Art does not reproduce the visible;rather, it makes visible.
- Paul Klee, 1920 -
Surely this, too, is the responsibility of good leadership: making visible that which we had no way of seeing before.
Just one excellent reason to engage seriously with art in its many forms - painting, sculpture, music, poetry, writing - so that we have eyes to see beyond our habits, and beyond our own horizons.
And so that we develop the capacity to discover and disclose new worlds of possibility for one another.
--
Want to see more Klee? There's a wonderful exhibition of his work at Tate Modern in London until March 2014.
Finding practices that recall us to ourselves - so that even the humdrum and ordinary can be imbued with some sense of wonder and aliveness - is something of an art that we each have to discover for ourselves.I wrote a little about this 
Sometimes, in the midst of our busyness and our fixation on having things work out just the way we want them, we forget that we're alive.This forgetfulness, it seems to me, is an inevitable part of our human condition. I like very much Martin Heidegger's phrase for this - that we get 'scattered into everydayness'. In our everyday coping with all that comes our way, we go to sleep to ourselves and what we're really up to in our lives.When our forgetfulness goes on for too long, and if we don't take steps to remember our aliveness, it starts to colour everything we're doing. Workplaces in which people have forgotten they're alive become places that pursue profit or targets with no sense of what they're for. Families who have forgotten they're alive lose sight of the preciousness and sacredness of the relationships between their members. There is always the washing-up to do, of course, but it can be a humdrum task to be endured or, when we're awake to what being in a family is for, an expression of a much bigger commitment to the care of one another and the life that we share.All of this is why it is vital that we have practices for remembering ourselves - practices that connect us to one another, to our aliveness, and to our relationship with all of life. Many of us have no such practices and those that we do have to deal with our scatteredness serve to numb us rather than bring us more fully to life.One of the reasons this is difficult for many of us is that as we've pursued individualism we've abandoned so many of the shared rituals that come from being part of community: singing together; retelling shared stories, especially the founding myths of our families or culture; eating together; turning towards one another in appreciation and recognition. And we've been sold the line that entertainment will do all of this for us, but it mostly can't reach deeply enough into our lives or into the lives of the people around us to wake us up to ourselves.Writing is, for me, a powerful experience of self-remembering - a way in which I catch on to my aliveness. And that you are reading is part of it - though we may never have met we're bound, you and I, for a moment. Reading - novels, poetry, philosophy, science. Walking too. Music. Meditation. Art. But nothing is as powerful a force for my own self-remembering as the web of Jewish practice that is woven through my life and which binds me in time, in place, and in a community. It has very little if anything to do with belief, and very much to do with what I've been talking about here - practices that remind me again and again of the feeling of being alive and connected to others in a vast universe of which I am, we are, a part.Please understand that I'm not making an argument here for anyone to take up the forms of self-remembering that I've found so life-giving. But I am arguing for taking self-remembering seriously - that discovering and taking up practices that bring us to life again and again is foundational to a life well lived and good work well done.Otherwise we're just sleep-walking through.
If you're 
My friend and colleague 
How many of your decisions and plans are attempts to avoid one of three primal emotions - fear, anger or shame?How much of your way of relating to others is part of the same strategy?And perhaps even what you call your 'leadership style'?We often kid ourselves that we're exercising rational, conscious choice in each of these, when in fact we're running as hard as we can from experiences we never wish to have again.And how different is a life lived or work done on the run, from a life lived or work done out of love?
Changing a habit, even if it's something that really matters to you, is not as easy as some people would have us believe.I'm sure you'll have found this out already.One reason is that our bodies have momentum. We settle into repeated patterns of action because of the way they make us feel. We're so used to being numbed or enlivened by our habits that the simple declaration "This habit and I are done with one another" is rarely sufficient.If you want to change a habit, you'll need to orient towards yourself with great kindness and great persistence.You'll need to practice, taking up new habits that orient the repeated patterns of your body in new directions.You'll need to commit to dusting yourself off each time you fall out of your cycle of practice, beginning again even if this happens many times.And, mostly, you'll need great patience.I loved this, from 
Because you're 
It's so easy to identify yourself with your circumstances, and to have your sense of your own possibility shaped by them.But it's important to remember that while you will always find yourself in, or subject to, particular circumstances, they are not you. They never were. They never will be.You are not your failure or your difficulty, your pain or your illness, your frustration or your longing, your debt or your confusion, your hopelessness or your fear or your certainty that you are stuck.And, equally, you are not your success. You are neither your status nor your privilege, your bank balance nor the string of letters after your name. You are not your fame, your salary, the size of your house, the number of 'likes' you have.Every time you think you are your circumstances, whether 'good' or 'bad', you diminish yourself.So who are you if you are not any of these?Can we ever find the words that will do justice to this question?For today, I think Khalil Gibran's response, from The Prophet, is a very good place to start: