To tell the truth.
By: Charles Davies
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Creative Process, Writing, Initiative, Identity

About ten years ago, I was sitting on my lounge floor in Brighton, surrounded by post-it notes, index cards, scraps of paper — several years of brain emptied out in front of me. There were notes on improvisation and The Way of The Fool (introduced to me by Floris Koot). And money and identity (courtesy of Peter Koenig). And the creative process (from working with The Kaospilots, Ideo and Matt Weston). And storytelling (from one eternally inspiring one-hour lecture by Ron Donaldson, from my time as features editor at The Face, from collecting the Storyteller book-and-tape series aged six).

And something happened where all these different threads came together. Where I could see how these different theories and different practices wove together into one. That — somehow — they were all pointing at the same thing. I felt it. I knew it to be true. And I had absolutely no way of articulating what it was.

You know when you have something to say and it’s on the tip of your tongue - you can almost physically feel it there? Nearly becoming speech, but the connection from brain to mouth hasn’t quite been made. This was like that, but instead of the unexpressed idea being just a moment away — almost articulated but not quite — I could sense in that same almost physical way that the idea was in there, but about ten miles back. Way, way back in my mind. Like I could see landscapes — neural pathways and hillsides and rivers and streams of consciousness and blue skies obscured by clouds — and way beyond, somewhere near the furthest horizon of thought, just hidden from view, there was the answer.

It was a great relief to feel as if, in some hidden way, I’d managed to make sense of all these disparate parts. Even if I couldn’t put it into words, somewhere a knot had been tied. And it was strange, also, that I knew from that first moment that the answer would make its way towards the front of my mind at its own pace. And that ‘its own pace’ was very, very slow. Like in a film where the camera — unmoving — watches someone walking all the way from the horizon.

I carried on exploring improvisation and money and identity and project design and storytelling. And I started exploring meditation and dharma and what makes a good question and what it means to take the initiative. And I’d check in on that idea in the back of my head and watch its progress towards the front. And it would make me laugh — that it was so intangible and nothing-y to track the progress of an unnamed idea, but at the same time it felt like the essential and persistent factor in the course of my life and my work and my thinking. And it would make me laugh — that I felt so entirely helpless in the face of its uncompromisingly unhurried progress.

“Who has time for that now?

Waiting for a natural path to open up

Only acting when the moment arrives?”

— Poem Fifteen, I thought I was on the way to work, but I was on the way home

And I developed a systematic way to clarify ideas. And I wrote a new version of Lao Tsu’s Tao Te Ching. And I attempted to articulate the fundamental nature of money in a ten minute stand-up talk in Amsterdam. And I spent hundreds of hours unravelling the knots that were stopping people from pursuing their vocation.

And in the end, all of it comes down to this.

In this very moment, there is a next step for me to take that is true.

In this very moment, there is a next step for me to take that is true.

And if I listen inside, with care, without prejudice, I know what it is.

In this very moment, there is a next step for me to take that is true.

And if I listen inside, with care, without prejudice, I know what it is.

And if I take it, then I am being true to myself and to the world I am in.

And if, having taken it, I can look back and say — in that moment I was true to myself and to the world I was in — then there is no space for regret.

Because what more can we ask of ourselves than that — in one moment — we might manage to stay true to ourselves and the world we are in?