Lead with Authenticity and Curiosity: Delights of the Ordinary No. 16

Life is a 20-part failure and maybe a 2-part success, yet we learn life from that 20 part failure. Hence, we have to find some space to wonder and imagine + the art exhibition I went to see this week.

Imagine 

Imagine that the world breaths fumes. And you are in a spaceship for an adventurous ride. And when you come back you find the extraordinary wonders on this earth. That people are talking kindness and compassion and prayers for each other. Imagine that you could imagine the wild joy flowing through your heart and when you hugged your friends they multiplied that joy into wilder streams.

-Anugrah

The wonder of imagination is lasting and what I remember from those days when I was a child, children atrociously outshine in this act of marvel and curiosity. This also I say from my own yarn - that the world is crowded with tight-lipped and non-jumping glorious adults so we all grow up to shrink to that sameness. Unimaginative and severely strict to our own selves!

So, when C.S. Lewis wrote a note to her godchild Lucy, while he was writing Narnia, he must be imagining a child still alive in, by then, older Lucy; her old, forgetful uncle will be waiting for Lucy to come and talk to him about the story he wrote for her. This is what he wrote -

My Dear Lucy,

I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But someday you will be old enough to start reading fairytales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand, a word you say, but I shall still be

your affectionate Godfather,

C.S. Lewis

What an amazing way to live a life! To have the freedom to imagine the world afresh, with childlike curiosity. The world is a sandbox and we have approval to play in it. And then as we explore, maybe we also unearth that there is not much distinction between imagination, art and our lives.

What is Imagination?

It’s the architect who asked, why do buildings have to be square? The poet who asked, why do words need to line up on a page? The activist who asked, why are we not all free? The scientist who asked, when was the universe born?

- Kendra Sand, What is Imagination? Three Perspectives

Kendra Sand further adds, “Imagination is the fulcrum of big ideation, it’s the creation of worlds, visions, or ideas beyond the visible. Creative potential beyond the constructs we often accept in day-to-day life.”

Art is Imagination in the Context

We imagine based on what the world presents to us. It has a context.

It is addressing the question - ‘how the world is versus how we want the world to be?’

What a child needs, what we all need, is to find some other people who have imagined life along lines that make sense to us and allow some freedom, and listen to them. Not hear passively, but listen. - Le Guin

Thus, when artists imagine they are making our cracked world come alive before us. They imagine so we can envision with them and recite it in our everyday lives. We may have to gather the courage to see from our mind’s eyes a more spacious world that sets out to redeem our authenticity and creativity from the grip of a hyper-digitized, overdosed world.

That is the purpose of imagination. It brings strength into our overstimulated-diluted form of living.

The Lion was pacing to and fro about that empty land and singing his new song. It was softer and more lilting than the song by which he had called up the stars and the sun; a gentle rippling music. And as he walked and sang the valley grew green with grass. It spread out from the lion like a pool. It ran up the sides of the little hills like a wave.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, Chapter Nine, The Founding of Narnia by C.S. Lewis.

My newsletters are also my imaginative process sent to you -from one person to another. Harbouring the beauty of life in words, hoping that you are doing good, sitting under the fan, bending o’er your phone, shaking that right leg and reading through.

And till the time you let me in this autumn-filled auburn afternoon, I will gently tap on your shoulder to remind you to gaze outside your window in a world of constellations and broken stars, where angles take a stroll to reimagine the world with us and we have heaven waiting for us.

I also hope in my creative imagination that you will benefit from Delights of the Ordinary Newsletters, prodding to think; to create; to imagine and to live a life with tiny specks of art in our otherwise art-deficient lives.

Your Weekly Curator

Now, as your curator who loves to curate weekly finds and favourite internet links, I hope that there’s something for you to discover amongst them.

Here are my favourite finds of the week:

To art: How Slowly Can You Run?

I went to see an art exhibition this week named, Toiletpaper: Run As Slow As You Can - by Italian contemporary artist Maurizio Cattelan and photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari.

If you have to project gluttony in our world how will run your imagination?

Don’t scroll down yet.

1,2,3………once you have freed your imagination, scroll down.

This art exhibit is “an expansive presentation of our ever-evolving, oversaturated, hyperreal universe… the show confronts the way in which we exist in and engage with an increasingly virtual world, incessantly drowning in visual stimulation. In their four-chapter artistry which actually spreads across four floors, the artists bring in the question of the homes we inhabit, the objects we own, and the people that surround us and in an overdosed contemporary society how slowly can you run?”

Now, take a look at some pictures.

When you look at the art, let it make you feel something. Don’t try to understand it all at once.

If you want to see more photographs of this art exhibition then link is here.

To watch:Hayao Miyazaki (link) made animated movies that were a masterwork and he is highly celebrated in Japan. He said, “I think… animators focus on movement but ignore motivation. It has intent. That’s what makes the muscles move.”

This video on YouTube may help us see an artistic world that ponders on the much softer inner substance and not on the outer callous surface.

To read:

Oh, my Shining Star

- Poem written by me.

Oh, my Shining Star,

That has captured my heart.

When the desires to fly are magnificently high.

We will proclaim the good.

That shall bring in the peace.

To drink the truth in its fullness. 

Then heavens shall be opened to find eternity descending.

- Anugrah

To end: with this quote by the musician and poet, Gil Scott-Heron-

 "Life inevitably translates into time. That is why the sum total of it is called 'a lifetime'. Freedom is the potential to spend one's time in any fashion one determines. I would always want the time invested in my ideas to be profitable, to give the reader something lasting for their investment in me. It is very important to me that my ideas be understood. It is not as important that I be understood. I believe that this is a matter of respect; your most significant asset is your time and your commitment to invest a portion of it considering my ideas means it is worth a sincere attempt on my part to transmit the essence of the idea. If you are looking, I want to make sure that there is something here for you to find."

I wish you a week full of imagination and big delights,  

- Anugrah

Delights of the Ordinary

Delights of the Ordinary currently is a free publication. Yet it takes me many hours of effort to write and curate it. I may need lots of coffee to keep me going.

You can :)

If you stumbled on my publication then you can explore all my previous editions here.