What It Takes To Design Your Life
Published: Wed, 10/12/11
October 11, 2011
What It Takes To Design Your Life
in memory of Steve Jobs
in memory of Steve Jobs
Since 1986 when I bought my first computer, the genius of Steve Jobs and his collaborators, have provided me with both technology and inspiration for designing my life. Every message. presentation, manuscript me has been designed and written on an Apple product.
My Mac is a tool I love. I love using it. I love looking at it. I love paying for and owning it. I love seeing it evolve with each new operating system. I love the consciousness of it's design. I love the logo. I the love the intelligence, creativity and respect living in the employees of Apple stores.
Why does a Mac inspire all this passion in me? It's the presence of one thing that all designers find essential to meaning and success -- a core aesthetic. Steve Jobs had an extraordinary core aesthetic. It became his company's core aesthetic, shaped the world of personal computing and impacts the lives and work of many now and in the future.
In his famous commencement address at Stanford in 2005, Jobs shared one source of the development of his personal core aesthetic -- a course he took in calligraphy at Reed College taught by a truly great teacher, Lloyd J. Reynolds.
Reynolds taught what I would call "Functional Beauty" as it appeared in letter forms. He saw in letter forms, archetypes for all design, for living a beautiful life, and for comprehending the human spirit. And Reynold's genius, woke up the aesthetic sleeping in the young Steve Jobs' genius.
Personal Note: Although I never met Lloyd Reynolds, one of his proteges, a nun, spent an afternoon with me sharing the art of calligraphy. Her caring, thoughtful, beautiful italic left my heart aching with awe. In each letter she formed a cosmic creative beauty lived. My heart still aches with that awe as I write this 36 years later.
Under Steve Jobs fierce leadership guided by his core aesthetic, Apple products consistently demonstrated Functional Beauty. I don't know that Steve Jobs ever used the term "functional beauty," but his extraordinary ability to manifest usefulness and beauty certainly demonstrate it.
Personal Note: Although I never met Lloyd Reynolds, one of his proteges, a nun, spent an afternoon with me sharing the art of calligraphy. Her caring, thoughtful, beautiful italic left my heart aching with awe. In each letter she formed a cosmic creative beauty lived. My heart still aches with that awe as I write this 36 years later.
Under Steve Jobs fierce leadership guided by his core aesthetic, Apple products consistently demonstrated Functional Beauty. I don't know that Steve Jobs ever used the term "functional beauty," but his extraordinary ability to manifest usefulness and beauty certainly demonstrate it.
A materialist's aesthetic focuses on function and an idealist's aesthetic focuses on beauty. When they combine or embrace, love that works is manifest. I love my Mac because love is present in every part of it and its excellence makes me better.
AWAKENING YOUR CORE AESTHETIC
How do you manifest functional beauty in your life? Does your life work? Does it feel beautiful? Do you have a core aesthetic? How do you move your life forward?
We often feel circumstances and conditions beyond our control design our lives. We don't understand how we manage to function and the beauty of our lives often feels distorted or faded. But with sacred and practical attention, we can awaken our core aesthetic and design our lives from the inside out to be beautiful and useful.
Yes, our core aesthetic begins in the design of our inner life of response, reflection and imagination and moves outward. We form the conscious capacity to design our own lives - to live and evolve through gestures that are beautiful and functional.
BEGIN HERE
Spend quiet time asking yourself:
What were my useful thoughts today? What were my beautiful thoughts today? What thoughts were useful and beautiful?
Ask the same questions about your feelings.
Finally look at your deeds.
Your analytical brain with love the useful questions. Your imaginative brain will love the beauty questions. Your heart will love seeing how they combine.
If you do this everyday before you go to sleep for just three days, you will begin to get a faint picture of your core aesthetic and be own your way to designing your life. Keep it up for a month and the picture will begin to be clear and living.
SUPPORT FOR DESIGNING YOUR LIFE
The Inner Year and Inner Life webinars are courses in revealing and strengthening the Functional Beauty of your personal life. You develop your core aesthetic. You learn how to design your process for living and manifesting. Like my MacBook, the webinars are tools that support your efforts to design your life.
Upcoming Programs
Our unconscious core aesthetic, the one we developed in our first seven years, must be discovered before we can form one consciously. The Inner Life biography program, Lifting the Veils: Your First Seven Years provides a truly powerful process for shaping your future by understanding your past. You don't need to have early memories to do this program. To learn more, click here.
Any attempt to design a functional and beautiful life benefits from creative input from our spiritual companions. Engaging Your Spiritual Companions, an Inner Autumn program, guides you to a new level understanding of those beings you cannot experience with your senses, but feel in your heart and soul: your Guardian Angel, those beings that form the Spiritual Hierarchies from angels to Seraphim, nature spirits and elemental, and the human souls that have crossed the threshold of death or are waiting to cross the threshold of birth. Insights into how we engage these beings in our daily living weave a new imagination of prayer and meditation. To learn more, click here.
Please let me here from you. Share your questions, your process, your surprises. Please post your comments on the blog. http://www.theinneryear.blogspot.com
Can I Listen ?
Are you living with questions about who you are and
what you should be doing? Do you seek to find what meaning lives in
your sorrows, struggles and suffering? Do you wonder how to develop a
new relationship to your life so far that opens up desirable
possibilities for your life to come?
You may want to
give yourself the gift of personal coaching or counseling. A good
counselor will provide the elements of warmth, containment,
encouragement and creative review and reflection. Each of us needs a
rhythm of sacred conversation centered on our own path of
self-development. If you would like to have sacred conversation with me, please call me 919-636-0430 or Email me.
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UPCOMING INNER AUTUMN - BEING HUMAN PROGRAM
ENCOUNTERS - PART TWO
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