Modern biology has shown that each living creature is locked within his specific environment and is unable to break out of it. For all that man may occupy an exceptional position, for all that he may be unusually receptive to the world, and that the world itself may be his environment – still, who can say that beyond this world a super-world does not exist?*
Viktor Frankl

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart,
and try to love the questions themselves
as if they were locked rooms
or books written in a very foreign language.
Do not search for the answers, which could not be given to you now,
because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps then, someday far in the future,
you will gradually,
without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.**
Rainer Maria Rilke

What are your questions?
The ones that you have no answer for as yet?
Do you try to ignore them?
Or are you walking into them?
Who are you speaking with?
What are you reading?
What are you learning?
What are you starting?
What are you finishing, or ending?
What are you gathering up along the way?
How are you more selfless?
More grateful?
Wiser?
Do you want the questions to end?
Or life to continue?

*Viktor Frankl’s The Doctor and the Soul;
**The Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer: Day 11.

Sankofa is a term in Twi, a dialect of the Akan language in Ghana. It means “go back and get it.”*
Seth Godin

There was a daimon in me, and in the end its presence proved decisive … I had to hasten on, to catch up with my vision. Since my contemporaries, understandably, could not perceive my vision, they saw only a fool rushing ahead.**
Carl Jung

I always forget something when I go on a trip or a journey,
But fortunately the kind of thing I can get by without or replace;
What I can’t get by without, or find some substitute for, is
my purpose –
I’ve got to take it everywhere, so if I forget it for a moment,
Please excuse me while I go back and get it.

*Seth Godin’s The Song of Significance;
**Victor Strecher’s Life on Purpose.

When you see the limit not as a continuing barrier, but as a threshold, you are already beyond.*
John O’Donohue

I suggest that in the creative transcendent experience, we are exploring both the outer world beyond ourselves and the inner world of our minds.**
Alan Lightman

Keep moving,
Keep exploring,
Outside of the lines that you have accepted
or have set for yourself;
In this incredible universe, the end of something
is the beginning of something more:
the universe will always be much richer
than our ability to understand it^ –
And there you have it, if you ever wondered about
what lies unrevealed within you,
Sculptured in unremarkable clay, you are an expression of
a rich, unknowable cosmos,
And though you’ll never know everything about
what’s out there and in here, your exploring will
certainly reward you, as Dorothy exhorts:
If you walk far enough,
we shall sometime come to
someplace.^^

*John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
**Alan Lightman’s The Transcendent Brain;
^Carl Sagan, from Maria Popova’s The Marginalian blog: Nick Cave on Music, Mystery, and the Relationship Between Vulnerability and Freedom;
^^Seth Godin’s The Song of Significance;

The human mind cannot be programmed by a computer. Our imagination is our greatest hope for survival.*
Keith Haring

The who-ness of someone can never be finally named, known, claimed, controlled or predicted.**
John O’Donohue

Imagination isn’t some off-the-peg human characteristic
some have while others don’t;
It is how we all engage with and
navigate existence –
The product of our talents and values and passions,
But also our characters and environments.

Feeding these different parts of who we are alters
our “who-ness” –
Synonymous with imagination:
There are no two imaginations alike.

*Keith Haring’s Keith Haring Journals;
**John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty.

Freedom comes from not being the direct reaction to your environment.*
Ben Hardy

It’s a cause of relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible – the quest to become the optimised, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you’re officially supposed to be. Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what’s gloriously possible instead.**
Oliver Burkeman

I do not want to react,
I want to do more than respond,
I want to initiate some things, too:
Mortals must do what they are here to create
or they will become cranky.^

Identifying and connecting to our abilities,
Noticing what energises us,
Naming and visiting our values
enables freedom,
When we write these things down, we increase energy
and willpower, as well as providing ourselves
with an inventory of things to try out –
It’s what dreamwhispering^^ is all about.

*Ben Hardy’s Be Your Future Self Now;
**Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks;
^Seth Godin’s Tales of the Revolution;
^^Get in touch with me to find out more about dreamwhispering.

But if we’re seeking a liminal state, the significance of getting from here to there, then we’re in a mode of discovery, not driving a train on a single set of tracks.*
…
The tactic is to seek a path where you see and understand the significant hurdles that kept others away. And then dance with them. They’re not a problem. They’re a feature.**
Seth Godin

This space between where you are now
and where you want to be,
This is a real space with important constituents and
experiences for you;
In Joseph Campbell‘s hero’s journey,
It is the special world which lies between the old status quo
and the new, a place of transformation and
trancendence –
Do not hurry through.

*Seth Godin’s The Song of Significance;
**Seth Godin’s blog: Significant hurdles.

What I have gradually learned is that it is not your strengths, but your combination of strengths that set you apart.*
James Clear

a gift is also a responsibility**
Robin Wall Kimmerer

I love having conversations with people about their
superpowers,
But their noticing these talents is only the beginning;
The abilities are not an achievement list
but a story to be developed,
They’re not the “done deal”
but the whispers of possibility,
They’re not effortless
but effortful:
We don’t rise to the occasion,
we fall to the level of our training.^

*James Clear’s 3-2-1 newsletter: On the hidden costs of success, how to deal with challenges, and the joy of shared experiences;
**Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass;
^Ryan Holiday’s Discipline is Destiny.

Eventually, I came to realise that doubt was a companion, every bit as resilient and persistent as faith, and she wasn’t going away. I realised that she had some things to teach me, and I decided that since I couldn’t shut her up or drive her away, I might as well learn from her.*
Brian McLaren

Whence all creation had its origin,
he, whether he fashioned it or whether he didn’t,
he who surveys it all from highest heaven,
he knows, or maybe even he does not know.**
Rig Veda

Certainty has been a good and helpful friend,
But sometimes a dangerous ami,
Whilst doubt has become the companion that embraces openness
and questioning, leading me to change.

Change is life –
I have my doubts to thank for this;
Though I must be careful to mind that doubt can overdo it,
I have come to see that certainty has sometimes manipulated and impeded me.

*Brian McLaren’s Faith After Doubt;
**James Carse’s Breakfast At the Victory.

This larger doodle in progress is for sale.

It’s a boutique design on a deep 12×16″ (30.5×40.6cm) canvas. Drop me a line if you are interested.

If to be human is, as we have said, to be conscious and responsible, then existential analysis is psychotherapy whose starting point is consciousness of responsibility.*
Viktor Frankl

We don’t turn to story to escape reality; we turn to story to navigate reality. And there’s no escaping the fact that much of our reality is shaped by other people, all of who have their own story.**
Lisa Cron

Seth Godin writes,
Humans are not a resource.
We are not a tool.
Humans are the point.^

A responsible story not only provides resilience
towards the irresponsible stories that are out there,
It buoyantly ad encouragingly announces that we are made to be
Creators, imagineers, alchemists, magicians, makers, and innovators.

*Viktor Frankl’s The Doctor and the Soul;
**Lisa Cron’s Story or Die;
^Seth Godin’s The Song of Significance.