Haxted Thinking No. 13 - June 2024
Haxted Thinking is a newsletter for anyone interested in how buildings and spaces are designed, made and used.
Edition No. 13: June 2024
Everything Changes
Welcome back. Everything changes.
I’ve been thinking a lot about change. I’ve just got back from a seven-day silent Zen retreat which created a lot of space to think. More importantly it provided the perfect stimulus for making real change – for action. 15 hours a day of meditation will do that for you. So, change is afoot all over the place. Starting here.
The original idea for Haxted Thinking was to share ideas and stories from the world of property development. This newsletter set out to challenge conventional wisdom and explore ways to do property better. I’ve said before we’re all in the property business whether we like it or not. But the reality is I’ve struggled to write consistently within the stated framework of subject matter directed towards anyone interested in how buildings are designed, made and used.
The way I see it property development and investment is more about people and possibilities than it is about physical buildings. And I’ve come to realise that most of all I like to make space: physically through the work at Haxted, creatively through photography, writing and experiments in connection, and professionally through my advisory work in leadership and team transformation and change.
At heart I’m a builder. I have been since the days of childhood when we built camps and hideouts and go-carts and bows and arrows and Panini sticker books at every opportunity. As I drift into the second half of life, looking back on those gloriously free days, I realise that it is helping to build connection, wonder and the space for new and exciting possibilities to emerge, that lie behind everything that gets my fire inside burning most brightly. Thank you Helen and Jo for reminding me of that recently.
From now on Haxted Thinking will be a much more eclectic brew. I believe personal creative fulfillment is amongst the most significant work for all of us, so the newsletter will now work in service of that. I remain grateful that you invest valuable time in reading what I put together, and I hope that you’ll continue to find things of interest. I’ve no idea whether it will work, but for me the way to creative fulfillment is in finding the middle space where relentless drive and unquenchable curiosity, can reside more comfortably with uncertainty and doubt.
Writing, after all, is just thinking made manifest. I find writing grindingly hard, but truly valuable as a way to test what I believe. And sharing writing means one is held to account - those thoughts and beliefs are now out in the world. But I also believe that it is only by being prepared to be uncomfortable, and wrong, that one learns. I want to stimulate discussion and connection and dissent. I’ve come to realise that it's a privilege to have my mind changed. For that reason I really do appreciate any feedback on these ideas.
This new approach may lead to me getting entangled. Then again that’s nothing new - I’m always getting entangled in one way or another so from now on I embrace the entanglement. It’s time to play.
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Everything Changes
Something came to me this morning while I was thinking about the dreadful epidemic in life dissatisfaction, loneliness and stress that we see today. Almost one in three Americans over the age of 65 are on benzodiazepines or opioids to dull the ‘pain’ of being alive, one in three 14-18 year old American girls contemplated suicide in 2021 and 1.4 million older people in the UK are ‘often lonely.’ We should be horrified at these statistics and we need to be more creative than ever to fix it.
What came to me was this - uncertainty in life is a feature not a bug. And what neuroscience shows us is that anxiety, far from being purely negative, is actually very often the energy that fuels the pursuit of the finish line, whatever that might be. It strikes me that the bit in the middle, the race to untangle uncertainty, is creativity. So we need to teach creativity, in all its guises, to our kids, and to do it rigorously. If we are to make life fulfilling again, for as many as possible, we have to reverse the way things are going in the West for so many.
So, creativity appears or comes alive in the gap between our present reality and all the future possibilities. And the irony of course, is that this is precisely where we experience all the discomfort. But that discomfort is essential. It's part of what it is to be truly alive. And that discomfort can be a deep and productive source of creativity if we treat it with care. Creativity belongs to all of us. It is the most potent, transformative tool we have at our disposal. It can change people’s lives. It can transform the world. So as things get more volatile, more uncertain, more unpredictable, we need it more than ever.
Personally, one or two wildly turbulent events in business over recent years have led to a sustained period of discomfort. I’ve been wondering why such an uncomfortable period has at the same time been so creative. It seems that because the brain uses massive amounts of energy it is designed to be inherently lazy. It is designed to go for neural pathways that represent what we’ve done before - pathways that preserve vital energy. The brain follows a line of least resistance unless it’s jolted into a different mode of action. And discomfort, turbulence and the survival instinct certainly provide a jolt.
I think perhaps that alternative mode of action is where creativity lives. Stepping out of what’s comfortable, whether deliberately or by virtue of challenging events, forces change. And change is full of promise. Change is where new possibilities lie. Change is the source of creativity. Miles Davis implied that change was behind his insanely rich vein of creativity. In the Birth of the Cool[1] he says “if anyone wants to keep creating they have to be about change.”
Everything changes. The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus, was perhaps the first in the West to point to this when he said “you can never bathe in the same river twice”. The river is in a perpetual state of change - always flowing. But so are we. As we enter the water the river has already changed, and in that short space of time, so have we. Every cell in our body has changed, and so have our thoughts, perceptions, feelings and states of mind. So, the river cannot receive the same us twice, any more than we can swim twice in the same river.
The East, in contrast, has always known this. Many of its philosophical traditions share the realisation that everything being impermanent is fundamental. When the great Shunryu Suzuki Roshi was asked by a student to summarise the keystone of Buddhist philosophy, he used just two words – "everything changes."
If everything is in a constant state of change and therefore ultimately impermanent, and it is, then all of life provides a fertile environment for great creativity. Even the hardest stuff.[2] It is always a great comfort, when things feel unmanageable, to remember what is a core first principle teaching of Shakyamuni Buddha that “everything that has the nature to arise will also pass away.” This profound reality changes everything. Acceptance of the transience of everything, both good and bad, can lead to a diminution in dissatisfaction and, potentially, to transformation.
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RIP Donald Sutherland
I first remember seeing Donald Sutherland in the 1976 film The Eagle Has Landed. I loved the crazy imagination of it - German paratroopers led by Sir Michael Caine, land in sleepy Norfolk village disguised as Polish allies, Robert Duvall in an eye patch, and an outrageous plot to kidnap Winston Churchill! Proper HolIywood. I was mesmerised by Sutherland’s character Liam Devlin. He played him brilliantly. I could see that even at 8 years old. Like all the best characters he was a devious rogue, an IRA man aiding and abetting the invaders, whilst busy frolicking with a young Jenny Agutter.
Rolling Stone magazine described him wonderfully this week as having “more range than the Alps.”
But who remembers seeing him as the father in the beautiful Kate Bush video for Cloudbusting[3] released back in 1985, the second single from her incredible album Hounds of Love? It’s so powerful - two artists, cultural icons, collaborating in a short film suffused with loss and the bitter sweetness of melancholy. There’s a link in the footnotes to the excellent Dazed piece on the making of the film and the essence of what lies behind the song.[4]
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Specialists
I’ve mentioned David Epstein’s terrific book Range before. His work helped me to double down on a long-held belief that a very broad ranging curiosity is far more valuable than a laser like focus on one thing, on specialising[5]. For a long time, this was counter to prevailing thinking on expertise and mastery – the oft heard jibe being that one can be jack-of-all-trades but master of none. But the more I study curiosity, the more I believe that a T shaped approach is the most potent approach of all – where excavating from a wide variety of interests is anchored by a deep expertise in one particular area.
Epstein tells the story about how the first written record of the phrase “jack-of-all-trades” as an insult dates back to 1592. Apparently the jibe was used in a pamphlet by a playwright criticising his own industry. It was directed at a poet with no University education who was busily engaged in multiple roles – script writing, bit part acting, and earnestly trying his hand at writing plays. The poet he was criticising? William Shakespeare.
Epstein also reminds us that in modern usage we are prone to hack off the end of the original proverb - “A jack-of-all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.” I thoroughly recommend his Range Widely newsletter[6]
“Specialist are people who always make the same mistakes”
Walter Gropius (founder of the game-changing Bauhaus and author of its manifesto[7])
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The whole right and wrong business
There seems to be so little room left these days for sharing strongly differing opinions, especially in close friendship groups. All the nuance seems to be getting sucked out of everything, and you have to be “for this” or you must be “against it.” I find it all quite enervating to be honest. Life’s never been like that and it never will be. It’s far too complex and textured. The way I see it there is a dearth of good old free-spirited thinking and idea sharing in our lives these days. Everything has got so tense and uptight and filled with anxiety. No-one is saying what’s on their mind for fear of offending others, and bad noise is crowding out good signal. While we may not be able to reduce the noise, we can certainly amplify the good signal.
This was what gave rise to the idea for an experimental gathering – The Waggle at The Bell[8] - held at Richard and Rosalind Upton’s gloriously nutty public house in Ticehurst, recently. The way I see it, for as long as humans have been wandering around, different tribes have broken bread together and shared stories, ideas, art and craft. These encounters, sometimes congenial, sometimes challenging, are always the better when rigorous and lively discourse is welcome. We had lots of that, and I’ve now had powerful feedback, all of which is in the blender (I’m currently plotting the next one so please drop me an email at carlo@carlonavato.com if you would like to receive further information in due course).
Anyway, the nun, teacher and author Pema Chödrön, wrote searingly about this stuff long ago. About how we need to be more open-minded and compassionate in our dealings with each other. I love it:
"The whole right and wrong business closes us down and makes our world smaller. Wanting situations and relationships to be solid, permanent, and graspable obscures the pith of the matter, which is that things are fundamentally groundless. Instead of making others right or wrong, or bottling up right and wrong in ourselves, there's a middle way, a very powerful middle way. We could see it as sitting on the razor's edge, not falling off to the right or the left. This middle way involves not hanging on to our version so tightly. It involves keeping our hearts and minds open long enough to entertain the idea that when we make things wrong, we do it out of a desire to obtain some kind of ground or security. Equally, when we make things right, we are still trying to obtain some kind of ground or security. Could our minds and our hearts be big enough just to hang out in that space where we're not entirely certain about who's right and who's wrong? Could we have no agenda when we walk into a room with another person, not know what to say, not make that person wrong or right?”
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Future housekeeping
For ease of publication and ongoing management I’ll be moving the newsletter over to substack for the next installment. It’s a much less complicated and more user friendly platform over there. Please look out for that and add the following email to your inbox to avoid any problems with spam filters: haxtedthinking.substack.com.
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Finally…
I am also writing longer form essays over on substack. If you’d like to read those they are at The Forbidden Playground here: https://carlonavato.substack.com/theforbiddenplayground.
My ongoing collaboration with the amazing designer, and creative wizard Jo Briggs, 1196, is now live over here: carlonavato.com. There’ll be a guest post from Jo included in the next newsletter.
Finally, remember if you’re going in, go all-in:
“When you do something, you should do it with your whole body and mind. You should do it completely, like a good bonfire. You should not be a smoky fire. You should burn yourself completely.”
Shunryu Suzuki
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Footnotes
[1] Birth of the Cool
Discover the man behind the legend. This film features never-before-seen footage, including studio outtakes from his recording sessions, rare photos and new interviews. Grammy-nominated and directed by Stanley Nelson
[2] The hardest stuff: Through the Fish-Eyed Lens of Tear Stained Eyes
[3] Cloudbusting
[4] Dazed
[5] Specialising: For the avoidance of doubt I believe there are exceptions to this – I would much rather, given a choice, that my brain surgeon was just a brilliant brain surgeon than a merely good one with a diverse range of other specialities.
[6] Range Widely
[8] The Bell Inn