‘But wouldn’t it be amazing if we could somehow encourage acts of greatness?  No order them, but create an environment where people feel they can embrace the superhero within and achieve great things.’*

Such environments would build on the best from our past and be stronger than the worst moments.

Spaces like this connect and reconnect us to our story: ‘the human mind was shaped for story, so that it could be shaped by story’.**

When we lost sight of our story, or we don’t believe we have one, we experience the “uneasiness” Erich Fromm observed in twentieth century Western society when he was speaking as a social psychologist, which we might also say, characterises ours:

‘No symptoms at all, but feeling unhappy, strange not even sleeplessness, life has no meaning, no zest for life, drifting, a feeling of vague malaise … people suffer from themselves … . Nobody who suffers from the malaise can be successfully analysed without a radical change and without  a transformation of character,’^

Richard Rohr would see our first attempts at creating our story as identifying our ego – in order that we might ‘let go of it and move beyond it’.^^  We’re not strong in our ego, though, but in our true Self.  Our ego has a victim part which Eckhart Tolle names the “painbody,” the part of us that wants to be offended, and, in extreme cases, wants to be offended in order to affirm its view of the world,*^ but, to go back to Rohr:

‘The True Self … is very hard to offend.’^^

We find ourselves in order to let go of ourselves by entering into the eco (from oikos, the whole house), into company (originally, those with whom we share bread).

Others not only help me to see what I’m doing badly and what I shouldn’t be doing, but, also, what I should be doing.

(*David Marquet in 99U’s Make Your Mark.)
(**From Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal.)
(^From Erich Fromm’s The Art of Listening.)
(^^From Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward.)