As the road winds, it too, appears to be straight. Certainty levels too much. Even wily sounds assume their own knowable shapes. At least for a while, until there is a rupture, an event, a serendipitous break with the fabric of our habits and daily routines and something extraordinarily out-of-the-ordinary happens. An encounter, a meandering, an unexpected sharp left-turn. “To think is always to follow the witch’s flight”. It takes courage to traverse the everyday and refuse to be torn apart . If you learn to embrace those diagonal lines, they’ll take courageous take you far.

“A philosopher worthy of the name has never said more than a single thing: and even then it is something he has tried to say, rather than actually said”. — Henri Bergson

Principle Five — 🧗‍♀️

PERSIST. PATIENTLY.

The only metric for persistence is resilience. Resilience requires patience. Patience accommodates misunderstandings (and they are thorny misgivings). It loquaciously creates a special room in the house for everything to be readily discussed. A flexible attitude towards a certain elasticity of ideas. Patience, you see, enacts the movement required to persist. It’s a profound thought. Note to self: sprinkle in a bit more patience. Persistence, then, becomes the way to hold space to create, a holding in place that spurs confidence. Wait a second: a tea kettle whistles against a cloudy day signaling that it’s ready to be poured.

“It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.”

— Gaston Bachelard

Principle Six — 🃏

AFFIRM CHANCE

Embrace what comes. All of it. Yes, even the mess on those newly mopped, immaculately cleaned white floors. Be open to accidents, excited to get your hands dirty, and prepared for the happenstance, especially as it happens, just as it is happening right now, as if for the first time. Affirmation exists beyond the valences of the positive and negative. It has a power of its own concoction. As Zarathustra says, “I cook chance in my pot.” What will you incorporate, as you stew on ideas and innovate your own modes of health and vitality. By saying yes to the world, the world will say yes to you. Sister to Principle 7: The Prepared Environment.

“You are extraordinary within your limits, but your limits are extraordinary!”

— Gertrude Stein

Principle Seven — 🛖

PREPARED ENVIRONMENT

It’s difficult to wrap one’s head around this concept, as if the wrapping alone is the setting in motion of the idea. As Madeline Gins says, we are our body proper plus our architectural surround. Here is what I mean. Environments can be designed, experiences can be created, and the beauty of the preparedness is the optimization it allows for new modes of existence. Another way of saying the same thing: “Architecture is basically a container of something. I hope they will enjoy not so much the teacup, but the tea.” A way of living, of being and becoming, then, can be fostered with an appropriate mixture of care, thoroughness, and an all out letting be. Things separate and conjoin at one and the same time. Essentially, wrapping ourselves in the living of life is the envelopment of the environment. Brother to Principle 6.

“The environment should encourage fortuitous encounters and open community.”

— Max De Pree

Principle Eight — 🫶

BE GENEROUS

Kindness isn’t weakness. It’s the farthest thing from it. It’s strength on a whole other order of magnitude. Dynamite! A plane of existence that opens itself up continuously. It starts with generosity, the willingness to share and participate despite our identities, and in spite of ourselves. What wicked things we can be when we stick up for our selves. Generosity is magnanimous. It doesn’t have time for criticism or the quicksand of inauthenticity. Wendell Berry says it concisely, “Do not think me gentle / because I speak in praise / of gentleness, or elegant / because I honor the grace / that keeps this world.” Generosity begets generosity, a world opening onto itself.

“How do you make your pictures? I don’t know, it’s not important.”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

Principle Nine — 🤝

COLLABORATE

Collaboration, to appropriate the wildly wonderful poetry of Walt Whitman, is the journey making of the stars. Hardly anything encapsulates the spirit of creativity, the whistling of wonder, more eloquently than coming together to tirelessly make and build and resist. A work of art has nothing to do with communication, says Gilles Deleuze. Instead, it has something to do with an act of resistance, and collaboration unfurls identities in a dance to become. The stars shine infinitely brighter, brighter still, when you learn to follow the grass, the wind, the peaks of the waves crashing in the salty seas. And, muster the courage to feel the stardust between your fingertips. The act of collaboration, itself a special and coveted exercise, necessitates the conditions needed to innovate a life to be lived.

“You have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.” — Miles Davis

Principle Ten — 💫

DO IT ALL AGAIN

It’s important to codify. It’s also important to iterate. Codifying is learning how to constantly be iterating so you can do it all again, and again. Again is where the doing picks up speed.

“Whenever I draw a circle, I immediately want to step out of it.”— Buckminster Fuller

Principle Thirteen — 🂻

BON COURAGE

As Rodin would say to Rilke each night,“Bon courage”, a riff on “bonne nuit”, or good night. At the close of the day, Rodin would remind Rilke to go forth with courage and demonstrate his magnanimity.

“Be of good courage all is before you, and time passed in the difficult is never lost...What is required of us is that we live the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.” — Rilke