The lesson is to know your own motivation. That way, you’ll keep on going even if no one else cares.*
(Chris Guillebeau)

When we know and embrace our motivation, we always have a friend to play with.

(*From Chris Guillebeau’s The Happiness of Pursuit.)

Don’t settle … Stay hungry. Stay foolish.*
(Steve Jobs)

there is an element of scarcity in what you do and how and why you do it, a combination your story and your superpower**
(Bernadette Jiwa)

Some people seem to be capable of amazing things. It’s almost magical to us mere mortals looking on. We probably walk away thinking we could never do something like that, or, if we did, we’d have to figure out a way to fake it.

It isn’t magic, though.

It’s simply someone taking what they love and are good at as far as they possibly can. And this is a truth for everyone. There could be someone looking at you, right now, wondering how on earth you do this thing.

From your perspective, everyone can do this. But they can’t.

(*Steve Jobs, quoted in Maureen O’Hara and Graham Leicester’s Dancing at the Edge.)
(**From Bernadette Jiwa’s Make Your Idea Matter.)

In art the self becomes self forgetful.*
(Flannery O’Connor)

Desire leads to conception and conception leads to birth. This is the efficacy of desire.**
(Philip Newell)

It’s important to know what it is you most want to do, to begin to give form to this, to help it develop and to finally bring it into being. This is our art. Art isn’t what some do, it’s what everyone does.

When our heart and should and mind and strength are invested in this, the last thing we’re thinking about is ourselves. We are living within the art of our humility and, contrary to popular belief, it is a very big place indeed:

the flow is exactly where the life is’.^

(*Flannery O’Connor, quoted in Lewis Hyde’s The Gift.)
(**From Philip Newell’s The Rebirthing of God.)
(^From Richard Rohr’s The Divine Dance.)

But what happens when those cultural patterns are in flux? When the old rules no longer function well because they are not up to the new levels of complexity, uncertainty and rapid change in society.*
(Maureen O’Hara and Graham Leicester)

In an odd way, my growing understanding of the vast forces that shape modern life has only increased my resolve to counter those forces, to build a parallel universe for my inner life and spirit. I am convinced that such an interior life is both possible and necessary.**
(Alan Lightman)

We can do this.

We can face the “vast forces,” but it will require that we restore and maintain the vast forces of our inner universes, especially, as I keep mentioning, opening our minds, our hearts and our wills.

These inner places do not become places to hide. In another of his books, Alan Lightman writes of his openness to more:

And I hope there will always be an edge between the known and the unknown, beyond which lies strangeness and unpredictability.^

(*From Maureen O’Hara and Graham Leicester’s Dancing at the Edge of Chaos.)
(**From Alan Lightman’s A Sense of the Mysterious.)
(^From Alan Lightman’s The Accidental Universe.)

“Progress” is some kind of ordained imperative of our species, an abstract conception of evolution, an inevitable development like the increase in entropy, the future.*
(Alan Lightman)

I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open to you where you didn’t know they were going to be.**
(Joseph Campbell)

Alan Lightman confesses that we can lose ourselves as we progress but get caught in our smaller world of speed, information overload, consumption, accommodation of the virtual, loss of silence and loss of privacy. Before penning the words, above, he wrote:

I believe I have lost something of my inner self. […] I mean that part of me that dreams, that explores, that is constantly questioning who I am and what is important to me.*

The hopeful thing, I find, is that Lightman is naming the things he wants to recover, though there is no going back, only going forward, start-overs that are like being born again. This is the progress of a different kind:

Stop worrying about technology. Start worrying about people.^

When mythologist Joseph Campbell writes about following our bliss he understands this is not only about what we do but who we are.

Human activity has increased complexity. Dancing at the Edge is Maureen O’Hara and Graham Leicester’s description of what developing our competency with complexity looks like, part of what it means to start-over forwards. Here is the need:

When too much is in motion at the same time, it is harder for the brain to separate what is important from what is just noise. Certainty becomes more fleeting, mistakes are made more frequently, anxiety increases.^^

Yet just before these words, O’Hara and Leicester write about the amazing human brain and what it is capable of, being more than able to deal with everything if we help it – I would say through our practices (especially open minds, hearts and wills), disciplines, dreams and actioning:

Human consciousness is astoundingly complex. A healthy human brain contains over 200 million nerve cells or neurons, linked to one another via hundreds of trillions of synapses. Through this system flows information that drives both our actions and how we think and feel about them. But this arrangement is not fixed like wiring in a house with robust and resilient circuits that can be depended on to deliver the same results over time. It is more ephemeral, acting more like waves passing through crowds of individuals locking and unlocking their arms. One instant a connection is made and a signal travels, the next moment the connection is dropped and a new one made to another cell carrying another kind of input. In a vast, dynamic orchestration, sense is made and actions taken. Because memories of past actions persist, learning occurs.^^

Here is what we each have to pursue our bliss, even when we become thwarted, we can start-over.

(*Alan Lightman, from A Sense of the Mysterious.)
(**Joseph Campbell, quoted in Elle Luna’s The Crossroads of Should and Must.)
(^From gapingvoid’s blog: Give people what they want.)
(^^From Maureen O’Hara and Graham Leicester’s Dancing at the Edge.)