we must never forget that all human freedom is contingent upon destiny to the extent that it can unfold only within destiny and by working upon it*
Viktor Frankl

If I no longer have to fight against the sheer fact of encountering problems, because that’s battle I’ll never win, I get to dive more fully, perhaps even with relish, into the problems I actually have.**
Oliver Burkeman

The problem with life …
Is that life is a problem –
Remember the five elemental truths?:^
Life is hard
You’re not as special as you think
Your life is not about you
You are not in control
You are going to die;
Don’t be despondent, these truths are
foundational for a most splendid life,
They are the necessary limitations or constraints
leading us towards a more imaginative and creative life, if
we learn how to play with them;
This is where the three responses of
humility, gratitude, and faithfulness turn up as
playmasters:
To be most fully who we are, and not who we are not,
To notice what we have, rather than what we lack – and to share,
To play with these daily in small ways, on our own and together,
Noticing where these lead so we might follow.

*Viktor Frankl’s The Doctor and the Soul;
**Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals;
^I often refer to these from Richard Rohr’s Adam’s Return.

Each of the projects described in this book has at its centre something drawn by hand.*
Quentin Blake

By hand is shorthand for anything that
involves the simplest or least technology possible as the
means for bringing poise and rhythm to lives that are
increasingly off-kiltered by the
complex, the
artificial, the
sunlightless, the
motionless, the
connectionless, the
nameless:
The more convoluted our worlds, the more we also need to
write and/or draw with pens, pencils and paper,
Walk or cycle or run or swim in nature,
Soak in sunshine … and the rain,
Feel plants and their geography,
Enjoy the company of others,
Become more handy.

*Quentin Blake’s Beyond the Page.

palimpsest (n) 1. a manuscript or piece of writing material on which later writing has been superimposed on effaced earlier writing; 2. something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form.

The most important story you will ever tell is the story you tell yourself about yourself.*
Alex McManus

The thing about a palimpsest is that it’s
never finished, it is ever incomplete –
We can always add more, which means,
Whatever yesterday or 2020 or 1959
appended in way of
experiences
decisions
hopes
failures
achievements
relationships
fulfilments
regrets
bitterness
sweetness …
Today is a new day.**

*Alex McManus’ reel;
**This is where I seek to help people with dreamwhispering; get in touch to find out more.

We all have more agency than we dare to admit.*
Seth Godin

a myth- that is a partial truth based on imaginative vision fired by a particular set of ideals, a dream which can help to shape our enterprises, but will mislead us if we trust it on its own**
Mary Midgley

Myth is an imaginative narrative which
makes it possible to act upon and
alter our reality;
Life is more than reality alone.

*Seth Godin’s blog: A transformative summer;
**Mary Midgley’s The Myths We Live By.

Successful outcomes often follow unpredicted actions. If we allow ourselves to do things that might not work, we’re far more likely to discover the things that do. And then we can repeat them.*
Seth Godin

Now God said to Abram and Sarai, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.’**

I don’t know this way, this
may not work, I prefer to
stick rather than twist, though didn’t
Abram became Abraham, and
Sarai became Sarah as a result of
their journey into the
unknown, beyond the familiar?:
An idea, experience, challenge, person –
A different me waiting, a
different you.

Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.^

*Seth Godin’s blog: Repeat happy accidents;
**Genesis 12:1;
^T. S. Eliot.

To be human is to live suspended between the scale of gluons and the scale of galaxies, yearning to fathom our place in the universe. That we exist at all — on this uncommon rocky world, just the right distance from its common star, adrift in a galaxy amid hundreds of billions of galaxies, each sparkling with hundreds of billions of stars, each orbited by numberless possible worlds — is already miracle enough.*
Maria Popova

We need to change our way of thinking and seeing things. We need to realise that the Earth is not just our environment. The Earth is not something outside of us. Breathing with mindfulness and contemplating your body, you realise that you are the Earth. You realise that your consciousness is also the consciousness of the Earth. Look around you – what you see is not your environment, it is you.**
Thich Naht Hanh

We can get caught up in recycling hard plastics,
Taking one-use plastics back to the supermarkets,
Wondering about whether we should try for an
electric vehicle, but in a universe like ours,
There’s always a bigger picture,
And we may want to take a few steps back to
take it all in, perhaps finding ourselves undone, or
is it recovered, by what we find? –
And it’s very special.

The verb God used when he asked Moses to remove his shoes was the ancient word for an animal shedding its skin. God said, “Shed your shoes.”^

*Maria Popova’s The Marginalian blog: The Universe in Verse 2022: What Is Life? (no longer available);
**Seth Godin’s The Carbon Almanac;
^Hasidic student, from David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea.

Here’s a little bit of fun that I’m running for half-term on the estate where we live, open to children and their parents. You’re welcome to join in.

Identify one of your superpowers, create a logo, and either colour in the superhero or create your own.

Here’s a simple one that I offered as an example:

When we play, we engage fully and intensely with life and its contents. Play bores through boredom in order to reach the deep truth of ordinary things.*
Ian Bogost

Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all.**
Thomas Szasz

Play
and
learning
provide
me
with
movement,
Direction
doesn’t
matter
at
first,
But
it
will
emerge;
I
also
get
to
grow:
Win –
Win.

*Ian Bogost’s Play Anything;
**James Clear’s 3-2-1 newsletter: Four questions for life, how to learn like a child, and seeing things in a generous way.

Isn’t it odd. We can only see our outsides, but nearly everything happens on the inside.*
Charlie Mackesy

The starting place for change is accepting oneself and taking an interest in one’s inner world.**
Edward Deci

How do you tend to
your inner world?
How will I know that
you have?

Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the centre of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world.^

*Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse;
**Edward Deci’s Why We Do What We Do;
^Joseph Campbell, from Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth.

Complex systems create unexpected and unpredictable outputs. They’re probabilistic and unstable, not deterministic the way we expect.*
Seth Godin

And we are amongst the most complex systems in existence.

*Seth Godin’s This Is Strategy.