In a previous post, Cartographers of the soul, I quoted Antoine de Saint Exupéry from his book Wind Sand and Stars. I’ll do so again today, taking words from a chapter of the book entitled The Plane and the Planet.
Some weeks ago I presented a talk on thinking creatively in business to a small group of arts practitioners who were starting or growing their own businesses. My aim was to encourage them to think ‘outside the square’. I used the following wonderful quote to illustrate how we naturally fall into the known landscape of our particular discipline, and within that follow paths defined by others.
For the majority of us this is a process that is logical and safe. These paths can be productive, but there is nothing new to find.
To rise above the usual and expected; to gain perspectives other than from those paths that have been prescribed; to cross the boundaries of our discipline and see the wild and unfamiliar lands of others ... these are the actions that will allow us to build new relationships, challenge our worldview and extend our practice beyond the known.
This is the recipe of the breakthrough idea; the way in which we can create and innovate rather than follow predefined limits.
A plane may be just a machine, but what an analytical instrument it is! It has revealed to us the true face of the earth. Through all the centuries, in truth, the roads have deceived us. We were like the queen who desired to visit her subjects and to know if they rejoiced in her reign. Her courtiers, seeking to delude her, built pleasant stage settings along her way and paid third-rate actors to dance within them. Beyond her slender guiding thread she gained not a glimpse of her realm, and never knew that through its length and breadth she was cursed by men dying of hunger.
Just so did we make our way along our winding roads. They avoid barren lands, great rocks and sands, they are wedded to the needs of men and go from spring to spring. They guide countrymen from their barns to their wheatfields. They take up the cattle, still sleeping as they pass through the cowshed door, and deliver them in the dawn light to the alfalfa fields. They join this village to that village, for there are marriages to be made. And even if a road does venture across a desert, it twists and turns to enjoy the oases.
Deluded by curves as if so by so many indulgent lies, moving on our travels past so many well watered lands, so many orchards and meadows, through all those years we embellished the image of our prison. We thought we lived on a moist and tender planet.
But our perspective has sharpened, and we have taken a cruel step forward. Flight has brought us knowledge of the straight line. The moment we are airborne we leave behind those roads that slope gently down to water troughs and cowsheds, or meander from town to town. Set free now from beloved servitudes, released from our dependence on natural springs, we head for our distant goals. It is only then, from high on our rectilinear course, that we discover the essential bedrock, the stratum of stone and sand and salt where life, like a patch of life deep in hollow ruins, flowers here and there where it dares.
Thus we are changed into physicists and biologists, scrutinizing civilizations that adorn valley floors and sometimes open out miraculously like great gardens where the climate is favourable. Thus do we now assess man on a cosmic scale, observing him through our cabin windows as if through scientific instruments. Thus are we reading our history anew.
To practice the alchemy required to make new things, we must learn to fly, like St Ex, across the hidden valleys and wild plateaus of other lands to discover wildflowers where others fear there is only rock.
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