Everything stops when you find a postcard on the doormat.
Immediately you immerse yourself in it. The the message, the handwriting, the stamp, the picture they have chosen to send you. It’s like having them with you, knowing that their thoughts and feelings are with you, and that it has passed from hand-to-hand to reach you. You take in the message and sense their mood, imagine their experience, and explore what their handwriting has to say.
Somehow you feel pulled you together across time and space. Whether it is written or not, the postcard says wish you were here. There’s many a cherished postcard out there in pride of place on a windowsill, or tear-stained postcard and kept in a box with other memories.
Good, warm connections
Genuine human connection is important, we all know that. But it is probably more important that we tend to realise.
In one of the most viewed TED talks, Robert Waldinger of the Harvard Study of Adult Development shares a simple scientific finding: that when hundreds of people were studied over their entire adult lives (since 1938), the people who turn out to be the happiest and the healthiest are those that have good, warm connections to others.
Note that it’s not just happiest. Good relationships help us to be physically and mentally healthier too.
So a postcard, a letter, or a conversation where we listen to understand are all powerful ways to bring us closer together.
A postcard to the world
Here & Now is a wish you were here.. for the world.
At this time in human civilisation it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and our levels of trust, hope and self-belief are low. We feel that too. But we need to find ways to move forward, and given the right conditions and tools (improvisation skills are one of these) we can demonstrate great resourcefulness and willingness to change (remember what happened in Spring 2020 anyone?).
If we can be here now, individually and collectively, we can sense and adapt to changing conditions and move forward together.
We don’t have all the answers, but we do hold on to this question: How can we be here now in more satisfying relationships with ourselves, with each other, with common purpose and with the living world?
Do what you can
I keep coming back to this line in Rick Rubin’s book The Creative Act, A Way of Being:
Do what you can
with what you have.
Nothing more is needed.
What we have is not a little. This isn’t a make-do-and-mend attitude. What we’ve got is A LOT! Through more artful connection, through social technologies like improvisation, we can find shared values and intentions and co-create, and let nature regenerate, a world of participation, prosperity and peace.
Let’s turn wish you were here into being here now.
Being in relationship
Being here now is about being in relationship.
The quality of presence we get from hereness and nowness makes us feel alive, absorbed, engaged and involved in what is arising, as it arises. It’s a gateway to the connection, intimacy and belonging that we seek. We simply now that many possibilities are only possible when we lean into the moment and take a risk of speaking up, giving support, building ideas together or sharing our feelings.
But there’s no need to adopt a pressurised idea of always needing to be here now, or Now, or NOW.
It’s alway better to focus on staying open, staying calm and relaxed and staying present so we can tune in to now as a space for relationships.
Being here now brings us into field of interactions:
- with ourselves, our thoughts and stories, our bodies and feelings.
- with others in groups, teams, communities, societies, countries, continents and globally
- with purpose, intent, shared goals, common cause and the challenges of our times
- with our curiosity, playfulness, commitment and creativity
- with the living world from the smallest insect to the largest tree
- with presence, mindfulness and awareness
- with absence, emptiness, the cycles of life and death
- with our expectations of the future amid the presence of the past
- with what we can accept and embrace, and what we reject and ignore
- with rest and peace; restlessness and striving
- with questions, answers and choices
- with what’s possible
- with what satisifes
We’re interested in all the possibilities that come when we shift from wish you were here to being here now and all the possibilities for connection, co-creation and satisfaction that can come from good, warm relationships.
Who would you send a postcard to?
Who would you send a wish you were here postcard to? What person or group would you like to see stepping up to moment and being present and engaged to guide change in the world?