What do you want to say?  Why does it need to be said?  What if you could say it in a way that has never been done?  How might you do that? 
Warren Berger

*Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.

Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what is called for is a little discomfort? … Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment.*
Oliver Burkeman

I profoundly believe that we don’t grow into creativity; we grow out of it.**
Sir Ken Robinson

An uncomfortable place for us to begin is to
listen, to notice, to pay attention;
We want to move on, but,
Perhaps, just maybe,
This will be an opportunity
to grow and gain more substance towards a
weightier, more meaningful life,
Where we shall sharpen our superpowers
and make a difference:
this older and more experienced self knows
that the painful things are often the things that
ultimately give substance and meaning to life.^

*Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks;
**Ken Robinson’s Out of Our Minds;
^Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files blog: #176.

What if we became experts in the field of grace? What if we made it our language, our essence, our genius?*
Erwin McManus

The moments when it’s most difficult to be kind are the moments where it matters the most.
Seth Godin

Grace can describe how a person moves,
More critically, it’s how we treat each other –
Grace doesn’t squash the one in error,
Finds another chance, another opportunity from somewhere,
Doesn’t have to be waited for,
Is future-opening,
Sees the best person,
Builds connection,
Can inspire and motivate others …
And sometimes we need to offer it
to our self.

Far from being effortless, this kind of grace is
effortful, and yet it still produces a crop greater than
the original investment;
Grace is good news:
The thing is,
no one is born graceful.
It’s a choice.^

While practise makes us more graceful over time,
We carry a resistance that must
be overcome by the continuing choice.

*Erwin McManus’ The Genius of Jesus;
**Seth Godin’s blog: The unwarranted smile;
^Seth Godin’s Graceful. a short but delightful eBook that costs £2.

Nothing opens the mind like the glimpse of new possibility.*
John O’Donohue

As we stand at such thresholds, life itself is commissioning us to move onto a new stage of our Becoming. Something at the core of our being is urging us forward … as surely as the onset of labour pain and the breaking of the waters commission the expectant mother to begin the process of birthing.**
Margaret Silf

The psalm declares for us,
In old age they still produce fruit; they are always green and full of sap^ –
And why not?;
Nature always finds a way of succeeding even against the odds,
Here Robert Macfarlane describes peering into a limestone gryke:
We lay belly down on the limestone and peered over the edge.
And found ourselves looking into a jungle.
Tiny groves of ferns, mosses and flowers were there in the crevasse –
hundreds of plants, just in the few yards we could see,
thriving in the shelter of the gryke:
cranesbills, plantains, avens, ferns, many more I could not identify,
growing opportunistically on wind-blown soil.^^

And we are nature dealing imaginatively with
the little wind-blown soil of time that we have,
More than able to overcome the resistance
and cross the thresholds we come to as we put on age;
On facing resistance, Katherine Morgan Schafler counsels:
The remedy for resistance is not discipline;
it’s pleasure.
Pleasure is an antidote for so much.
Find what brings you real pleasure and
you will find your way home to yourself.*^

We identify the things that fascinate, bring wonderment,
And satisfy our deepest desires …
To this, I would add generosity,
The drive to be a gift to others,
Without which our story would be incomplete.

*John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
**Mary Ruth Broz and Barbara Flynn’s Midwives of An Unnamed Future;
^Psalm 92:14;
^^Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places;
*^Katherine Morgan Schaffer’s The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control.

If you’re unwilling to interact with uncertainty, then you’ve greatly limited who you are and what you’ve become. You’ve limited your ability to make choices, because all choices involve uncertainty and risk.*
Ben Hardy

When you get to be older, and the concerns of the day have all been attended to, and you turn to the inner life – well, if you don’t know where it is or what it is, you’ll be sorry.**
Joseph Campbell

We increase the possibility of our becoming
by stretching ourselves into the unknown and unfamiliar around us –
Not knowing what will happen is part of the deal –
AND
By nurturing and ordering our inner world;
It’s not either/or –
We need both/and –
For we bring our discovering into a place of
reflection and transformation, which in turn impels us outward
Into new places, ideas, relationships, roles, actions and behaviours.

*Ben Hardy’s Personality Isn’t Permanent;
**Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth.

Do we also recognise that we already have within us everything we need for our own becoming?*
Mary Ruth Broz and Barbara Flynn

We no longer know how to manage our mythical lives in a way that is spiritual and transformative.**
Karen Armstrong

Humans possess a sense of becoming that stretches through
the decades of our lives,
More than developing our talents and abilities upwards and to the right,
We possess an itchy inkling that transcendence lies in connection
beyond ourselves, to others, to our world and universe,
And perhaps to god:
More self,
less connection to a larger world.^

*Mary Ruth Broz and Barbara Flynn’s Midwives of An Unnamed Future;
**Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth;
^Alan Lightman’s The Transcendent Brain.

My own sense … is that there is something deeply built into us that needs story itself. Story is such a source of nurture that we cannot become really true beings for ourselves and for each other without story – and without finding ways in which to tell it, create it, to encourage younger people create their own story.*
Vincent Harding

Being a writer is an act of perpetual self-authorisation.
No matter who you are
Only you can authorise yourself.
You do that by writing well, by constant discovery.**
Verlyn Klinkenborg

Story may be the most defining characteristic of what it means to be human,
For being different to other species –
How might we explore consciousness without story,
Able to change our lives, live with deep meaning, turning
failures into triumphs, connecting with one another?:
Both ordinary, day-to-day, errand-filled life and
special, value-drawn, making-a-difference life are comprised of story …
And if we fail to write our own, others will write some narrative or other for us –
Mistakenly thinking that’s what they’re here to do – another badly written story.

It’s perhaps worth noting that this year’s Eurovision Song Contest was won
by Nemo telling their story.

Only you can create your compelling and gratifying story,
The kind that will be helpful to others.

*Krista Tippett’s Becoming Wise;
**Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several short sentences about writing.

The action in a universe of possibility may be characterised as generative, or giving, in all sense of that word – producing new life, creating new ideas, consciously endowing with meaning, contributing, yielding to the power of contexts.  The relationship between people and environments is highlighted, not the people and things themselves.  Emotions that are relegated to the special category of spirituality or abundant hero: joy, grace, wholeness, passion and compassion.*
Ben Zander

*Benjamin And Rosamund Zander’s The Art of Possibility.

Cherish your curiosity. It is your questions that will shape you.*
David Delgado

Question your maps and models of the universe, both inner and outer, and continually test them against the raw input of reality.**
Maria Popova

Each of us possesses a destiny, contrived by our disposition
and our situation in life, beyond which lie freedom
and responsibility, enabled
and actualised by our curiosity
and questioning, which make it possible to be open to more
and for longer with no end
in sight:
her reality is a potentiality.
What she is, she is not yet, but ought to be
and should become.^

If you were only allowed to ask one question in your life,
Or you conceived your life as a question,
What would it be?

*Claudia Bedrick and Maria Popova’s A Velocity of Being;
**Maria Popova’s blog The Marginalian: 16 Life Learnings from 16 Years of The Marginalian;
^Viktor Frankl’s The Doctor and the Soul; I thought to alter the gender of Frankl’s statement.

One of the best things about writing everyday (or doing your creative thing everyday) is that you teach yourself the ability to do it in the face of all the emotional and situational highs and lows of day to day life.  You teach yourself to be able to fire up creativity regardless of the circumstances.   And that way when you’re in a creative pinch and you need something … you’ve come up with something when you’ve felt like this before.*
Gabe Anderson

If you’re not willing to risk the unusual, you’ll have to settle for the ordinary.**
Jim Rohn

There’s nothing quite like setting up a practice to
do what you must do,
A place to turn up, no matter what, and even with
your pain –
Everything that is happening is put to work in
service of something that matters to you;
It is an unusual practice because
it is yours, and no one else’s,
As such, it is an expression of your special world of
superpowers, values, and passions;
At first it feels unfamiliar and even unnecessary, but,
As you patiently shape it through the frustrations, it alchemises
into a place of transcendence and transformation.

*Gabe Anderson’s blog: Keep Writing;
**Todd Sherman’s The Alter Ego Effect.