What if you had the opportunity to embark on an adventure of a lifetime – one suited to what you really would enjoy and most benefit from?  A trip to some paradise island, or a safari, or high-seas cruise, or extreme sport extravaganza?

You’d be really disappointed you’d missed out on this offer because you didn’t pick up the call from the unfamiliar number or trashed the email or failed to open the envelope.

But this is exactly the opportunity we’re given in this one life:

“Life is a luminous pause between two great mysteries which themselves are one.”*

We need magnificently wonderful emporiums of travel in which people can identify their adventure, pick up their itinerary and travel tickets and go: where to?, who will we meet?, what will we see?, what will we do?, how will our lives be changed and change others?

Yesterday, I told part of the story of Edwin Land, who created the polaroid camera following a question his three-year old daughter Jennifer asked him.  It resulted in Land ‘distancing himself from his own assumptions and expertise.  For a moment he stopped knowing and began to wonder.’**  Land opened his mind, which led to opening his heart, which led to a thirty year journey of creation.  The Magnificently Wonderful Emporium of Travel is a place for stepping back from what is known in order to wonder and then to take the first step.

‘A significant part of artistic challenge is to go beyond interpreting human experience to be an interpreter of human possibility.’^

The journey from potential to potency requires clarity of purpose and self-mastery towards the future.  Here we find faith helping us.  Faith is not a belief we have or are a part of, but something which changes us towards action which changes the future.

Potential is something we all have, it comes with the possibility of thriving.  To live this potential requires skill times effort.  Skill is made up of talents, effort is produced by character: ‘the role of character and where character enters the equation is as “effort.”  Effort is the amount of time spent on the task.’^^

The emporium’s doors are open to all:*^

“Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For another union, a deeper communion’^*

(*Carl Jung, quoted in Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward.)
(**From Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)
(^From Erwin McManus’s The Artisan Soul.)
(^^From Martin Seligman’s Flourish.)
(*^This idea of a travel emporium is an actual concept I’m working on with others, which I hope to see expressed in some way in 2015.)
(^*T. S. Eliot, quoted in Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward.)