CO DO PO MANIFESTO

You can’t say anything anymore. And yet here we all are. Saying anything. The last real taboo in comedy is Sincerity. So let us dissolve that final bastion of the forbidden.

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1. Be in love with Bus Stops. Be utterly IN LOVE with being ALIVE - with breath, with beauty, with mundanity, with people, with waiting, with ugliness, with function, with dysfunction, with vandals, with the elderly, with band stickers, with Bus Stops.

2. TRUST. Trust yourself; trust people other than yourself. Trust something bigger than yourself. Gifts and lessons are often packaged the same, but it’s an act of courage to open both with the same voracity, and to receive both graciously.

3. Procrastination is the maintenance of a problem. Call it what it is: FEAR - then invite FEAR along for the ride as our friend. Clear the seat for her. Push the coats and the empties into the footwell, brush away the lint and crumbs and make her feel welcome. She’s got some good ideas but she’s too keen and underqualified to take the wheel. 

4. OBSERVE, UNTANGLE, CREATE. This is the cycle of an examined life. Where you can’t find peace, find meaning.

5. The moon; The most senior table; the retirement home; Number 10; being ready to love again; The Galapagos; Cornwall. We can go literally anywhere if we’re not in a  rush. 

6. HEALING happens like roadworks or cell repair - largely at night and seemingly invisibly. It never appears to be happening, then time passes and whad'ya know! The tarmac is laid or the scab is healed. Like the immune system or the local council it cannot be rushed. 

7. RITUAL, CEREMONY and FESTIVITY are vital. Have practice for playtime. Have a service for lunch. Have funerals for projects. ALTARS are everywhere if we make them, and we should. The kitchen sink may be Notre Dame if we make it so - and so we should.

8. Work with SEASONS and cycles, not against them, and work with them at their pace. This is flow. It’s embarrassing and futile for February to want to be June. Let February be for seed sowing and June be for harvest. Let droughts be for replenishing the basics and creative waves be for gushing and exploring. Let morning be for grounding and evening be for gazing. 

9. UNCERTAINTY is fruitful weather. Uncertainty is where flirting happens. Where growth is fertilised. Where newness parks the car. Where excitement always finds its address. Uncertainty is the only place you’ll ever find God smirking. 

10. Just as we can hold MULTIPLE TRUTHS at once, we can hold MULTIPLE SELVES at once. We are prisms, holding every past, present and future self simultaneously in one colourful, scattering, alchemical vessel.

11. We have the right to EXPECT. Just use the Gift Of Discernment to know who and what is safe to expect from, and for what. 

12. If given the opportunity to run through an empty hotel corridor, you must. It makes you go superspeed and it makes the world fall away until just a child is stood out of breath at the door of an adult’s hotel room. That’s just science. 

13. Be held by COMMUNITY. Be held by SOLITUDE. Both have the ability to charge and to drain. Do an inventory of your resources and move along the differential gradient.

14. Oxygenate COMPLIMENTS.  Pour them in, pour them out. 

15. It aches to hold STILL but it builds strength and definition. Just as holding a pose makes muscles tremble but is necessary to capture a moment, stillness of mind and of travel does not always equate to calm - it might mean a tremble in tension. But that builds strength to be still. We must tremble in order to bask. 

16. Be disciplined in your aimlessness. FANTASY is for imagining without consequence. PLAY is for doing with no mind for consequence. PRACTICE is for committing to consequence. Be disciplined in your aimlessness

17. Be in love with Bus Stops.