8. Commit yourself to growth and renewal
Kaizen or continuous improvement is more steady and incremental, where big leaps and bounds are not necessary. Yet I confess, looking back I can see I have made continuous growth through my life but its peppered with peaks and troughs. Is it avoidable? I don't really think so because its mostly in the mind. We spend lots of time growing and developing and creating, being creative without a seeming end in sight but when it comes to fruition, pop, the mountain top feels all the more special. So reaching the summit, getting to the end, singing the chorus of a new song for the first time, feels like a huge leap, a bound into the creation of something new, it is actually the incremental end to creative concentration over a period of time. In football parlance, its the concentrated effort of scoring a goal - it only takes one to win the game but the ninety-minutes of combined concentration is no less important. Surely, then the commitment to growth and renewal is a daily event. Today I am off to Winchester to stay in the University for an 'away day' - you couldn't make it up, I have a literary PhD and I accept this oxymoron every year without protest - it must be the bad food and even worse the coffee (Universities buy bad coffee in bulk) - so I will be driving this morning, I have got a feeling I belong, forty years ago I knew how she felt:
