
It’s possible that you no longer need to get better at your craft. That your craft is just fine. It’s possible that you need to be braver instead.*
(Seth Godin)
But in other cases – as the fir trees – the fragrance is the sap, is the very life itself. When the aromatic savour of the pine goes searching into the deepest recesses of my lungs, I know it is life that is entering.**
(Nan Shepherd)
There are three big thresholds to be crossed, conversations we need to have if we are to move into life-in-all-its-fullness.
The first is between judgement and openness:
You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked.^
The second conversation is between cynicism and compassion. Will we allow ourselves to care about the more we are discovering, around us and within each of us?
The third is the conversation between fear and courage. We know more, we feel more, and will we do more?
(*From Seth Godin’s blog: The limits of technique.)
(**From Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain.)
(^Franz Kafka, quoted in Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation.)