What exists in the universe outside you also exists in the universe within you. The universe literally flows through you … The universe has one intention: to create life.*
Erwin McManus

May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven around the
heart of wonder.**
John O’Donohue

Here we are! –
What a marvellousl thing this is;
I open my eyes to a new day –
The wonder floods in again,
Or at least it sometimes does if
I can get my head and heart around it,
Rather than the dull day, the aching body, and
the return of yesterday’s issues.

Here is a cosmological yet mystical understanding
of human life, an expression of the universe that makes stars and
humans out of the same materials –
We have our scientific understanding, and yet wonder,
“How do we happen?”

And what shall we do with this life?

If you think you have room to grow, you do and you will. If you think you’re as good as you can be … you’re right. You won’t get any better.^

We find ourselves in an infinite game^^
in which we have more choice than we know,
The universe offering us the possibility of increase –
I’m not thinking about what we possess, but who we are and
what we can make (and give);
Firstly, the universe gifts us life, and then
it throws all kinds of problems at us,*^ and yet this is exactly where
humans have shown themselves to be imaginative and alchemistic.

The creative process is not a part of one’s life but life itself and all that it throws at you. ^*

Here we are: the gift;
Then come the problems: our purpose.

*Erwin McManus’ The Way of the Warrior;
**John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: For Presence;
^Ryan Holiday’s Discipline is Destiny;
^^See James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games;
*^We understand the universe is indifferent to us;
^*Nick Cave, from Nick Cave and Séan O’Hagan’s Faith, Hope and Carnage.

Being of a reasonable sort appears to require limitation. Perhaps that is because Being requires Becoming, as well as mere static existence – and to become is to become something more, or at least something different.*
Jordan Peterson

Life is not anything; it is only the opportunity for something.**
Christian Friedrich Hebbel

I am not only what I am, but
also what I will be –
At least this is the possibility open to us all;
I am open and I learn, but
more importantly –
I do, which moves me from anything to
something – which I recognise is
not an easy place to be, because we are returned to
the beginning.

We need to rehearse some different skills. We don’t to be good at them at first but we’ll get better.^

You and me,
We recognise our limitations as an invitation
to becoming, so we keep doing, keep changing, keep becoming:
We will be what we will be.

*Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life;
**Viktor Frankl’s The Doctor and the Soul;
^Gabe Anderson’s blog: Rehearsing New Skills.

The function of ritual, as I understand it, is to give form to human life, not in the way of a more surface arrangement, but in depth.*
Joseph Campbell

Awake to the story of being here and enter
the quiet
immensity of your own presence …
Respond to the call of your gift and
the courage to follow its path.**
John O’Donohue

Our worldviews and rituals look a lot like religion,
Full of beliefs and practises that cover all elements
of our lives,
Most of all, making it possible to be present to
our own immensity – that which resonates from the core of our being, what
Joseph Campbell named our bliss, whilst we are also
present to the immensity of all that is beyond us and around us;
We don’t find religion,
We make it.

*Joseph Campbell’s Myths to Live By;
**John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: For Presence.

To find our ‘life paths,” we’ve got to first accept a few myths about life paths: 1. A life path isn’t a get-out-of-suffering-free card. 2. Just because you choose a life path, it doesn’t mean you’re locked into that for a day longer than you want to be. 3. Not choosing a life path is choosing a life path – but it’s not a great one.*
Campbell Walker

*Campbell Walker’s Your Head is a Houseboat.

In a significant organisation … each person is a vital component, adding human insight, care, and commitment to the work at hand. In this environment, there is no room for someone who is simply compliant.*
Seth Godin

You can carve out a very good career simply by being the most reliable person on the team. You would not think that always showing up on time, hitting every deadline, and responding quickly and professionally to all communication would be such a differentiator, but these traits are always in short supply.**
James Clear

We should take both our finite
and infinite games^ seriously,
And playfully:
To respect the game we’re in with our full attention, but
also to look for ways of bringing something from the best of ourselves,
Something that will be different to the best of others.

*Seth Godin’s The Song of Significance;
**James Clear’s 3-2-1 newsletter: On self-worth, how to have style, and how to build a great career;
^James Clear’s Finite and Infinite Games.

May you come to accept your longing as divine urgency.*
John O’Donohue

Some give freely, yet grow all the richer; others withhold what is due, and only suffer want.**
Ancient proverb

Each of us carries some urgency deep within us,
Something irreplaceable and unrepeatable that the world needs, but
without our generosity it will never have.

Perhaps it is something that you need to receive firstly,
What it is shaping your purpose, and
setting your path through life.

Take a moment to write it down;
What must you do next? –
Even if it’s the smallest iteration of this longing.

*John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: For Longing;
**Proverbs 11:24

The fact that it takes longer to write things out by hand gives handwriting its cognitive edge.*
Ryder Carroll

Devote the back half of your life to serving others with your wisdom. Get old sharing the things you believe are most important.**
Arthur Brooks

There is no need to panic –
Slow and longer are more than okay,
They are good for us,
Inviting us into an openness – a
superpower in today’s world of
fast, busy and overstimulated:
The hardest state for a
human being is that of
open-endedness.^

There will be times when we have
to play our finite games – and reach our destinations, but
the open-ended person, while knowing this, also
enjoys the ever-journeying of the infinite, the knowing
and never-knowing.

One point of embarkation into slow and long openness is
quietness and solitude:
You may want to gift yourself 4’33”^^ of stillness in which to
listen, and if you find yourself distracted by all that
needs to be done, simply
bring yourself back to listening.

*Ryder Carroll’s The Bullet Journal Method;
**Arthur Brooks’ From Strength to Strength;
^Maria Popova’s The Marginalian blog: The Log from the Sea of Cortez: John Steinbeck’s Forgotten Masterpiece on How to Think and the Art of Seeing the Pattern Beyond the Particular;
^^I often set the timer on my phone to 4’33” and seek to be open to the place I am in by listening; you may also open other senses one by one: touch, smell, and sight.

The palest ink is better than the best memory.*
Chinese Proverb

stop believing everything you think**
Campbell Walker

I was recently being regaled by my oldest sister
about accidents I had experienced as a child:
Being thrown across a room by the force of a lightening strike,
Hair all standing on end (this brought back the vaguest of memories for me),
Falling into a quarry when with my dad (I have no memory of this whatsoever) –
Christine say these stories explain a lot.

There are lots of things I do remember, memories that embarrass me, or worse, they
taunt and torment, and for the worst, I am glad I can write them down –
This being harder than it seems, shows me how, often,
I am not remembering the thing itself but some
memory of a memory of a memory;
When I see it laid out, I realise a thought is just a thought and I can leave it there;
I am enabled to rewrite the story in a more positive way –
“I may have royally messed up but I learnt from what happened, changed some things, and
I’m still here!”;
I can also organise the important things and the clutter in a way
that I can’t in my head, so that I see what to pursue and what to discard –
And sometimes I see that it is the tough stuff that is the real gold.

There are many ways to journal – pen and notebook, tablet,
Longhand, bullet points, mind-mapping, illustration, commonplace –
What matters is that we have a means of laying out in front of us all that is usually
crammed inside our head;
Personally, I never do this alone – today I have been accompanied by
Ben Hardy, Campbell Walker, Nick Cave,
Mary Midgley, Seth Godin, Gabe Anderson, some scriptures, and always
my personal myth or story (reminding me of what matters most to me).

I felt like the chaos of my head had flowed through my fingers and into that document – and that I didn’t have to carry it around with me anymore. I even discovered new insights, hiding in the lawless wall of text: epiphanies previously unknown were now glaringly obvious.**

*Ryder Carroll’s The Bullet Journal Method;
**Campbell Walker’s Your Head is a Houseboat.

You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.*
Annie Dillard

*Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing blog: Olfactory Work.

Importantly, building a connection to your Future Self requires seeing your Future Self as a different person from who you are today.*
Ben Hardy

Later I discovered that you have to have this sense of faith that what you’re moving toward is already done. It’s already happened.**
John Lewis

We travel to the future to be able to imagine what might be,
Returning to the present to be able to activate what we have seen –
It is a special world available to each of us for exploring possibilities,
Returning with these to our ordinary everyday worlds of the present;
We then set about creating patterns of behaviour – habits –
To contain our hopes and dreams.

Like building muscle, we need to train our intentions to make them resilient and strong.^

We move to the future along different paths,
Usually a mixture of these three –
Trends (the future will be more of what has already been),
Events (the future will be affected by good or bad things outside our control),
Choices (the future can be what we imagine) –
Often underestimating the power of personal choice …
And choice is becoming more important to us every day when it comes to
being clear about who we are, what we have, what we must do.

The world is changing faster every day –
Another way of saying this is
the future is coming at us faster than ever …
And it can be overwhelming.

The bad news is, with all that information, we now have a deficit of mental clarity … In addition to our own compromised brain space, there is a compounding effect from the attention deficit of everyone around you. Being mentally cluttered is the new normal.^^

On the other side of this lies the decline of the old ways for
gaining clarity towards meaningful action –
Religions, myths, and meta-narratives*^ –
So we’re on a mission to find new ones,
Something humans are good at finding,
if we make the time, so,
Instead of waiting for the tsunami wave of the future to come to us,
We travel to the future through
identifying our strengths, connecting with our energies and passions, and
naming our values.*^

*Ben Hardy’s Be Your Future Self Now;
**Krista Tippett’s Becoming Wise;
^Ryder Carroll’s The Bullet Journal Method;
^^Campbell Walker’s Your Head is a Houseboat;
*^0 I Let me know if you need some help – this is what dreamwhispering is all about.