As with generativity in other domains (see my last post), the elements do not predetermine what the outcome looks like. Rather, they are the basis from which individual decisions and creativity happen. So this is not about saying what I must do, or how specifically I must live in order to live well, it is about identifying why a particular season of living, or even a life overall, just works.

The three common dimensions I observed in generative domains were:

1. Hard coded, non-negotiable but non-prescriptive design elements. From my observations of my own life and those around me, the drivers and foundations of a well-lived life outlined in Part 1 are the design elements of a generative life.
2. The outward expression is intentionally and continuously evolving creatively. A generative life is intentionally and continuously evolving. This applies to pleasure, betterness and meaning, the pursuit of which draws me to experience more of the beauty in the world (pleasure), continually develop my innate and acquired talents to be the best I can be (betterness), and contribute with ever increasing effectiveness to a better future for others (meaning). The disciplines (getting and staying unstuck, uncluttering, modal living and contentment) equip me to navigate this ever-evolving terrain with determination and grace.
3. Positively oriented; it generates positive experiences and cultivates a positive future. A generative life generates life. The meaning here is not about physical reproduction. A generative live is life-enhancing, life-giving. There are two expressions of this: Firstly, generative living is engaged with communities (see note above) in ways that generate internal energy (see note of generative engagement below). The harmonizing of the design elements creates and sustains energy for living.

If any one of these three dimensions is lacking, life misses that generative edge. If the foundational drivers of pleasure, betterness and meaning are unharmonised, then generativity gives way to striving, restlessness and a sense that something is not quite right. And if my life is not continually evolving, moving from the known to the unknown, then stagnation takes over. As biologists remind us, equilibrium or static balance is death. And lastly, to live generatively, my orientation in life must be positive. Always hoping the best of and for people. Always looking to build up rather than tear down, always seeking to leave the word better than how I found it.

And then in addition to these three dimensions, a generative life energises those with whom it engages. In simple words, being around a person living a generative life is inspiring and motivates us to experience pleasure, be more fully ourselves and prioritise what matters most to us. A generative life is a potent, if not always publicly acknowledged force for good in the world.

My previous post on the discipline of contentment was the final piece of Part 1 of my personal manifesto. Part 2 is about generativity and how it relates to the four drivers, two foundations and four disciplines that made up Part 1. The diagram below pieces the bits from Part 1 together.

A well lived life harmonises pleasure, betterness and meaning. The contexts within which I pursue these are the communities from which I derive my identity. The quality of my engagement in these communities is largely determined by my experience of unconditional love within spaces where I can be freely myself; my literal and figurative home(s). Further to these foundations, the disciplines of getting and staying unstuck; uncluttering my life; priming myself to be my best for the recurring contexts of my life via modal living; and active contentment, make up the elements of a well lived life.

An introduction to generativity

There were a couple of hundred of us in a large room, scattered around small tables. We were in intense conversation. I had never heard the word before, but when I heard Peter Senge describe a particular kind of learning as ‘generative’ I intuitively understood, at least partly, what he meant. The word resounded with meaning for me; I heard something about creativity (generating). I heard something about people (generations). But it was more than understanding, there was something about the word, so pregnant with meaning that captivated me. That was a long time ago, and I had been using it for a number of years before I decide to dig a bit deeper. What I found intrigued me even more.

Unknowingly I had encountered the concept of generativity way back in my year 11 English class. Being a mathematically oriented student I tolerated English classes, managing to get through most literature assignments without actually reading the texts. But there was a unit of year 11 English that suited me down to the ground. In our class it was called transformational grammar. In transformational grammar we learned the ‘code’ behind sentence structure. The idea was that if you understood the basic elements of a sentence, you could then create meaningfulness by inserting your own content. It was the ‘science’ of English that facilitated creativity. But if the elements we not well formed, no content would make sense to the reader/listener. As with any design practice, the application extends to diagnosis as well as construction. If a sentence is non-sensical, transformational grammar allows us to diagnose why.

When linguist Noam Chomsky developed the theory I encountered as transformational grammar he had called it generative grammar. I was curious about the common meaning between Senge’s generative learning and Chomsky’s generative grammar. So I dug further.

Psychologist Erik Erikson, known for his work on stages of human development, coined the term generativity in the early 1950s to describe the struggle against adulthood stagnation. In his work, it meant living with a concern for the next generations, typically characterised by an optimistic outlook. More generally, generativity came to mean the ability of an independent system to generate new content, unique to that system, without external intervention from the creators of the system.

OK. So that started to make sense of the other uses of the word I was now discovering.

Renowned music producer Brian Eno used the word to describe ever-different and changing music that is generated by a system. While Eno’s generative music is electronic, we could also think about a wind chime in a breeze as an example of generative music. Generative art, similarly, is art that is autonomously created, whether by computer algorithms or other patterned systems.

In 2011 I came late to the genius of Christopher Alexander. After a trusted recommendation I trawled the specialty bookshops in Melbourne for his 1974 classic Pattern Language. The day it arrived I sat down to skim the contents and was instantly mesmerised.

The scope and brilliance of the book was intoxicating. From the design of the universe, through how to arrange nation states, right down to where to put windows in hallways, here was a mind so attuned to ‘what works’ it was like ‘waking up’ to a way of thinking I didn’t even know existed. Alexander had understood the design of ‘things and people’ in the same way Chomsky understood language, and had broken it up into rules that everyone can understand. Generative design. (My label)

While the dictionary definitions of generative tend to focus on the ‘capacity to generate offspring’, the use of the term in the contexts I have come across imply a richer meaning. From these examples I have distilled my own, more nuanced appreciation of generativity.

For me, generative has three dimensions.

1. Hard coded, non-negotiable but non-prescriptive design elements.
2. The outward expression is intentionally and continuously evolving creatively.
3. Positively oriented; it generates positive experiences and cultivates a positive future.

I then reverse applied these three dimensions to the uses of generativity I’d come across:

• Erikson’s struggle against adult stagnation,
• Chomsky’s generative grammar,
• Peter Senge’s generative learning,
• Eno’s generative music,
• Generative art.
• Alexander’s generative design (my label).

But as interested as I was in language, learning, music, art and design, for me the main game was about living. And so I wondered what generative living might look like.

So, next time: what does generative living look like?

Practice and master the art of contentment

We raised our family of four children with little money. Until our youngest child went to school we had no guaranteed salary cheque, and what we did get put us in the lowest income bracket. We had made conscious choices to live simply and frugally. We were immensely happy and for many years felt we lacked for nothing. We practiced the discipline of contentment.

It wasn’t just about money. We chose to savour the seasons; when we had babies, when we had toddlers, kids and when we had teenagers. Without mastering contentment, seeking change is like chasing the wind. Getting unstuck adds colour and stimulus, it expands our appreciation of life and the world in which we live. Contentment facilitates peace.

A commitment to ‘live in the moment’ can sound like a foolish short term approach to life. And wrongly applied that is true. Living in the moment does not mean that every time I see a piece of caramel slice in the café cabinet, I am committed to engaging! It could also imply that I throw caution to the wind in regard to long term financial planning and save nothing for the so-called rainy day or old age, whenever that is supposed to begin. In an ambitious world, where growing your audience is king and the law of the jungle seems to define corporate life, a commitment to contentment can be perceived as weakness. Not so.

A life well-lived is a contented life. The discipline of contentment is the daily commitment to open my eyes to the good and the beautiful on offer now. This is not in conflict with driving ambitions in the arenas of pleasure, betterness and meaning. It is in conflict with an attitude that is so focussed on the fantasy of a desirable alternative, that I am robbed of the opportunities for deep satisfaction and appreciation today. It is about doing my best with what is on my do-list right now, not about an illusion of another do-list.

A contented life also recognises the seasons of life. The freedom (or lack thereof) I have when, for example, there were small children in the home, is fundamentally different than retirement. It feels normal to live for tomorrow, lusting after someone else’s lot in life, or the prospect of a more attractive future. The consistency of life means that if I live for tomorrow now, I will always live for tomorrow. Tomorrow never comes.

The wonderful thing about mastering contentment, is that I always have today. In fact, today is all I ever have. The discipline of contentment is about urging myself to be at my best today; to open my eyes and see the beauty I can engage to feed my desire for pleasure today; to take the opportunities to improve who I am, to become better at what I do today; to be alert to how I can put another little incremental dent in the universe by my actions and behaviour before I go to sleep tonight.

Questions that help me practice contentment

1. What is great about my life right now?

2. What else?

3. What else?

4. How will I enhance my active appreciation of these things?

Modal living: being intentionally present

We started living and working from our caravan about the same time as I started working week on, week off, in Port Moresby. That meant I was spending large amounts of time in three places; at home, where the focus was family and work; in the caravan where everyday meant swimming in salt water alongside working remotely; and in Port Moresby which was hotel living and office based work.

This stark variety prompted me to behave differently, to develop patterns of living that were customised to each environment. The kinds of clothes I wore, the way I related to people, the pace of life, my diet, work rhythms, were pretty much unrecognisable between contexts despite the reality that I was doing similar work and for the most part maintained relationships with the same people.

What emerged over the year was a conscious effort to acknowledge the particular environment I was in, and adapt my living style to it; I called it modal living.

Being intentional about my inner world and physical habits helps me be fully present. Who am I here for? What do they require of me? What do I need for myself in this space? … are all questions that arise from modal living.

It is immensely frustrating that I only have one go at life. How good would it be to know what it would be like to be a court judge and a hermit? An implication of the discipline to unclutter though, is that I make peace with a focus, to be the best at being myself. Knowing what gives me pleasure and investing in infusing my living with associated experiences. Knowing what I am good at and taking every opportunity to become better and to pursue mastery. And being in touch with what matters most and prioritising my own efforts to contributing to a better future in relation to it. Which is about taking this one life and making peace with all the things I can’t do.

Kind of. There are two ways I can live multiple lives while maintaining the disciplines of contentment (see next week’s post) and uncluttered living.

The first way we can cheat the ‘one life’ shackle is to get and stay unstuck. Who says I can’t do something completely different for a season?

Secondly, I recognise that I live multiple lives within this one life. I have a work life, a home life and some kind of social life. For the purposes of this discussion, let’s call them modes of living.

A well lived life is to be fully present within the spheres that make up my living. A common tendency is what I could call vanilla living. Rather than contextualise my attitudes and behaviours to the environment in which I find myself, I impose my undisciplined or that’s-just-who-I-am state on the environment. What I am aiming for here is not about being a conforming chameleon, unsure of my true identity. The discipline of modal living identifies the different roles or contexts that define my living. For each of those modes, I then determine the inner world attitudes and the outer world realities that optimise pleasure, betterness and meaning in those environments.

For example, at work I need to be switched on, organised, agile and confident. While some of these things might come naturally to me, on any given day, they may not. Modal living will mean I determine the things within my control that enable me to be at my best. Interestingly, apparently superficial things make a big difference; the clothes I wear, the radio station I listen to over breakfast, and the speed at which I intentionally walk.

At home on the weekend, wearing different clothes, putting my work bag out of sight, grinding my own coffee to slow me down … all these things help me adopt a fundamentally different demeanour.

Of course, some of this comes naturally. Environments have extraordinary power over me so I involuntarily conform. But simply going with the flow of what the environment imposes on me is not what a well lived life looks like. I am talking here about being precise about what the people and environment needs from me, and determining ways to get my head and heart in the right space.

Variety is the so-called spice of life. By appreciating the different roles I play and being intentional about being at my particular best in those spaces, I can ensure my life is less vanilla. One life, yes, but multiple expressions within it.

One of my hindrances to doing this well is my inability to leave things behind. I take my work home, or I take my holiday fantasies to work. So within the discipline there is an opportunity to apply the discipline of being uncluttered. What does this look like?

In each mode I figure out what is essential. In order to deal with what is not (essential), I must use or create systems, tools or processes that enable me to manage other things in my life with the absolute minimum expenditure of time and energy. This might mean allocating time every early Saturday morning or late Sunday evening to capture the distractions from work. It might mean a regular lunchtime message to Maria as a container to check in on important family matters. Typically, it will involve routines and practices that manage those things not essential to my current mode. They enable me to be fully present, without the constant distraction of ‘the rest of life’.

Modal living is not about sitting at my desk dreaming about the next holiday. It is about committing to booking it on the weekend, and getting back to work. Modal living is not about snapping at the kids when I walk in the door, it is about taking the five minute walk from the tram stop to figuratively stuff the worries of the office into my satchel and throwing it behind the bedroom door on the way to the kitchen. It is about being full alive to the possibilities for pleasure, betterness and meaning in my current environment and making sure my mind and body is primed to grab them.

Questions that help me stay intentionally present

1.Identify my main modes of living. (Think about the different places I am in regularly, the groups of people with whom I live etc)

2.What does each role require of me?

3. How will I manage the other ‘distractions / inclinations / temptations that distract me from the main game in each mode?

Uncluttered: trump wastefulness

My dorm room in the residential college at university was cluttered with stuff. I liked having bits and pieces around me, symbols of things, posters, ornaments … stuff.

Maria was a minimalist. I’d never heard the word or even knew of the concept back then, but I was drawn to the simplicity of her living. If she hadn’t worn an item of clothing for a while, she would give it away. Somehow, bare rooms still had character … it was an odd and attractive characteristic.

I was slow to learn, but over the years I have loved learning the discipline of purging our lives of stuff. Books have been very important to me, so the three occasions when I have given most of my library away have been emotional. Before the days of digital music I similarly purged my record, cassette and CD collections. I am attracted to the idea, not of ‘how I could live with less?’, but with, ‘what can I not live without?’. When we moved to the Sunshine Coast a few years ago, we took some favourite kitchen equipment and personal belongings that fitted into two cars (and a caravan). We put some photo albums and kids toys in a very small storage unit and gave the rest away … a house load of furniture and memories. So liberating. It was an exercise in determining what we wanted to keep to enhance our lives, and to discard the rest, despite the financial loss.

It is hard to get unstuck when our lives are cluttered with stuff that ties us down.

Busyness is a curse. In a well lived life, it is not worn as a badge of honour. Busyness normally refers to the volume of activity relative to the allotted time, but can also describe the state of my inner world. Cluttered usually means scattered.

Paradoxically, it seems to me that the highest achievers say ‘no’ habitually, in fact they say ‘no’ most of the time. Some people say ‘no’ as a power play, but that is not what I am talking about. I am talking about the crystal clarity that comes from determined focus; a simplicity about choices that reflect the underlying outcomes that are being pursued.

A well lived life is characterised by a determination to know the essentials and discard the rest. This commitment to embracing what can’t be lived without, is not an austere minimalism, it is a robust appreciation of what enhances ones experience of pleasure, pursuit of betterness and engagement with meaning.

I accumulate stuff relentlessly. The only antidote is to abstain from my accumulation impulses (committing to not replacing items and making purchasing decisions that will last the long haul) and then periodically doing a de-clutter. The de-clutter can be applied to stuff, to activity, to responsibilities – to anything that hinders my capacity to focus on the things that matter most to me.

The skill to effectively juggle multiple tasks, and the ability to absorb and respond to the complexity of hectic urban living is admirable. But there is an inherent attractiveness about clarity. It betrays a quality of life that charts an intentional course, one that knows where it’s going and what it needs (and doesn’t need) to get there.

Questions to help me stay uncluttered

1. What is essential for me to optimise pleasure, betterness and meaning?

2. What other things are cluttering my life? What could I get rid of?

3. What will I get rid of?

The next section of my manifesto is about four disciplines, the exercise of which, for me, are critical for living well.

Get and stay unstuck

In the early 1990s I wrote a life plan that included some ambitious contribution to significant change. I was working within an organisation and was part of a vocational network that I had no reason to doubt would shape the rest of my career. I had significant leadership roles and found kindred spirits whenever I travelled around the world. I felt like I was part of something big and important.

Then I gradually became unsettled. I developed hunches that my contribution would not lead to the kinds of changes I had imagined. Having spent the first fifteen years of my working life on a trajectory within the not-for-profit sector, I wondered what it would look like to work for myself. I had no commercial experience, and I’m mostly glad I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

I really had no idea what I was doing really, I quit the world I knew and ventured into the unknown. And the world opened up for me like a spring flower on time lapse. I got unstuck from the career trajectory that I had expected would define my contribution over a lifetime. I met people, engaged ideas and discovered rich values and communities that I would have never believed existed. I had no regrets about my vocation until then, but the new worlds that I encountered help me appreciate how ‘big’ life can be.

I had tasted what it was like to make a change. A real change. I knew I would never allow myself to be stuck again.

Rituals and habits are fabulous. They give life stability and are an extremely efficient way to make decisions. Imagine if I had to decide what to do afresh every morning in my getting-ready-for-work routine. Debilitating.

One of the ways to determine the healthiness of a particular routine is to assess the ease with which I can choose not to do it. If I find myself without a real choice, then I am addicted. And addiction is always a bad thing. It is healthy to be able to choose to do something, even if I make that choice relentlessly for the rest of my life.

This can be confusing when overlaid with my personality or psychological preferences. These hard-wired attributes incline me to act in certain ways. For example, I might be inclined to wash the dishes every night after dinner. Tick. But if I simply cannot go to bed with dirty dishes in the sink, I have a problem. Trivial at one level maybe, but it reflects being hostage to a habit, rather than a habit being in service to me.

A life well lived is one in which I make choices about the circumstances that define my life and / or my response to them. Choices determine how I spend my time every day, but the accumulation of choices (or non-choices) over time determine how I spend my life.

It is a foolish naivety to believe I can ‘have the life I want’. Such platitudes come from positions of power with rare acknowledgment of the systems, privilege and luck that supported the ‘rise.’ But even with that caveat, sometimes I believe I am stuck when I am not.

I can change careers, I can move cities, I can become healthier. But I must embrace the consequences of the choices to do so. Inertia is insidiously strong. If I am in a pattern of living and relating that has been developed over time, what started as a productive groove can become a debilitating rut. I can feel like I’m stuck on the treadmill.

By looking at my life through the pleasure, betterness and meaning lens, I can determine which levers I need to pull to live more fully. If the ‘ruts are deep’, some disruption may be necessary to make a change. So be it.

I need to beware the inclination to change things that are simply uncomfortable or hard; to avoid responsibility or seek easy-street. That is not what I am talking about here. I am talking about a life where pleasure, betterness and meaning are in harmony over time, a life where I am fully alive. Discretion and wisdom will help me determine what circumstances I am stuck with over the long haul, and which ones I can navigate away from.

Getting unstuck is also not about moving on or leaving. Getting unstuck is about moving to. Making effective life-changing decisions is about executing a long term (or at least a medium term) vision. It is about taking steps to put the elements of life in place that allow me to harmonise pleasure, betterness and meaning for the long haul.

Mountain-top epiphanies aside, there is rarely a compelling time to make the big calls. However, learning to make decisions from a projected five year time frame is a helpful attitude. “If I could look back on my life now from the vantage point of five years down the track, what would I wish I had had the courage to do, but didn’t?” “What am I spending my energy on now, that feels important in the moment, but in five years time will seem like a waste of effort from the perspective of what matters over time?”

The commitment to get unstuck, and the discipline to stay unstuck, is a potent antidote to long term regret.

Questions that help me get and stay unstuck

1. What do I dream of in life? What is holding me back that I could change if I chose to?

2. What are the consequences of biting the bullet and making the change? What will I do to manage those consequences or implications?

(All the pieces of my personal manifesto fit together and build the bigger picture, so to get the full meaning you’ll need to scan the previous posts, in particular, for this post, the one on community.)

Home: a place to love

Identifying with a community or tribe helps me understand and communicate who I am in the world. My drives for pleasure, betterness and meaning are rarely hidden; they are about my engagement in the external world and so by definition are ‘public’ pursuits. But the extent to which my engagement with those communities is healthy, is determined somewhere else. The formation of who I am is inner work. I am who I really am when no one is looking.

‘Home’ is that place where I am free to be my unpolished self. It is also the place where that small number of people I call my family are free to be their unpolished selves too. The quality of my being in the external world, the demeanour and character with which I pursue pleasure, betterness and meaning is determined by the love I experience at ‘home’.

Note that home is not necessarily the family home, or indeed the house where I am living. It is the space, where I am accepted unconditionally and accept unconditionally. If community is about belonging, home is about love.

What happens if I don’t have a ‘home’ in this sense of the word? I compensate, and I look for it in the various communities to which I belong or am seeking belonging. But there is a hard edge to this; without a loving home – a place where I am unconditionally accepted and accept – my engagement in the external world, my pursuit of pleasure, betterness and meaning, will tend to become a search for ‘home’, and my ‘performance’ and corresponding affirmation in those arenas becomes a surrogate for a loving home. My navigation of life will be characterised by recurring indications that society in general or people specifically ‘owe me something’

The counter is naturally also true; that if I love and am loved unconditionally, if there is a place where I am relationally secure and safe, I will be equipped to engage in the public pursuit of pleasure, betterness and meaning with confidence and grace.

I am screwed up. I am not free from the psychological impact of living among other screwed up people. This is not about perfection, a sure psychological illusion. It is about a foundation of self esteem and a confidence with which I can engage our society with the primary posture of being a giver rather than a taker. I have a deep need to be loved and affirmed for who I am. Without a ‘home’ where this need is at least partially satisfied, the rest of my life becomes dominated by social maneuvering and manipulation to get people to affirm me.

There is a paradox here, similar to the one in the meaning discussion. The path to be loved is to love. Children aside, there is no shortcut to being loved. I can manipulate people into doing things that look like love, but they aren’t love. Of course just because I love someone does not guarantee that person loves me back, so loving can never be a ‘strategy’ to get loved. Love is simply the highest and most potent human act. But unlike self actualisation that sits on top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, love is not the end point. Love is the beginning and the end, the foundation and the peak.

The pursuit of a well lived life, the sustained satisfaction that comes from harmonising pleasure, betterness and meaning, starts and ends with a place to love.

Questions to help me understand my home(s).

1. With whom and where am I most ‘at home’?
2. Who do I really know and love? Who really knows and loves me?
3. How will I become more vulnerable and give more ‘at home’? What do those I love need most (from me) in this season of life?