What do you do when you don’t what to do?
Kicking off the newsletter with 20 great ideas for getting started amidst uncertainty
The origins of this project are many but for today, I’m liking the feeling of a fresh start.
Fresh starts are available every day, every where. Mondays are fresh starts or Sundays if you prefer. The turning of the hour or the shift in season or the next breath. Do you want to start with the exhale or the inhale?
Kicking off a year of writing and connecting with you
I’m using my birthday as the fresh start energy to kick off this Livable Futures newsletter! There is a lot of exciting momentum around our beautiful and growing Livable Futures community — turning toward planetary conditions of crisis and uncertainty with all our creative capacities.
I’m also ready to create the book and to do so with all of you in this community over the next year so that by the time by next birthday rolls around, I’ve got a manuscript ready to ship and together we will have generated a treasure trove of ideas for living and thriving in uncertain times and doing work with purpose and creative expansion.
What are the things that are paralyzing to you right now? Where do you feel powerless? What do you want to start but you don’t know how?
How do you get started even when you don’t know what to do?
Climate change terrifies me so for many years I turned away from it. I felt paralyzed, powerless, and afraid.
One day, during the lead up to the 2016 elections, I heard a story on the radio about rising temperatures and melting arctic ice and as I reached to turn off the radio, to turn away and hide my head in the sand, a voice in me said stop, listen, turn toward it.
I flashed on the many descendants of the Nazis in Germany who carry the shame of their ancestors doing nothing in the face of atrocities and I realized that turning away from climate change was creating generational shame.
I want to be a better ancestor.
In the simplest terms, I want to be one of the people who did something. I don’t want my children and grandchildren to ask me what I did about stopping climate change and creating more justice in the process of adaptation (just transitions) and have nothing to say.
So, in 2015, long after when I should have, I finally started turning toward climate change and that in itself was a fresh start.
Nothing is as scary when we turn toward it.
But what can one person do about these seemingly insurmountable problems?
I did some online research and got some important information and you can too. Yes our consciousness about the amount of carbon we are adding to the suffocating atmospheric problem matters. Yes reducing waste and taking pleasure in ecological consciousness helps, a lot. But ultimately, this alone is unsatisfying for many of us.
I read some books and you can too. Naomi Klein’s “This Changes Everything: Capitalism and the Climate” is a great place to start or read a short Guardian article by Klein on climate injustice.
I tentatively talked to my friends and family about what they were doing and you can too. Bring it up. Make addressing climate change a topic of conversation or something you share about on social media. Social movements are built this way. And you’ll get wisdom that will help you, my mother, who runs a non-profit for health and healing through the arts, told me “you already know everything you need to know in your body now.”
“You already know everything you need to know in your body now.”
Alana Shaw, The Body Now, Turning the Wheel Productions
Turn Toward Your Fears
As is often a good idea, I listened to my mother and I turned toward what I know and you can too.
I’m an artist and a writer and I know how to make things in video and interactive media and performance. I’m a mentor and community builder and a mother.
If we already know everything you need to know to get started, then there is nothing stopping us. Let’s sense into how it feels to be with the fear and rage and confusion and then see what comes next.
I sensed that this issue of climate change is an embodied process but it feels out of scale with our bodies. I wondered what would happen if I could bring it into the scale of my body and then do the same for others? Would that help us find intention and eventually action?
I made the audacious leap of assuming that my art practice could do something about climate change.
But there again, I didn’t know where to start, so I did the next thing I know how to do—I called in my resources and asked others for their knowledge.
I put out a call on social media tagging in several artist friends of mine and asked them:
“What do you do when you don’t know where to start? How do you begin creating something new?”
The outpouring of response I got is a treasury of creative practices for make dances and artworks and theater pieces but it is also a guide to all manner of initiation and a manifesto for turning toward what is, arriving into radical presence, and responding creatively. I’ll share it with you shortly.
But first, what do you already know, in your body now?
If I asked your friends or neighbors or family what you do best, what would they say? Are you are great listener? A loyal friend? Do you know how to fix things? Are you a nurturing parent? What if these are your super powers? What if you already know everything you need to know to get started?
How might you make the same leap I made and just assume that these skills are needed now and can directly address the things that feel impossible? What might unfold?
What do you do when you don’t know what to do? How do you get started?
How do you begin a new project? Do you gather information, assemble your materials, call in collaborators, enjoy an empty space or page? If you assume that you already know everything you need to know to get started, what is one small action you might take today to create livable futures?
I promise, there are so many possibilities you’ve never considered just waiting to present themselves to you.
Here are 20 great ideas my friends sent me via social media, feel free to put them to work in your day today!
“Seeing what’s there:” Walk into an open space, drop your bags and start improvising right away with no warm-up, no prior thought. See what an unprepared state will come up with.
Talk to a friend for four days to find different ways to describe what animates what I think I’m working on, and then together create a big grid of discrete tasks or mini-self assignments that are exciting to you and start there.
Make a short intensive residency with scheduled “feedback” folks who will come in…to get things rolling…
Set yourself in motion via some physical problem, game or trick, 2) glean promising nuggets and/or phrases, 3) tweak/alter timing, facings, spacings; exaggerate, diminish, 4) push and prod the movement toward the impossible and uncomfortable. 5) Once you have this motherlode of material, you can assess it and tweak it from an intellectual perspective.
Spend time alone: sketch; with others: whiteboard brainstorm when wanting to get on your feet: emulate/write in the margins of others’ work; in the evening: read about other work or philosophy…
Schedule shared space with someone you trust and feel no competition with. Give yourself 20 minutes to tackle the core/most scary/most salient part of the problem. Show it to them. Repeat 3x.
Nap.
For starters, don’t do anything anyone tells you to do. I’m a fan of index cards, writing down anything you consider material so that they are moveable parts. Also a fan of diagrams. spatialization of an idea, writing down the talking points/anecdotes/key concepts/ideas/anchors on papers in the space and navigating them differently each time was useful for me to practice alone and with others.
Bring someone into the process with you!..show them what you have, they will have a suggestion/ opinion. That usually sparks me to know what I want/don’t want.
Authentic movement, then “fake movement” sample and recombine from favorite youtube videos (create a dance karaoke list) and dance them!! Borrow.
Do a kind of 1970s Simone Forti’s crawl into the studio, perform it and crawl out of the studio immediately. Let it resonate, work on some ideas – only come back to the studio or any other working environment if you feel the necessity – but wait at least 2 weeks. If it does not trigger anything – drop it and start from scratch…
Always start with a nap!
“Find a place you love and trust it for a while.” (I think that comes from Oblique Strategies by Brian Eno)
Erwin Wurm – create one minute sculptures
Change your perspective and get outside. To think, to see-think, listen-think, and move.
Ask others to send you assignments. Roll dice for randomness.
Start with simple images or sound and move from there. Live inside that movement world for a while, it tells you what to do next once you’re there for a long time. Then you are free to interrupt, contradict, add layers, points of nothingness, or keep as is! The base is the hardest, then things get more interesting…
Make a complex set phrase – just walking into a studio, warming up, and in linear fashion clipping one movement to the next to the next
I just say “What am I doing?” over and over (not ironically, although one could) and then spend the rest of the day chasing invisible butterflies or I guess you could call that dancing. Honestly I don’t do anything planned other than force myself to stay in the slightly inchoate state that defines “beginning” for me and I don’t try to make any “knowledgeable” decision for weeks.
My only two cents: keep going. especially when you get stuck – keep going.
What would you add to this list? What do you do when you don’t know what to do? How do you get started?
Thank you, Norah! I spent several hours last night, listening to talks about the climate crisis, thinking about it, and wondering how to connect it more to our work at Local Matters, I’m pleased to see you thinking about it, too. I’m looking forward to following your Substack entries. Onward!
Fantastic Noreen. Thank you for turning toward the crisis and listening and learning, that is so important and connecting it to Local Matters is also really valuable, a great container for creative unfurling of possibilities.