Good stories give birth to many different meanings, generating “children” of meaning in their own image.*
Dan McAdams

Meaning transforms something literal into something figurative. When you connect to something meaningful, you get perspective and purpose, but you don’t get control.**
Katherine Morgan Schafler

Meaning turns that into this: the path becomes
a journey, a problem presents as
a challenge, an author and their book provides
a guide, this pain proffers
a teacher – when we understand our lives are
stories, we realise how we can rewrite or overwrite these palimpsestically –
Imagination playing with reality – creating something
new and alive; a poor story claims
there is no meaning, a not so good story
acts as a time-capsule to meaning, but a good story is
a baby-meaning mamma.

*Dan McAdams’ The Stories We Live By;
**Katherine Morgan Schafler’s The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control.

Leaving the work to find its own place in the world is the mark of a good workman, a good workwoman … Out of what is hidden we make the visible and then call it work; work that makes sense of the hours we are privileged to live.*
David Whyte

Watch the stars in their courses and imagine yourself running with them.**
Marcus Aurelius

Here are two questions that will last a lifetime:
Who is my True Self?
What is my work (contribution)?

Our best work will find the people who need it, and
will last our lifetimes – it may not be
the work we are paid for, though it may be.

The work we love, making what we see
visible to others, may be a small thing in such a vast universe, but it also
provides us with a journey greater than ourselves.

What is your work?

*David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea;
**Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic.

Culture defeats tactics every time, which is why strategy is often about creating culture.*
Seth Godin

The holloways are humbling, for they are landmarks that speak of habit rather than suddenness. Trodden by innumerable feet, cut by innumerable wheels, they are records of journeys to market, to worship, to sea. Like creases in the hand, or the wear on the stone sill of a doorstep or stair, they are the consequences of tradition, of repeated action.**
Robert Macfarlane

You are the smallest expression of human culture,
Shaped over many years, decades of conscious or unconscious
development – your holloway** resists the change you now seek, the
tactics and techniques you employ; but
perhaps there is a deeper holloway to discover and travel,
One shaped by your talents and energies and values, fashioned
from the inside out: your delightful
culture, story, myth, that allows us to:
wake up each day in a world of wonders
rather than a world of answers.^

*Seth Godin’s This Is Strategy;
**Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places; ‘Holloway: from the Anglo-Saxon hola weg, meaning a “harrowed path,” a “sunken road.”‘;
^Brian McLarens’ Faith After Doubt.

As is so often the case with grace, you could not have gotten to where I now was from where I had been.*
Anne Lamott

The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s “own” or “real” life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life – the life God is sending one day by day.**
C. S. Lewis

If I’m honest, I wouldn’t
have planned to have arrived here:
What I am doing today has
a lot to do with being nudged, pushed, and
pulled by things I didn’t welcome at the time, and
I’m grateful.

*Anne Lamott’s Dusk Night Dawn;
**Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations For Mortals.

Freedom is not something we “have” and therefore can lose; freedom is what we “are.”*
Viktor Frankl

No one can change everything, but everyone can change something.
Seth Godin

If you were to decide to do
that good thing
you want to make a difference in, there’s
no way I could stop you.

“Initium est dimidium facti” …
“Once you’ve started, you’re halfway there.”^

*Viktor Frankl’s The Doctor and the Soul;
**Seth Godin’s blog: Powerlessness;
^James Clear’s 3-2-1 newsletter: On how to handle idiots, pushing toward growth, and two types of choices in life.

Well, poetry holds what can’t be said. It can’t be paraphrased. It can’t be translated.*
Krista Tippett

However much we might uncover, nature will never cease to be filled with surprise ripe for the reaping.**
Maria Popova

You are more a poem than you know,
Certainly more than prose, and
never allow you or another describe you by
powerpoint.

You are not in nature,
You are nature, full of
SURPRISE! – waiting to be discovered
by yourself and others.

Of course, some want to
be powerpoint,
Off the hook, “Next slide, please,”
But not you.

*Krista Tippett’s Becoming Wise;
**Maria Popova’s The Marginalian blog: Every Loss Reveals What We Are Made of: Blue Bananas, Why Leaves Change Color, and the Ongoing Mystery of Chlorophyll.

I always admire people who marvel at things that anyone could have noticed but didn’t.*
Brian Eno

The experience of touching something timeless can shock a person out of the rhythm of ephemeral experience in daily life.**
Bina Venkataraman

We all notice something more than others do,
It’s how we provide our lives with purpose and direction and delight, but there are
some who seem to have widened their “bandwidth” exponentially –
They enrich my life and motivate me to notice more;
A lot of this is about time and effort and curiosity,^ but if there is anything
magical about becoming a better noticer, it is that everything
is useful to our original purpose and direction and delight.

We won’t be the first to have noticed what catches our attention, and,
Hopefully, because we have turned our gaze towards it,
We won’t be the last.

Everybody’s idea seems obvious to them … maybe what obvious to me is amazing to someone else? … We’re clearly bad judges of our own creations. We should put them out there and let the world decide. Are you holding back something that seems too obvious to share?^^

*Brian Eno’s A Year With Swollen Appendices;
**Bina Venkataraman’s The Optimist’s Telescope;
^All of which can be worked on.
^^Derek Sivers’ Hell Yeah Or No.

It is our responsibility to set our future self up for as much opportunity, success, and joy as possible. This is how you become the person and create the life you want, rather than becoming someone with regret. Describe your future self.*
Ben Hardy

The voice is an inner whisper not obvious or known to others outside. It receives little attention and is not usually highlighted among a person’s abilities. Yet so much depends on that small voice. The truth of its whisper marks the line between honour an egoism, kindness and chaos.**
John O’Donohue

If we go for what Ben Hardy espouses –
And this is what my work with people is about –
Then we must make sure that we are also
developing the inner voice John O’Donohue writes about;
It happened that I read the two books together
four years ago, which feels
significant: as I read Hardy’s words again today, there,
Too, was the small voice desiring we
proceed with caution, always setting ourselves up for
honour and kindness over ego and chaos.

*Ben Hardy’s Personality Isn’t Permanent;
**John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty

When a man can control his life, his physical needs, his lower self, he elevates himself.*
Muhammad Ali

These are the characteristics of the rational soul: self-awareness, self-examination, and self-determination. It reaps its own harvest … It succeeds in its own purpose.**
Marcus Aurelius

The fourth elemental truth states:
You are not in control,^ but
there is more detail to this we need to explore:
Whilst we can’t control things out there, we can
control things in here – the most
important place – meaning we can control
our response to everything out there –
This is Viktor Frankl‘s point;
Marcus Aurelius wrote wise words to himself, but
we get to benefit: we are each capable of developing
awareness and
examination and
determination^^
of the self, leading to some interesting results –
The more we control ourselves, beginning with the
basics, the more we can
affect our surroundings …
Though in a more profound, more helpful, even
more beautiful way.

When an artist says “Trust the Soup” she means let go of the need to control (which we can’t do anyway) and put your faith instead in the Source, the Mystery, the Quantum Soup.*^

*Ryan Holiday’s Discipline is Destiny;
**Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic;
^Richard Rohr’s Adam’s Return;
^^More than being self-aware, we descend deeper by self-examining, and build our power to self-determine so that we can travel further in the outer world;
*^Steven Pressfield’s Do the Work.

May you see in what you do the beauty of your soul.*
John O’Donohue

The self is always under construction. The multiplicity of selves is what allows change.**
Peter Turchi

All the people
I have ever been are
still here, collaborating and
vying,^ helping today’s me not only
figure out who
I want to be and what
I want to do, but also how
to bring these towards some
greater oneness and fullness.

*John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: For Work;
**Peter Turchi’s A Muse and A Maze;
^There are some of my past “me”s that I don’t want to be again, and that’s how they help me.