Finding Your Element: A Conversation With Sir Ken Robinson

It is possible, even if, for the time being, you are in a job that you would perhaps not choose to do for the rest of your life. But even there, to make the first step towards opening up is to let go of resistance to what you're doing and give it your fullest attention. And sometimes then life takes you away into something else because you have opened yourself up so you can give of your best. If you, let's say for the past few, three years, you disliked working at this restaurant. And everybody somehow, even though you smile, but everybody can feel that. That you don't really want to be there. And the customers can feel it, and your colleagues can feel it. And if you then shift and you do it with fullest attention, you honor every moment, every person that comes into the moment. And the way you put the plate on the table, there's attention there. So what changes then is not sometimes what you do, but how you do what you do. And I would say, I don't know if you've looked at that. The first step towards finding something more satisfying can be to change. Not to look for what. I don't know what, but change the how in what you're doing already and bring full presence to what you're doing. And then perhaps somebody notices how present you are, a customer in a restaurant and says, oh, what's your name? And suddenly that leads to something else. Either you open your own restaurant, and suddenly people come in and they feel good in that presence, that you create an energy field of presence or whatever it may be. So have you looked at that initially, perhaps to change the how rather than necessary, because otherwise, if you're trapped in negativity, it may be much more difficult to break out of that.

I agree absolutely with that. It seems to be one of the things that makes us human. Because in most respects, we're like the rest of life on Earth. You know, our lives are short and organic and dependent. But you ask, well, why have human beings suddenly come to dominate the planet in the way that we have? And part of my answer, anyway, is to say that human beings uniquely have extraordinary powers of imagination, the ability to bring into mind things that aren't present. We can look forward, we can look back, we can enter other people's consciousness virtually, which is what we mean by empathy. And if we imaginatively engage with somebody else's consciousness, if we're empathetic, then we broaden our own lives. And it's always interesting to me that in times of war and conflict, the first thing that we try to suppress is our empathy for the people that we're rising up against. And it's only when we suppress our empathy that we can do things that are literally unimaginable. Yes, but the reason I say that is from that power comes all the powers of practical creativity. And there is a literal sense, I think, which is clearly in what you just said, that as human beings, we create our own lives, we create our own realities, we compose our lives, and we can recompose them, we can recreate them. We can see things differently. We can choose to see it differently. We can see it this way or we can see it that way. And often the most dreariest circumstances could be transformed not by the circumstances changing, but by our attitude to the circumstance changing. And that in due course, may change the circumstances.

And that in itself, that perhaps is the ultimate creative act, is that it's the ultimate creative act, not necessarily create something, but not to be a reactive entity, but to bring the. To create your own life.