“We have to be really ready to fail, the failure… to be part of the journey”
“To me, going to the unknown is absolutely rule number one”
“in order to create something new human beings need to go into the unknown”
Marina Abramovic, interviewed in the documentary Innsaei
I have trailed in past posts that I will be writing about the documentary InnSaei. I was profoundly moved by the power of the teachings within and learnings from this film, and the learnings are revealing themselves to me in waves.
For now, I continue to be almost overwhelmed by exposure to the performance artist Marina Abramovic. Recently I wrote about “Leadership and Resilience” and in that post I wrote about her :
“She, to me, has gained a level of presence gained through access to parts of the mind achieved only by a very few, and so much of that comes from her focus on challenging herself and her resilience over the decades of her astonishing work.”
Her presence comes from her testing herself beyond her comfort zone, going into the unknown and being “really ready to fail”, year after year, decade after decade. In this earlier post I shared a video of her at a peak moment of presence, and for more understanding of this, do watch Innsaei (it is on Netflix) and witness her presence.
This also makes me think of the moment at the end of The Matrix when Neo realises he truly is “the one”. Morpheus had told him earlier that the Matrix “..is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth”, but Neo, even with all his trials, had not accepted it, until the moment that he did. Suddenly he stood up and saw everything in total presence, represented in this clip by the artificial reality of the imagery, masks, identities of the Matrix falling away to where he saw everything in the falling stream of numbers.
I’ve had moments of such presence in life and had the gift of being with people with staggering presence who similarly see, feel and sense everything around them.
Now, my simple definition of a leader is “a leader is someone others choose to follow”
Would you follow someone with the presence Neo gains here?