The motivation to play in an infinite fame is completely different – the goal is not to win, but to keep playing – it is to advance something bigger than ourselves or our organisations.*
(Simon Sinek)

But a labyrinth is actually an arrangement of paths that lead you, in time, to their centre. You can’t get lost in them; they are comprised of only one winding corridor. It slows you down. That’s all.**
(Lauren Elkin)

The words of a song have just transported me back some twenty six years.

I’m videoing a reading to send to a community I served all that time ago and the song came to mind:

Fears that crowd around me
For the failure of my plans
For the dreams of all I hope to be
The truth of what I am^

I didn’t know where my failures would lead me, or how my dreams would grow and what they would become, but looking back I can see more.

There’s a point early in walking a labyrinth where you find yourself very close to the centre.

A short hop and you would be in the centre.

What is important, however, is to continue on the path now carrying you away from the middle for what seems an age before it finally bringing you to the centre.

The words in the song feel like that.

Twenty six years ago, they felt close and very important, but I now understand I wasn’t grasping them as fully as I am able to now.

Twenty six years later and I am able to appreciate that my contribution is all about failures and dreams, for me and for others, too.

Simon Sinek writes about the “just cause,” part of the infinite game, something bigger than ourselves, a cause that shapes the future.

A story that might be said to be of mythological proportions, spanning a lifetime and more.

Life is less like a linear path and more like a labyrinth, circling or twisting around the centre, sometimes closer, sometimes farther away, but, sooner or later, it will arrive, at the right time, rich with stories and experiences.

It’s not time to give up on your failures and dreams.

*From Simon Sinek’s The Infinite Game;
**From Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse;
^From From Graham Kendrick’s For This, I Have Jesus.