Genius in the Art of Living

My 20 year old daughter, a studio composition major in a music conservatory in New York, approached me in our living room a few days after the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan and asked me why anything she does matters. “The world is in chaos. The recession, Middle East, earthquakes, tsunami, nuclear meltdown, everything is out of control and everybody keeps talking about the end of the world. Why does making music even matter?”

Hers was an eternal question, of course, that applies to the arts, business, education…all things human. How do we find meaning in a world where plates can cross in the ocean and devastate a nation in the space of a day? Why aspire to lives of purpose when so much seems random and fleeting? What makes us think that anything we do could possibly matter?

I’ll share the answer I came up with in a subsequent post, but for now I’d love to know: What would you have told her?’

Innovators are told: “Think outside the box.”

Qualitative scholars tell their students: “Study the box. Observe it. Inside. Outside. From inside to outside, and outside to inside. Where is it? How did it get there? What’s around it? Who says it’s a ‘box’? What do they mean? Why does it matter? Or does it? What is not ‘box’? Ask the box questions. Question others about the box. What’s the perspective from inside? From outside? Study diagrams of the box. Find documents related to the box. What does thinking have to do with the box anyway? Understand this box. Study another box. And another. Understand box.Understand. Then you can start thinking inside and outside the box. Perhaps. For awhile. Until it changes. Until you change. Until outside becomes inside—again. Then start over. Study the box.” — From Halcolm’s Laws of Inquiry

Taking a page from Halcolm, Genius in the Art of Living attempts to explore what it means to live a good life in a rapidly changing, highly uncertain, morally and culturally diverse, recession-beleaguered, hyper-connected world. More than a place to discuss work-life balance or what’s next for business (although we’ll do some of that) this is a place for questioning existing assumptions and considering new ways to approach a new world and our place in it.

I first thought I’d borrowed the “Genius…“ concept from Albert Einstein, who referred to the great moral teachers of his time and in history as “artistic geniuses in the art of living” but the term precedes both Einstein and me. Goethe, for example, uses the term to describe a female friend in this excerpt from a letter written in 1780:

“She knows the world, or rather, she is of the world, she knows how to handle the world. She is like quicksilver that separates into a thousand parts in a second and again combines to form a ball. Self-assured about herself and her rank, she also acts with such delicacy and ease that one must see it in order to describe it. She seems to give everyone his due…not like others…who give to everyone small sealed packets prepared according to class and rank. She just goes on living with people and that produces the lovely melody which she plays so as to use not every note but only the choicest. She handles it lightly and with seemingly carefree quality so that she could be thought to be a child tinkling about on the piano without looking at the notes, and yet she always know what and to whom she is playing. That which is genius in every art is present in her art of living.”

These words from Goethe and Einstein set me off on a quest. I began reading and rereading the work of great poets, philosophers, spiritual thinkers and others who attempted to understand what it meant to live well in their times/cultures. Some of their wisdom stood the test of time. Other bits seemed less relevant in a Facebook, Wikileaks, Enron, Charlie Sheen world. The more I read the more questions surfaced: What is the conventional wisdom of our day? If intellectual genius is represented by IQ and relational strength by EQ, what attitudes, behaviors and lifestyles would characterize a genius in the art of living? How will they change as 78 million Baby Boomers enter retirement and more than 80 million millennials come of age? What role will we Gen Xers have in that transition?

So I decided to lob the question out there to see if I could find some other folks interested in exploring what it might mean to pursue Genius in the Art of Living in the 21st century.

I look forward to looking inside, outside and around this box with you.

Joan