One of our greatest freedoms is how we react to things.*
(The mole)

A great being stays with what she loves; she’s patient, she forgives, and she allows what she loves to develop. She overlooks its mistakes, and in this sense she suffers for and with reality. This is the deepest meaning of passion: patior is the Latin verb meaning to suffer or to undergo reality (as opposed to controlling it).**
(Richard Rohr)

It’s not only what you want to do.

It’s about what you’ve been preparing yourself throughout your lifetime to do.

All of those choices which left more behind than you continued to carry with you.

Not only the skills you have developed into talents and talents into strengths, but your values and your curiosities and the things you see and others don’t

It’s just as well you can’t do anything you want because it means you will do something and that something will matter.

And for you it will be the best thing in the world.

(*From Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse.)
(**From Richard Rohr’s The Divine Dance.)

It should be obvious that those who live enlightenment lives have demonstrated a unique ability to learn from everyone and everything around them.*
(Erwin McManus)

We can only explain what has happened.

Even then we may summarise because everything in life is way more complex than we acknowledge.

It is not possible to explain what has not yet happened, although we try in the form of predictions, recognising that sometimes we have to do this in order to plan and prepare.

Wisdom, though, encourages openness and a seeking of enlightenment from everyone and everything that we have yet to meet and that is yet to happen.

The world is bigger than explanation, as are our lives through enlightenment.

(*From Erwin McManus’ Uprising.)

Mingle the starlight with your lives and you won’t be fretted by trifles.*
(Maria Mitchell)

I am constantly struck dumb by this mystery [just atoms and molecules].**
(Alan Lightman)

If you want to explain yourself, you’ll need the right words.

In her describing of a children’s book What Miss Mitchell Saw, which tells the story of the 19th century astronomer‘s early life, Maria Popova observes:

Names become a central trope in the book – the dignifying, truth-affirming act of calling all realities by their true names.^

This includes you and me.

Before we find our true names we must find the words that are important to us:

finding the words is another step in learning to see^^.

We each are made up of many wonderful and extraordinary words.

Then may we find our true name, the one that is an adventure and not a prison.

(*Maria Mitchell, quoted in Maria Popova’s brain Pickings: Favourite Children’s Books of 2019.)
(**From Alan Lightman’s Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine.)
(^From Maria Popova’s brain Pickings: Favourite Children’s Books of 2019.)
(^^Robin Wall Kimmerer, quoted in Maria Popova’s brain Pickings: Favourite Children’s Books of 2019.)

Time and again I am surprised by the richness and diversity of their responses. The random images seem to stimulate their meaning making and encourage them to break out of familiar ways of thinking. […] In the words of Bateson […], Without the random there can be no new thing.*
(Daphne Loads)

I thought to read even more randomly as I journaled this morning.

I’d read Daphne Loads’ words on randomness yesterday and made sure to include them.

A dozen or so sources later, I’d reflected on the behaviour of a particular crowd story that had perplexed me for many years …

pondered reconstituting a creative community I have missed since its final event some years ago …

wondered about how the different experiences we go through temper or “voice,” and how to bring this into my work …

thought about how to connect mindful doodling more with this …

considered how the mundane things in our days may be transformed into meaningful games of possibility, allowing us to stay in our flow …

topped off with how the random meetings with people and what’s important to them can create spaces of possibility, and a universe of abundance rather than a world of scarcity.

Would it have mattered if I had not got anything from my random wanderings? I don’t think so.

As long as I trust openness and unhurriedness to provide more:

The least strained and most natural ways of the soul are the most beautiful, the best occupations are the least forced.**

This for all of us; why not find your randomness.

(*From Daphne Loads’ Rich Pickings, quoting Gregory Bateson.)
(**Michel de Montaigne, quoted in Gretchen Ruben’s The Happiness Project.)

It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.*
(Kahlil Gibran)

Or you can be an agent of change, someone who creates tension and then relieves it.**
(Seth Godin)

We tend to take to excess what we care about most.

It’s why we do it and others don’t, hence the word is used as the measurement: “too far.”

Not for us, but for others.

Excessive just feels like normal to those who MUST.

(*From Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet.)
(**From Seth Godin’s This is Marketing.)

The Self wishes to create to evolve. The ego likes things just the way they are.*
(Eckhart Tolle)

For most of us, though, changing our behaviours is driven by our desire to fit in (people like us do things like this) and our perception of our status (affiliation and dominance). Since both these forces often push us to stay as we are, it take tension to change them.**
(Seth Godin)

Seth Godin is touching upon the two basic myths Joseph Campbell believes we all need for our lives: a personal myth and a social one.

Who am I? and What is my contribution?

If we do not shape our own they will be provided for us.

This experience of finding our own can be unsettling and for this reason we avoid it, but it doesn’t take as much as we fear to find the necessary tension to draw something new out.

Once identified, each new day provides opportunity to explore and discover:

People wish to be settled; only as far as they are prepared to be unsettled is there any hope for them.^

(*From Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth.)
(**From Seth Godin’s This is Marketing.)
(Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Ursula K. Le Guin on Art, Storytelling and the Power of language to Transform and Redeem.)

what people want to do is take action (or not take action) that reinforces their internal narratives*
(Seth Godin)

Yesterday, I wrote about the purpose identified where our deepest joy meets the world’s deepest need.

There is a way or path running through the heart of each person, it is the thing they most want to do to make the world better.

The rest of us can help towards this, or get in the way.

If you prefer the former, here are some things you can do:

Ask the people you come across to share their purpose or vision;
Ask them about their talents and abilities that have taken them from the beginning of this journey to here;
Help them to deepen their value and understanding of what it is they seek to bring;
Assist in the development and articulation of their core values;
Inquire how to be a part of this.

(*From Seth Godin’s This is Marketing.)

There’s a gap in the market where your version of better can make a welcome change happen. […] Yes, you have a calling: to serve people in a way that they need (or want). The opportunity is for each of us to choose a path and follow that, nor for our own benefit, but because of what it can produce for others.*
(Seth Godin)

What do you care about? What kind of work serves you? What do you need? What do you want?**
(Bernadette Jiwa)

A calling rarely arrives within as some tub-thumping, light-show of sudden certainty, more as a growing conviction of how we can serve others in accord with who we are.

It will demand everything, but as Bernadette Jiwa reminds us, we need to also attend to how our calling serves us … for the long run, the life-run.

Frederick Buechner’s summing up of calling or propose, then, remains one of the best I’ve come upon: we find our purpose where our deepest joy meets the world’s deepest need.

Here are some reflective exercises to help:

Connect to your purpose and calling, finding different ways to express it: words and images;
Recognise and find joy in the strengths that have brought you to this;
Grow your understanding of the uniqueness of what you bring;
Identify and develop your core values;
Make your new insights and developments available to others.

(*From Seth Godin’s This is Marketing.)
(**From The Story of Telling: Needs and Wants.)

The club is a very ancient institution, but it is a disaster when whole nations turn into clubs, for these, besides promoting the precious qualities of friendship and loyalty are also hotbeds off sectarianism, intolerance, suspicion, superciliousness and quick to defend an illusion that flatters self-love or group consciousness.*
(Johan Huizinga)

[V]astness is repeated in every system of our lives. If we only care enough to zoom.**
(Seth Godin)

The best way to plan for serendipity is to play the infinite game.

Invite as many as possible to play for as long as possible, and change the rules if some threaten to be excluded or the game is coming to a premature end.

What then happens includes new encounters, sharing of ideas, new ideas being born, new possibilities tried, new people met, new ideas encountered, more ideas clustering, more exploring.

Seth Godin includes the following image in his blog for today. Go on, click on it and keep zooming.

Godin’s words, above, pertain to this incredible universe in which we discover more and more as we zoom in … and also people’s amazing lives.

We cannot plan for serendipity by carefully selecting. As many as possible need to turn up and then see what happens.

Douglas McWilliams documents, or zooms in, on the incredible boost to the London and British economy that has added significantly to every person’s life in the UK through the contribution of immigrants – emigrés.

We do to know if there is any limit to our zooming. The adventure is in the finding out.

(*From Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens.)
(**From Seth Godin’s blog: Zooming in – the magic of looking more closely.)