So what was LIFT08 like? For me: fantastic!
The Creativity Utopia Workshop went beyond my expectations. Now the kind of third-loop-learning workshops that I do are usually a bit rough on the participants, you are asked to think, think critically, and to think from a place deep within yourself. I am however fair enough to also give the participants the chance to put me on the spot and make me think then and there. I was on the spot a few times. It is all about authenticity and self-expression, and that is exactly what the workshop was about. Remember that I never claimed to know what creativity is, and I still do not know. Shani Lee did take fantastic notes and I had very valuable feedback from Yann Mauchamp with whom I spent the wee hours after the closing party roaming the streets and clubs of Geneva. Rough is a bit of the nature of my being and there is a certain kindness to that roughness that Yann offered a term for: amour vache.

You see, it is rather simple really, but then that is how I preface anything that is far beyond being simple: lies, all lies. Lies, secrets and digital deception to put it into Genevieve Bell's words. My own Utopia is one in which the world as is, is right. I am not out to correct the path of evolution on earth or on a mission to make it a better place, nor do I want to correct and make wrong the generations and great minds that got to roam and act on this earth before I lazily showed up last century: the Universe is the way it is, accept it, deal with it, love it. It occurs to me that there is another thought linked to that one, however that other thought is not just rough, it is rude and an assault on the sensitivity and perception of most. That contingent hidden thought is also the central theme of the novel - the fiction - that I am working on now.

Shit happens, and god does not give a damn. It never did, it never will. I may or may not care, but this is my Universe, the one that I inherited from those that came here before me. So, tell me, from Big Bang to Big Bang where on earth is your reality? Who owns what, and what is it that you are responsible for?