Anytime you reach a paradox, or what appears to be a dead end or an impasse, it is time to reach out for something new. This is a creative process because what you are reaching out for has not been revealed or discovered yet. It is reaching into new space and adding complexity, like cell mitosis. Complexity is what will help us now. There is too much “it has to be this way or that way,” in our discourse, too much blunt application of principles.

If you are going to build something beautiful, your goal is to add complexity and nuance. You have to learn and do this slowly, with careful precision. Over the course of our interactions with one another and our lives together, we add a gentle and exacting brushstroke here and a dash of seasoning there.

In order to keep an organism going and growing, you make slight adjustments, not drastic ones. People and systems change slowly. Any time you are trying to change yourself (or worse, someone else) too quickly, someone is going to get hurt. Try to make a tree grow too fast or try to add too much water or make it into a different kind of plant. It won’t work. You will damage the plant or kill it.

Reaching out for something more is called faith. We reach out beyond what is already in existence because it feels like we need to. This is not to say God is something we have created out of our own imaginations. God is the muse reaching to us from beyond that has inspired imagination. God is creativity, set the process into motion and the energy and power behind it. When you are reaching out, you are reaching out for God, believing there is something out there that is better than what we have now. All this creative cell division and reproduction is headed in a particular direction.

“The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” [1] That may be hard to believe right now, but if you practice this Presence – the idea that there is something out there that is solid and enlivening, then you introduce good into any system you are in. Every time you interact with someone else, you bring some hope to the situation or you don’t. Hope is the creative energy. It holds that there is something better out there, and, at the same time, it is enough just to be here and to be us. It is explorative and anchoring at the same time. That is how connection works to facilitate growth.

[1] Martin Luther King, in his “How Long, Not Long” speech delivered at the conclusion of the Selma-to-Montgomery march in March 1965