I don’t mean truth is what we make it.

Nor that there aren’t truths that affect everyone and everything.

I do think there’s a lot more truth to discover yet.

And a lot more truth to create together.

We are made for truth.

We just give up on it too soon, distracted by easier things.

Here are a couple of thoughts I read this mornin – encouragement to keep exploring truth:

‘Ignore distractions – and distractors.*

‘Every time I see a toddler in a [buggy] with an internet device in hand, I shudder.’**

And here’s a little more from someone who living a hundred years ago:

‘And the point is to live everything.  Live the questions now.’^

(*From gapingvoid’s blog: Make yourself irreplaceable.)
(**From Sth Godin’s blog: Seeing and believing.)
(^Rainer Maria Rilke, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)

At the close of his book Dance for Two, Alan Lightman writes:

‘The earth wobbled imperceptibly on its axis, as bits of cosmic debris randomly bombarded it from space.  One such piece of debris, billions of years in the past, had struck with unusual force and cocked the planet over, producing a tilt of twenty three degrees, producing uneven heating as the earth orbited the sun, producing the seasons.”*

We are seasonal people, the product of our world.  Sometimes it’s summer, other times winter – this is our story.  And through the seasons we produce our stories.  Anne Lamott’s honesty more than reminds me of the reality of our seasonality.  She writes:

‘We’d prefer routine, predictability, to never be ashamed or afraid, let alone aghast. […] In lovely closed systems, timers are set: tick, tick, tick.’**

Though life becomes longer it also becomes emptier.

(*From Alan Lightman’s Dance for Two.)
(**From Anne Lamott’s Hallelujah Anyway.)

We’re always having ideas.

Our capacity to turn ideas into reality is now creating a glut of products.  What Bernadette refers to as ‘solutions in search of problems.’*

There are also those ideas that respond to ‘problems begging for a solution.’*

As i said, we’re always having ideas.

(*From Bernadette Jiwa’s Hunch.)

Don’t give up on my yet.

Yesterday didn’t go too well.

I’m going to try again today.

It used to be that mapmakers filled in all the spaces on maps as if they knew what was there – with all kinds of rubbish.  They didn’t know.

When they began to leave blank spaces they were really saying “We have no idea but we’re going to find out.”

I wonder if it’s the same with our lives, admitting we don’t know everything opening up new worlds of possibility?

The first turning up is being born.

The second turning up involves the unique combination of our bodies, brains, imaginations and decisions.

Now what?

Starting on a new path will likely involve others.

We will read their books, listen to them speak, meet them spend time with them.

It’s about seeing all of these things as opportunities to do something new.

Nothing wasted.

‘Fearful that we’ll expose our incompetence, we hide.  Remembering the lessons of childhood, we wait to be picked.  But the Peter Possibility points out that we’re far more competent than we imagine.  That once we pick ourselves, we have precisely what we need to do generous work.’*

Seth Godin is here turning the Peter Principle around into the Peter Possibility.

Michael Bhaskar introduces me to #firstworldproblems – such as the “pain” we experience when the wifi isn’t working fast enough.  Citing Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – physiological, safety, love/belonging, esteem, self-actualisation, and acknowledging we’re at the top of the pyramid, he writes this about our first world problems:

‘It’s all a big joke and quite how vacuous we have become.  Yet it also reflects something significant.  That problems really have changed.  That more is not always more.’**

Bhaskar questions whether the things creativity produces at the top of the pyramid is always a net positive.

I’m not a lover of hierarchies but perhaps there is an exception at play here.  To see this, we need to place an inverted pyramid alongside Maslow’s original.  Now we see the possibilities of creativity in each of the levels of need being useful in needs of the adjoining, just as we have most probably benefitted from someone’s creativity in the pyramid adjoining our own.

Bernadette Jiwa captures something of this when she writes about innovation in this way:

‘True innovation isn’t about finding an alternative that gets us from A to B; it’s about envisaging news As and Bs.  It’s about being open to redefining where problems begin and where solutions must end and working out why it matters that we make these new connections or forge different paths.’^

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: The Peter Possibility.)
(**From Michael Bhaskar’s Curation.)
(^From Bernadette Jiwa’s Hunch.)

(I’m going to be taking a break for a couple of days but I’ll aim to put up a few doodles after the weekend.)

… doing!

‘We define ourselves as doers.  Changers.  People who push on towards a goal. […] To be a doer is more than a name; it’s an action-by-action choice. […] We’ve chosen to be doers – so we get things done.’*

We’re here.  It’s as if the universe, our god, our muse has given an “A” to us and waits to see what we’ll do with it.  We’ve stumbled on obedience.

Obedience is what happens when we begin to weave stories, to make things live.

I thought about doing this so I tried it and guess what!

Obedience feels very different when it swells up from inside us rather than being forced upon us from outside.  This obedience is about doing what our lives tell us we must do – it still requires effort but it’s the kind of stuff that changes the world.

Bernadette Jiwa tells the story of Susan Beal who visited 500 families that’d experienced the loss of their baby to SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome).  I can’t imagine what this felt like, to visit these families in the first, most raw hours following a baby’s death, but the findings led to public education that is saving hundreds of thousands of lives.**

This feels very much like a story of obedience, the thing Susan Beal knew she MUST do.

Peter Senge helps us to see why this kind of obedience is so necessary when he writes:

‘the vast changes required by a regenerative society will not be achieved just by reacting to crises after they arrive.  They will require inspiration, aspiration, imagination, patience, perseverance, and no small amount of humility’.^

Jonah Lehrer perhaps puts a finger on why this kind of obedience to our lives is so hard when he writes:

‘The art that makes us feel is the art that makes us hurt.’^^

Joseph Campbell frames this in a different way when he speaks of our need to make sense of our lives:

‘To be in accord with the grand symphony that the world is, to put the harmony of our own body in accord with that harmony.’*^

Eugene Peterson offers what I think is another layer of seeing to this:

‘all life is given and must continue to be given to be true to its nature’.^*

(*From gapingvoid’s blog: Doing the Authentic.)
(**See Bernadette Jiwa’s Hunch.)
(^From Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution.)
(^^From Jonah Lehrer’s Proust was a Neuroscientist.)
(*^Joseph Campbell in Jospeh campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth.)
(^*From Eugene Peterson’s Run with the Horses.)

‘If I choose to hide you away, it is for a reason.  I have brought you to this place.  Drink in the silence.  Seek solitude.’*

Digital analyst James McQuivey writes:

‘Before you can disrupt your product you have to disrupt your process.’**

When the product is the contribution we make with our lives, I take this to mean, if you want to look at what you want to do with your life, you have to look at the person you are and are becoming.  I’m connecting this with Theory U‘s two questions: Who am I? and What is my work (contribution)?

I read these words from Roz and Ben Zander at the same time as reading McQuivey’s:

‘Gracing yourself with responsibility for everything that happens in your life leaves your spirit whole, and leaves you free to choose again.’^

This encouragement to take responsibility for our lives took me back nineteen years, to a moment of potential burnout which I needed to take responsibility for.  At the time, I journaled how I would not blame others, nor the organisation I was part of, or the situations I’d been in.  I think I found some kind of freedom: if I was free to take responsibility I was also free to take the next step.

I don’t think I would be doing what I do today without that moment of realisation.

Systems exist because of certain interdependencies and interactions; they can involve friends, families, businesses, societies, politics, the natural world, and they can also be interpersonal.  System scientist Peter Senge points out how every system is made up of at least a reinforcing loop and a balancing loop.  The reing=forcing loop concerns what’s happening on the surface, the balancing, for good or bad, is what is happening below the surface.  If I connect this to Theory U intrapersonally then the reinforcing loop is What is my work? and the balancing loop is Who am I?

The latter is more neglected than the former:

‘Finding the time and space to question a cultural landscape that doesn’t encourage it, it challenging.’^^

We are the cultural landscape so how do we go about asking the deeper questions of yourself?

“I must listen to my life telling me who I am.”*^

‘To whit, your story tells you its meaning, you do not dictate meaning to the story.’^*

It is this thought which lies behind what I refer to as dreamwhispering: the art we develop throughout our lives that is about listening to what our lives are saying, especially in three ways – our passions or hopes, our talents, and our experiences.

We need to down when everything demands we keep going fast.  It is about asking questions when all we want is answers.

‘As Carl Jung said, wellness is found through integration of the unconscious life into consciousness.’⁺

When I look more closely at my balancing loop, I see how I can be struggling with pride, greed, and foolishness.  The things that mess up most relationships.  I may not use these words and it may look like me wanting to be recognised for something I’ve done, or justifying some purchase I feel I need to make, or believing I can shortcut some issue by avoiding thinking about it.

As I reflect on these things I’m reading Bernadette Jiwa’s passage on signs and signals in which she offers this illustration:

‘As a novice, every firefighter learns to read the four attributes of smoke: volume, velocity, density and colour.’⁺⁺

It feels as though the smoke is the stuff happening unnoticed in our balancing loops, the things I’ve mentioned above.  When I notice what’s happening then I can bring some humility to my pride, some gratitude to my greed, and some faithfulness to my foolishness.  When I do II hope I become “productive in the things that really matter: love, kindness, gifting and suchlike.

(*Frances Roberts, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(**From James McQuivey’s Digital Disruption.)
(^From Rosamund and Benjamin Zander’s The Art of Possibility.)
(^^From Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)
(*^Parker Palmer, quoted in Henri Nouwen’s Discernment.)
(^*From Robert McKee’s blog.)
(+From Philip Newell’s The Rebirthing of God.)
(++From Bernadette Jiwa’s Hunch.)