It turns out that a life lived conveniently isn’t always a better one. The cost of convenience ends up being too high.*
Seth Godin

When you live a life of obligation it steals from your strengths. Wisdom allows you to harness your strength.**
Erwin McManus

It may be convenient, but
there are hidden extras that demand
your compliance and attendance:
When you have chance to look around,
What you really want to do may
be off in the distance –
There is inconvenience in
living our strengths.

*Seth Godin’s blog: The convenience fee;
**Erwin McManus’ The Way of the Warrior.

It remains the dream of every life to realise itself, to reach out and lift oneself to greater heights. A life that continues to remain on the safe side of its own habits and reputation never engages with the risk of its own personality, remains an unlived life.*
John O’Donohue

the main thing in life was to keep the main thing the main thing**
Ryan Holiday

An unrealisation is a
dimension or aspect of your life that
you have not yet given expression to;
It is something unique to you, making you
unlike anyone else –
When your main thing becomes the main thing,
You are a realised person, and for this,
We have today.^

*John O’Donohue’s To Bless the Space Between Us;
**Ryan Holiday’s Discipline is Destiny;
^I write to myself first of all.

Sooner or later, we are all self taught.*
Seth Godin

Finally,
We end the resistance –
Living in the past,
Comfortable error,
Easiness, denial of
the future – and
we let some new knowledge in.

*Seth Godin’s blog: Aha!

what I’m really concerned about is reaching one person*
Jorge Luis Borges

Name the people you’re writing for. Ignore everyone else.**
Seth Godin

This isn’t only about writing,
It is about whatever the contribution
you want to bring to the world is –
But not all the world, just some;
To know who and how many is important –
For me, it is the one.

Let me know if you are the one.^

*Austin Kleon’s Keep Going (W);
**Seth Godin’s blog: Write for someone;
^geoffrey@thinsilence.org.

Resist chronology.
It will always try to impose itself.
Break the flow of time once it begins.
Better yet, resist it from the start.**
Verlyn Klinkenborg

We live on a planet on which space is stationary and time flows through it. Imagine, instead, that we live in a reality where time stands still and space flows through it.^
Jean Houston

Whilst I grow older, I sense
my want is for more moments
rather than more time, where
past, present, and future merge –
Time has overcome wonder long enough,
May this third age be one of astonishment.

*As apposed to chronology;
**Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several short sentences about writing;
^Jean Houston’s The Possible Human.

What you seek is seeking you.*
Rumi

Well, let’s just say we all have regrets and most of us know that those regrets, as excruciating as they can be, are the things that help us lead improved lives … certain regrets that, and they emerge, can accompany us on the incremental bettering of our lives.**
Nick Cave

The things I regret are strange to me,
Indeed – whilst I wince at some of my choices,
There would have been no coming to the work I lovewithout them,
Their consequences nudging me towards something
more important, more valuable, though buried within me:
Would I have come to this same place with better choices?

I don’t know,
Maybe I would still be pursuing what I
I could not name, still eluding
that which pursued me; I only know that
I stopped to look regret in the eye.

Contemplation is meeting as much reality as we can handle in its most simple and immediate form – without filters, judgements, or commentaries.^

*Ben Hardy’s Be Your Future Self Now;
**Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan’s Faith, Hope and Carnage;
^Brian McLaren’s Faith After Doubt.

You don’t need to be a prisoner of dead old men who stopped learning two thousand years ago.*
Ryan Holiday

If you are comfortable with where you are, you will never know how far you can go. If you refuse to change, then you refuse to grow.**
Erwin McManus

We don’t have to go back two thousand years, or
one hundred –
There are plenty of people walking
around today that have stopped learning –
Stopped living? – only
carrying the past and not open to the future;
I want to learn from learners,
From those open to the future and to becoming,
Changing and growing into goodness.

Man might be described fairly adequately, if simply, as a two-legged paradox. He has never become accustomed to the tragic miracle of consciousness. Perhaps … his species is not set, has not jelled, but is still in a state of becoming.^

*Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic;
**Erwin McManus’ The Way of the Warrior;
^John Steinbeck, from The Marginalian: The Tragic Miracle of Consciousness: John Steinbeck on the True Meaning and Purpose of Hope

To cross a threshold is to leave behind the husks and arrive at the grain.*
John O’Donohue

If there is no conflict there is no interest.**
Fred Wilson

I may have desired a trouble-free life, with
a modest degree of success thrown in, but
it has been when I faced some issue or difficulty that
a threshold appeared, and with it
a good shaking out, because
I was unable to cross the threshold with all my husk intact –
Thresholds are for revealing the grain in us.^

What is the new horizon in you that wants to be seen?*

*John O’Donohue’s Benedictus;
**Seth Godin’s blog: The landlord and the creative coach;
^Admittedly, at the time I couldn’t the thresholds, I could only feel the threshings.

A simple note of thankfulness for
forty five years married:*
Thank you, Christine, for loving me,
Thank you for receiving my love,
Thank you, God, for the gift of love.**

*Blue because forty five years is sapphire;
**We’ll be at a family wedding today – which feels a very fitting way to celebrate our anniversary.

Ritual is simply a myth enacted; by participating in a rite, you are participating directly in a myth.*
Joseph Campbell

Learning the skill and caring enough to implement it, again and again, can give us the foundation to see what others might miss.**
Seth Godin

A myth without ritual is
only a story, but when we add rites
it manifests in our ordinary world what we have discovered
in the special world of our explorations;^
These rites will be peculiar to us, our unique take on
and response to the world,
And living them consistently means we’ll find and
make our particular contribution.

*Joseph Campbell’s Pathways to Bliss;
**Seth Godin’s blog: In defense of the hard parts;
^As I see it, the time taken to discover and reflect upon our abilities, energies, and values is a special world activity. See more about a myth’s movement from the ordinary world to the special and the return to the ordinary in this short video.