no pebble tossed: the first stir of winded.vertigo

a life of curiosity is full of surpirse, especially how it makes perfect sense only upon retrospect.

it starts with a shadow and a reflection

in the early days of email and video chats at the turn of the century, i met with close friends every wednesday nite to catsup and create. this is how we stayed in touch, despite each of us living in different states across the US. only one of us had a child at that point, so these sessions went late into the nite. one day we all met in-person, and as the moon shadows grew long and the party favors took hold of our imaginations, we found ourselves pondering an optical phenomenon: a telephone pole was shrouded by the smoke of a campfire such that from certain angles the pole would disappear and reappear. our fascination earned that pole and our group a nickname: the ghostpole collective. such elusive phenomena were always, and still remain, a focus of our conversations to this day. however, just like the ghost pole, we found it difficult to combine our different perspectives. together, we saw things differently; as individuals, we did as well. these differences often limited our abilities to truly collaborate creatively. i became inspired to better understand why collaboration can be so elusive despite our desires to do so.

why is it so difficult for creatives to collaborate? as many of us know, it can be quite difficult to cultivate a creative practice on our own, let alone with others. the very uniqueness of our individual, lived experiences contribute to the novelty of our self-expressions. but those individual experiences also limit our ability to see the perspectives of others. it seems that we can be protective of our own creative rituals from others—to not spook the muse or to avoid trying to explain what is an utterly mysterious process—as well as ourselves. when we combine shared inspirational moments with highly individualized processes (or at least when they are coveted and unshared), group creativity can quickly turn into delegated tasks, which are later integrated in slap-dash fashion without proper leadership or an exploration of shared production. these wobbly efforts at collaboration were often more coordinated than creative; more engineered than enlightened; and i took it as a personal challenge to find out why.

fleeting challenge of both play and meditation

this creative life online with friends was in many ways parallel to the abundant meditative life i was living offline while studying ecopsychology at naropa university. both were opening my mind, heart, and body to new ideas—and oddly enough, each other. a steady diet of art studios and meditation practices fed off of each other to reveal more commonalities than differences. in both contexts, the moments when i became aware of the audience preceded my inability to stay with the abnormal or weird ideas that fertilize introspective insights and inspire creative expressions.

the moment you notice the saddle, is when you fall off the horse.

it was during this time in life when i became acutely aware of how my body sent signals that anticipated the uncertainty of new ideas or the fleeting challenge of observing one’s thoughts rather than thinking them. that dizzy feeling not only became an indicator, but also the motivator for most everything i did. i was living the examined life, while seeking the challenge of learning. this wantan abandon often led me to breathless pursuits of anything that could evoke the dizzy that i knew would precede an amazing facility and even one-ness with the world around me. around this time, i sketched winded vertigo into a notebook page that i still have today. i purchased the domain windedvertigo.com, and for twenty years it showed only the following words: “winded.vertigo happens sooner than expected.” well, its been many years since and i agree—it does happen sooner than expected, even when delayed.

finding caillois

the purgatory that one finds when bridging communities can linger. i knew there was something about the physiological sense of dizziness and how it consistently appeared before creating was more than just butterflies. in fact, i was determined to find ways to embrace the dizzy in my meditative, creative, and even empirical research practices. one day, while spending yet another day chasing down ledes from PubMed in the library stacks at the university of georgia, i found it!

one beautiful word springs from the typewritten page: ilinx

in 1958, a french sociologist named roger caillois published a book titled, les jeux et les hommes, or in the 2001 english translation: man, play and games. in that book were beautiful insights on how to define play, alongside a rubric that provided translational fodder for someone straddling the two worlds of phenomenology and science. caillois proposed four games in his rubric of play, in which humans engage along a spectrum of rules-based to open-ended [see figure 1 below]. i had found a map of play, a fundamental tenet in non-dual traditions of hinduism [see lila, or divine play], inside a much more recent sociological theory. inside this rubric was vertigo, which caillois chose the latin term for whirlpool [ilinx] to describe. a few minutes into viewing the column under ilinx, i envisioned children ‘whirling’ and ‘wee-ing’ there way through the evaporating scariness of uncertainty; they did so with breathless excitement. in other words, winded.vertigo.

page 36 of man, play and games

liaison for data and dharma

why is no one coding here, and why aren’t more examining the unexamined life over there?

the fleeting insights from meditation and creativity are (mostly) well-documented. it had become clear to me that my purpose was to explore the connections between these abstract worlds and leverage them for their mutual betterment. i left the meditation halls of naropa, carrying dharma from eastern philosophical traditions with me, into the labs of research universities. i could not have felt more alone in either world, as neither valued each other’s evidence. anecdotes across millennia were replaced by p-values and power estimates; story replaced by scientific method.

yet these remained exciting times, despite a lack of societal success. the currency of publications and citations were still out of reach, and almost none of my buddhist sangha respected science, let alone understood it. then, the discomfort delivered a message…

i am a liaison.

accepting an invite

when we were dating, i told my wife that the only thing that could get me to leave academia was a knock on the door by LEGO or sesame [workshop]. well, one of them did and five weeks later we moved our preschooler to billund, denmark.

if it weren’t for years of seeking its friendship, the omnipresent sense of vertigo from planning an international move in four weeks would have made me sick. instead, my wife and child were catapulted into a new life full of LEGO bricks, oddly familiar food and faces, and a new career path. my new job was to lead research linking learning through play with the development of creative thinking. seeing that i had already studied the psychometrics of creativity for a decade, and play was the pedagogy behind the changes in creativity i investigated, i was uniquely qualified for the task. i felt at home.

i was now traveling around the world, with the support and brand power of LEGO leading the way, as we investigated how to stoke playful learning in a variety of contexts, materials, and geographies. the tools and methods i had been honing in labs and museums for years were now being adapted to dynamic, real-world contexts—to spectacular results and fan fare.

i had my dream job.

waking from one dream to have another

after five years of ceaseless inspo and challenge, my dream job now required that i move back to the land of the brick [in billund] after having relocated my family during the pandemic to live near the LEGO US offices in boston. there had been years of tumultuous leadership shifts and strategy change that had distracted from the awesome work we were doing. while i wanted to convince my family to move just one more time, i was finding it impossible to convince myself.. let alone them. we were now a family of four, with a third daughter on her way to the world of the air-breathing.

it was time.

to let go of a dream.

an identity.

but, to dream again.

love is the value

after making the announcement to colleagues, and then family, that i would be leaving the LEGO Foundation, i was terrified. what would i say to people when they asked what i do for a job? the doors were closing; the same ones that once flew open for someone who’s business card had a photo of him as a child on one side, and creativity research at LEGO Foundation on the other. after months of anxiety and uncertainty, a calm arose when pondering one simple question: what is the life i want to design for my family and me?

when asked by the closest of my friends, what do you really want to do[?], the first and only thought that kept arising was: create beautiful work with people who lead with love. i’ve worked with, and been humbled by, the best in many fields. competence and intelligence are awesome, but i prefer adoration over assholes.

it is with three principles that winded.vertigo was birthed:

1. seek out colleagues and clients that lead with love

2. how can winded.vertigo help me (and the collective) design the lives we want?

3. create in collaboration, where we teach each other our super powers

unboxed and unlocked

not everyone gets to unbox a dream job. in fact, many will put up with terrible treatment in exchange for staying close to the work that they love. even more have not had the opportunity to chase a dream that was either squelched or laid dormant.

we invest in lifelong learning—both in time + money allocated towards evolving and playing together. there is great joy in giving [and receiving] agency to talented people to express themselves in the work + play that they do.

my favorite part, and what is a vital piece of a bodhisattva vow, is that i will.. challenge people to be their unlocked best; celebrate them at their most vulnerable; harbour them during their dark times; and row the boat to the shore of enlightenment before returning to bring their friends as well.

watch carefully the magic that occurs when you give a person enough comfort to just be themselves. — atticus

play with us; we always do

winded.vertigo is a collection of brilliant and unbridled minds from around the world. our mission is to create connective and collective learning experiences. that is to say, in a world full of uncertainty and machines that can make us feel alone, we choose to focus on reminding people that everything is connected, and that you too are part of a collective experience where we are healthier and stronger than when tricked into thinking we are not.