We all have at least one.

a. A view or vista.
b. A mental view or outlook

Mine has been changing.

From where I’m seated, I focus on the small heater in my study.  I move.  Just a little, and see it in quite a different way.  If I keep moving, I know I can obtain 360 degree view.  Even though I am no longer focused on the original view, I carry all the information.  I may still conclude the original perspective was the best after all – it has the switches on this side.

Sometimes a different perspective changes everything for the better.  If I come to where someone else is sitting and gain their view of something, my world can change.  (It doesn’t have to be a person: I can look at something from the point of view of a future society or the planet or a species.)

Perspective is made up of several perspectives.  Someone may look at their life through the lenses of spirituality, relationships, work, finance, and health.  Michael Heppell suggests more, breaking these down further: relationships, contribution, vision, career, personal development, health, close family, and money.

Yesterday, I considered the importance of deep breathing; today, I add perspective.

Try focusing on something in your home or outside (outside is best), noticing all the details you can as you breathe deeply.  Then, move to a different viewpoint and refocus.  Note how your focus looks quite different from here.

You can do this with your own life, or some situation you are facing.  You can invite another person to tell you what this looks like from their perspective.

Of course, you can’t do this unless you’re prepared to move.

Deeply.

We’re breathing all the time but don’t usually notice our inhaling and exhaling.  Yet nothing would happen if it were not for our breathing.

Often, we breath shallowly, caught up in the busyness of life.  When we take a moment to breathe deeply, we interrupt this.  To take a few breaths deeply slows things down immediately, noticing how breathing moves through our whole body.

When we breathe deeply at the beginning of the day, we can access how everything begins again.  Then, what do we breathe out?  What do we breathe in?

We can have a place to escape and breathe deeply awhile, close to where we are busiest.  We don’t have to carry any special equipment with us.

For these few moments we stop, reflect, and even change direction.  We give ourselves a fighting chance to walk away from WYSIATI and SOSO (What You See Is All There Is and same old same old).  We begin to notice all the things and the people  we’d missed, and how we can throw some creativity into the mix.

When our breathing deepens, our awareness expands.  We see what else we can do.  We see what we can do with others.

Our breathing deepens again.

“It’s pure elation when you find this elegant way to solve a problem.”*

Fifteen year old Jack Andraka had just produced a litmus paper test for pancreatic cancer.

This solution sounds a lot less complex than his powerfully disruptive question:

“What if I exposed a single-wall carbon nanotube with an antibody to a protein overexposed in pancreatic cancer?”*

Elegant is another word for the simplicity found on the far side of complexity.

Framing the right question is a skill in itself.  Andraka’s question was powerful and disruptive.  It’s what’s needed to shake ourselves awake from how things are.  Ever had those kind of dreams?

You may be the only person who must ask the question you are asking; everyone else doesn’t see the need for a question.

Asking the question is followed by a great deal of failure.  If we could find the solution or answer easily, it would already exist.  The important thing is to fail in different ways, not in the same way.

‘Failing gracefully is part of the deal.’**

In the process, we come to know more clearly who we are becoming and what we have to hand, providing us with the perseverance to keep going until we break through into the elegant answer.  We also become generators of even more powerful questions.

(*Quoted in Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)
(**From Seth Godin’s Graceful.)

I can’t quite picture what you’re telling me.  What does it look like?  Why don’t we stop talking about it and do it?

When we draw it, make it, or enact it, we make something visible, and more real to others – so less likely someone will get it wrong: “I thought that’s what you wanted me to do!”

What we find ourselves doing is prototyping: trying something out to see if it actually works, or maybe how we can make it work.

Another benefit of making something visible is we find out what we can really do and how much we really have.

We sometimes make things visible to ourselves first.

I’m part of an organisation which can still be talking about things decades later – not giving itself the chance of knowing whether something will work or not.

“If you want everyone to have the same mental model of a problem, the fastest way to do it is with a picture.”*

Try doodling it: here’s a visual alphabet which makes it possible for everyone to illustrate what they’re talking about:

(*Visualisation expert David Siebert, quoted in Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.  I don’t know there were visualisation experts!)
(**From Sunni Brown’s The Doodle Revolution.)

The passengers on the top reck of the number 26 bus didn’t know what to make of the group of pirates wielding cutlasses and “arr-ing” on the way to their seats.

We’d begun on Portobello beach with a game of Battleship (or should that be Man O’War) on the sand, and we were now heading into Edinburgh to find a few pubs (taverns) to tell our stories of daring-do, handing out our treasure (chocolate) to those who would take it.

A story with lots of fun.

Jonathan Gottschall closes his book pondering the future of story, especially because it’ becoming increasingly possible to live within novels as they’re being written.  In MMORPGs (Mor-pegs, or massively multiplayer online role-playing games) players are the protagonists fighting against evil, escaping mundanity.  So will the story, which has been helpful to us as a species, become a liability, creating “a mental diabetes epidemic” as we prefer virtuality to realtime?*

I’m more hopeful.  Especially for stories which allow us to ask the most important questions.  In these stories, we can do some “thinking wrong” – the technique of ‘mixing and matching things that don’t normally go together.’**  When the expected things don’t work, why not combine things in stories which don’t go together and see what happens.

What if I don’t take offence at what someone says to me or does to me?  What if I don’t hold this person responsible for something their company or ancestor did?  What if someone could walk off the street into a shop in which they could purchase a different story to live.

The difference between the pirates in Edinburgh and a mmorpg is the pirates were trying out an idea to see how people can have fun and make a difference in the world.

‘Figure out what you are meant to contribute to the world and make sure you contribute it.’^

(*Brian Boyd, quoted in Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal.)
(**From Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)
(^From Susan Cain’s Quiet.)

I was brought up in the 60s when The Prisoner was running on TV, and Patrick McGoohan’s character was trying to escape the island where he was being held prisoner, but he kept getting captured by those crazy bubbles.

Reality is, we’re each living in some kind of Bubble-world – most bubbles are complete ecosystems in which we can exist. We complain about and love the Bubble at one and the same time. It may be our work or relationships or what we’re willing to think about or what we’re willing to attempt. We can think THIS is all there is, and we swallow the warning the Bubble feeds us, that we’ll perish beyond what we know and what we do, and our circle of friends or accomplices.

Rarely is this the case. As our knowing, our loving, and our doing increases, we will become creators of our best art, we’ll make our greatest contributions.

We probably have to have several turning points to move us beyond the Bubble. As I thought about this, some of my turning points have included realising the things I was becoming curious about and intrigued by needed me to leave behind the familiar and comfortable, and journey into a world of new people, new knowing, and new experiences.

‘To be willing to do new things you don’t think you’ll like requires you to prefer the unknown. Not just to tolerate it, but to prefer it.’*

(*From Seth Godin’s Graceful.)

There are basically two kinds of gatekeeper.

There are those who keep you out; they also  keep others in – end of story.

There are also those who invite everyone in – these are the ones who are endlessly fascinated by you and keep asking questions.

I’d been thinking about my friend Alex’s comment about not being misunderstood: what he fears is being understood.

What would it be like to be understood?  Where and by whom?  Do I want to be?  What would happen if I were understood?

I don’t want to be categorised or tested for accuracy or pass someone’s “understanding test.”  Id be halfway to becoming the kind of gatekeeper who keeps most people out and some people in.

I hope it’s okay to dream of a world which keeps opening upon opening, where people engage in inviting upon inviting, living the dreams coming from both within and beyond.

This is the kind of gatekeeper I want to be.

‘Wouldn’t it be great if you could change your belief system right now and make it more empowering; a belief system designed by you, that helps you engage your life at an altogether different level?’*

(From Michael Heppell’s How To Be Brilliant.)

The universe can appear a chaotic and dangerous place, yet some claim there’s a deeper grain which might even be called goodness.

When a person does good, then, they align themselves with this deeper grain.

“A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.”*

These words from Charles Darwin help us to appreciate why, when we hear a story of selfishness or greed or uninvited suffering, we might find ourselves mouthing, ‘That’s just wrong.”  But when we hear a heart-warming story of giving, sacrifice and love, we know there to be something right about it.

Martin Seligman suggests, ‘altruism is an explosive puzzle for selfish-gene theorists … nothing makes us feel better than helping another person.’**  Psychology professor Dacher Keltner even claims it might be we are “Born to be good” – this deeper grain of the universe running through each of us.

Today is called Good Friday by Christians who tell just such a good story, of how Jesus of Nazareth lived out the words with which he’d encouraged his followers, how there’s no greater love than to lay down our lives for our friends.

I guess Friday can be good, then, and every other day.

(*Charles Darwin, quoted in Martin Seligman’s Flourish.)
(**From Seligman’s Flourish.)
(^Quoted in Seligman’s Flourish.)

Twyla Tharp’s habitual routine for finding a good idea for her art: ‘I’m digging through everything to find something.’*

Scratching is also a way of understanding how we shape our stories about life.  And, have you noticed, we are the protagonists and never the antagonists in our stories.

Psychologist Cordelia Fine has called the idea of self-knowledge, a “farce” and an “agreeable fiction.”**

Philosopher William Hirstein proffers how our positive illusions keep us from despair because, “The truth is depressing.  We are going to die, … we are tiny insignificant dots on a tiny planet.  Perhaps with the advent of broad intelligence and foresight comes the need for … self-deception to keep depression and its consequent lethargy at bay.”*

We prefer to stay in the Matrix: “You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.”^

There’s another story here, one greater than we can handle.  We are also a vast universe’s expression of consciousness, imagination, and creativity.

Back in 1963, neo-futurist Buckminster Fuller asked, “How big can we think?”^^  The creator of the term “Spaceship Earth.” Fuller could see how our thinking threatened our very existence in a cold and dangerous universe, but also hoped we could think bigger still.

Thinking bigger involves increasing our awareness, which helps us to see ourselves in perspective.  Part of thinking bigger, then, involves thinking smaller, understanding our meaning and place:

‘If you are content with being nobody in particular, content not to stand out, you align yourself with the power of the universe.’*^

To look into the life of another, out into the universe, and into god – if you have one – is to see ourselves: ‘You … have become still enough inside to notice the vastness in which these countless worlds exist.’*^

The five elemental truths help us to begin life:
Life is hard …
You are not as special as you think …
Your life is not about you …
You are not in control …
You are going to die …

Your life is about completing each of these in a way which brings love and beauty and hope into the world in the way only you can.

(*From Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit.)
(**Quoted in Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal.)
(^The character Morpheus in the movie The Matrix.)
(^^Quoted in Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution.)
(*^From Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth.)

When we wait for our joy to come to us from outside – perhaps from something or someone – we open ourselves to disappointment or worse.

We find our joy within.

It is already there, waiting to be found, like a deep artesian well.  When we open up this joy, there is no need for some external or artificial pressure to make it flow.

Who you deeply are, what you deeply have, and how you want to act, are already there, deep within you.

When we discover or identify this, we’re able respond to both the good and the bad around us in a way which doesn’t threaten our core:

‘As you become happier and more satisfied with your life and the things in it, you will have more to give to others.’*

Peter Senge** writes of the ways we explain reality, which I think can be related to our personal lives.  At the surface level we react to things happening around us.  As we go deeper, we begin to see patterns and trends, and begin to see how we’re anticipating things to happen to us (usually more of what’s already happened).  Beneath this level of explanation, we see the systems we or others have designed (including habits and practices) which carry the patterns and trends.  Further down, if we keep drilling, we find our ways of thinking about things, and also how, if we change our way of thinking, we can be transformed, our world too.

Here we can identify a different story.  This new story alters our “systems for living”; our behaviours begin to change; and, we become shapers of events, perhaps small but some larger.

‘Issues of love and esteem and social connection are almost 100% about how we see the relationship taking place, not what is actually taking place.’^

(*From Martin Seligman’s Flourish.)
(**Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution.)
(^From Seth Godin’s Placebos.)