The motivation to play in an infinite game is completely different – the goal is not to win, but to keep playing. It is to advance something bigger than ourselves or our organisations.*
James Carse

Life requires of man spiritual elasticity, so that he may temper his efforts to the chances that are offered.**
Viktor Frankl

You will keep on finding ways
to continue the game because you know that
if you or someone else brings
the game to an end, you will
never know what lies beyond
the particular winning line:
No two human beings ever experience two sensations,
experiences, feelings, or thoughts identically.
Everything changes.
Everything is always different.^

The game is never over, and you know that
you have the capacity to
to move beyond the winner/loser definitions
too hastily arrived at, to
adapt, shift, morph …

*James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games;
**Viktor Frankl’s The Doctor and the Soul;
^Keith Haring’s Keith Haring Journals.

Once you have crossed the threshold, if it really is your adventure – if it is a journey appropriate to your deep spiritual need or readiness – helpers will come along the way to provide magical aid.*
Joseph Campbell

*Joseph Campbell’s Pathways to Bliss.

None of these changes are failures. They’re simply steps in the journey. We change. That’s part of the deal. A well-lived life without calibration is unlikely.*
Seth Godin

Listening is its own reward.**
Aaron Copland

It’s not working,
You’ve grown older,
You’re being forced to move,
This isn’t your first choice …
It doesn’t have to be negative –
We’re very capable of re-orientating, re-organising, re-creating, re-inventing, re-calibrating,
And when we begin with listening –
(Let’s give that a capital L -)
When we begin with Listening –
To others, to the field, to the world, to our god,
To ourselves,
We can discover a melange of exhilarating possibilities
to re-invest ourselves in:
You choose your purpose
and then you give your soul to that purpose.
In due time,
you’ll transform.^

*Seth Godin’s blog: Re-calibrating;
**Rob Walker’s The Art of Listening blog: Heard Behaviour;
^Ben Hardy’s Personality Isn’t Permanent.

Personhoods are staked on the cards dealt and not the hands played, as if we evolved the opposable thumbs of our agency for nothing.*
Maria Popova

I am walking around all alone in this splendid garden that does not belong to me and the gate of which stands wide open for anyone; I dwell here in refreshing but also oppressive loneliness. That is why I’ve been attesting to the existence of this idyllic spot for years … without expecting many strollers to come, however. For what enthrals me and what I experience as beauty is often judged to be dull and dry by others.**
M. C. Escher

The unexampled life can be a lonely place,
Neither this nor that –
And we know how humans so love this and that;
Maria Popova offers two examples in M. C. Escher –
Who sought to bring mathematics and art together in his
groundbreaking, often beautiful artwork – and
Rachel Carson, scientist and poet, whom she describes as:
too lyrical for science and too scientific for literature**.

Those who seek to live between two or more
genres, categories, groups, or fields
know how misunderstood they can be, and yet
we are all capable of taking the “cards dealt” to us –
A starting place only –
And playing them in a way that propels us to live our
beautiful unusualness in a world exploring how to be glorious misfits.

*Maria Popova’s The Marginalian blog: The Good Luck of Your Bad Luck: Marcus Aurelius on the Stoic Strategy for Weathering Life’s Waves and Turning Suffering into Strength;
**Maria Popova’s The Marginalian blog: M.C. Escher on Loneliness, Creativity, and How Rachel Carson Inspired His Art, with a Side of Bach.

They don’t know what they don’t know, until they find out they don’t know it.*
Dave Trott

Consciousness probably involves the entire nervous system and its integration with the full body.**
Alan Lightman

We each notice something
others do not.

If you share something with me that
I do not know, then I can choose to know it, or not.

Becoming a fully conscious being requires me
to experience it in some way as you do.

(I knew a lot of stuff about what retiring and moving habitat would look like;
It has been quite something more in experiencing it.)

Or if I choose not to go that far, to somehow absorb,
Rather than dismiss what you know.

For this, I will bring space, and
reading and listening and openness.

Of course I get to ask questions,
Lots of questions – where’s the fun otherwise?

Just when you think you know all the answers,
the universe comes along and changes the questions.^

Dave Trott’s One + One = Three;
**Alan Lightman’s The Transcendent Brain;
^Francisco Pinto, from Albert Espinosa’s If You Tell Me To Come.

We have separated soul from experience, become totally taken up with the outside world and allowed the interior world to shrink.*
John O’Donohue

Now, looking through
the slanting light
of the morning
window toward
the mountain
presence
of everything
that can be,
what urgency
calls you to your
one love? What shape
waits in the seed
of you to grow
and spread
its branches
against a future sky?**
David Whyte

Vladimir and Estragon
wait for
the outside to happen, unaware
they could employ these hours to
become some inside Godot.

*John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
**David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea: from What to Remember When Waking.

It’s not by accident that the positive wildness of our planet disappears as the understanding of our own inner wild nature fades.*
Clarissa Pinkola Estés

The earth is not outside us – it is within us: the clay from where the tree of the body grows.**
John O’Donohue

I stop to look across this open field of grass,
So different to me that I conclude it can never be me, nor I it,
Yet the wild poet Walt Whitman declares that,
Upon his passing, he may indeed be found beneath our feet:
I bequeath myself to the dirt
to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again
look for me under your bootsoles.^

If there is such a thing as magic
this must be it: I am
this earth and it is me –
Something that aids my wellness,
Opens me to wonder,
And allows me to reconnect with my wildness – benefits our world
and universe want to impress upon you and I:
Alan Lightman turned off the engine of his small boat,
lay on his back looking up at the stars:
The boat disappeared.
My body disappeared.
Awareness of my body and ego disappeared.
And I found myself falling into infinity …
I felt connected not only to the stars
but to all of nature, and to the
entire cosmos. I felt part
of something much larger than myself.^^

*Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run With the Wolves;
**John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
^Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass;
^^Alan Lightman’s The Transcendent Brain.

Whatever you value most in your life can always be traced back to some jumble of chance occurrences you couldn’t possibly have planned for, and that you certainly can’t alter retrospectively.*
Oliver Burkeman

If we stick to the letter of the law, we don’t have to think. Because there’s risk involved in thinking. There’s nowhere to hide if it goes wrong. But real creativity often comes with risk. So don’t just blindly follow the words themselves.**
Dave Trott

*Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks;
**Dave Trott’s One + One = Three.

A more fruitful approach to the challenge of living more fully in the moments start from noticing that you are, in fact, are already living in the moment anyway, whether you live it or not.*
Oliver Burkeman

This is the pleasure of limits, the fun of play. Not doing what we want, but doing what we can with what is given.**
Ian Bogost

Right now,
I may turn my attention to the moment I am in:
This space, this light, these words, this pen and journal, these feelings;
And though a moment may seem small and insignificant,
Though it cannot contain all things, as it unfolds, it holds
the possibility of leading me to everything.

*Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks;
**Ian Bogost’s Play Anything.

Whatever the reason, we generate the meaning we need in the moment. The act of reinterpretation is fundamentally an act of agency; it gives is a sense of control and confidence at exactly the moment we feel out of control and lacking confidence.*
Bruce Feiler

Keep asking questions. Colour outside the lines. Draw your own maps. Create your own legends.**
Ekere Maria Hadessa Talliet

Whatever’s happening right now,
I’ve got to remember it’s a story, and,
If I stop and pinch myself
to get my attention,
I can tell it differently –
Sometimes even with a flourish.

*Bruce Feiler’s Life is in the Transitions;
**Maria Popova and Claudia Bedrock’s A Velocity of Being.