If we do not seek variation, we end up dead in life, shutting out those new experiences that keep our hearts and minds active. Our horizons will shrink, our learnings will stagnate and we will become nothing but creatures of habit.*
Anna Katharina Schaffner

An aircraft’s attitude is stabilised in three directions: yaw, nose left or right about an axis running up and down; pitch, nose up or down about an axis running from wing to wing; and roll, rotation about an axis running from nose to tail.

Variation is not a matter of distance or of money, primarily it is a matter of attitude, a matter of openness to all that is around us right where we are.

(If, then, distance or money happen to come along, we’ll know what to do with them.)

Being curious and interested is good for our health. Finding something to pursue and invest ourselves in, no matter the space, experience or circumstance.

A clear sense of self-directed meaning provides us with an essentially inexhaustible supply of motivation.**

Here are a few simple ways in: take a familiar walk slowly to notice more, take an unfamiliar walk and note things to find out more about, like the person who has given their name to a road-sign you see, meet up with someone for an hour and find out all about their work and/or their motivations.

*From Anna Katharina Schaffner’s The Art of Self-Improvement;
**From Steven Hayes’ A Liberated Mind.

For the past eighty years I have started each day in the same manner. It is not a mechanical routine but something essential to my daily life. I go to the piano, and I play two preludes and fugues of Bach. I cannot think of doing otherwise. It is a sort of benediction on the house … It is a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a part. It fills me with awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being. The music is never the same for me, never. Each day it is something new, fantastic and unbelievable.*
Pablo Casals

May all that is unlived in you,
Blossom into a future,
Graced with love.**
John O’Donohue

Our birth is wrapped in wonder and mathematical improbability.

This is something we can remember or ignore at the beginning of each day.

Helping each other to remember is one of the most precious gifts we can give to each other.

*Pablo Casals, quoted in Maria Popova’s The Marginalian: Music and the Mystery of Aliveness;
**From John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: To Come Home to Yourself.

The sacrifice is that doing The Thing requires not doing everything else we might like to do, at least when we’re actually making The Thing. The risk is that The Thing just might not work – in Buber’s words, it will break, or it will break us.*
Austin Kleon

It is about waking up to a knowledge that is deep in the very fabric of our being, and it is about living in relation to this wisdom.**
Philip Newell

Austin Kleon contemplates the sacrifice and risk involved when Martin Buber’s “eternal origin of art” comes knocking.

This is not “art-art,” rather the art we all have the capacity of creativity for: the thing that, when we come upon it, we must do.

Kleon considers the sacrifice to be greater a demand than the risk

The risk, surprisingly, seems much easier to me. Something will break us, eventually, so why not The Thing? And if The Thing breaks, well, it didn’t even exist before we tried to bring it forth, now, did it?*

To sacrifice, though, is to give up all the other things we may have otherwise pondered or dwelt upon for the sake of pursuing the thing.

His words find me at a time when I have been wondering about what I haven’t done because of the thing I have decided to do.

There is a moment of anguish, then recovering, I find myself so full of gladness because of this thing I do.

The test of this is that it makes a difference for others. My forlornness would extend much further if this were not so.

That we may awaken,
To llive to the full
The dream of the earth
Who chose us to emerge
And incarnate its hidden night
In mind, spirit and light.^

*From Austin Kleon’s blog: A sacrifice and a risk;
**From Philip Newll’s Sacred Earth Sacred Soul
^From John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: In Praise of Earth.

Play to keep playing.*
Seth Godin)

Pray in the Spirit at all times in every prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert and always persevere in supplication for all the saints.**
The Apostle Paul

Hope in everything.

Set imaginations free.

Lights, cameras, action!

Don’t exclude.

Include everything and everyone.

The game includes more clues than rules.

And its name is Transcendence!

*From Seth Godin’s The Practice;
**Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians.

For the one who believes in it, a blessing can signal the start of a journey of transformation.*
John O’Donohue

The unrelenting day will soon begin with all its rush and push.

Perhaps bless yourself before entering the thrall … with some words, some quietness, some centring.

Allowing these to sink deep into you, shaping you towards shaping your day.

If you find some words that touch you deeply, you may also try writing them on a slip of paper and popping them into the storage of a jar, to be pulled out and blessed by on another day … which is what journaling can be about.

*From John O’Donohue’s Benedictus.

We have the ability to bring three things together for endless possibility:

The values are about our ways of being and doing: the world we want to live in and invite others to visit.

The talents are our ways of leaning in and connecting to our worlds of people and things: they can become superpowers.

The play-areas are the environments in which we flourish most: we shape these and are shaped by them.

Together, they are where our deepest joy meets the world’s deepest need.

Thank you for all the recent comments on the blogs. I really appreciate these and will be replying soon.

Unlike the world of matter, in the world of spirit a whole territory that has lain fallow can become a fertile area of new potential and creativity.*
John O’Donohue

all life on earth is ultimately made possible by dissipative structures that capture chaos and shape it into a more complex order … those who know how to transform a hopeless situation into a new flow activity that can be controlled will be able to enjoy themselves, and emerge stronger from the ordeal**
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

When we find ourselves stuck, we’re tempted to wait on help from somewhere or someone to come to us, and whilst we certainly need each other, we also have a surprising capacity for imagining what we can do with what we have.

For help to discover more, let me know if you are interested in the hour of possibility I’m offering.

*From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
**From Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow.

Exclusion becomes more complicated when you need those whom you despise. In most cities there are ‘alien’ elements who are necessary to its functioning, from cleaning its toilets to servicing its banks.*
Richard Sennett

Jen is felt in that deeply satisfying moment when you bring out the goodness in others.**
Dacher Keltner

We are very aware of those who “celebrate” themselves, making more of themselves than they ought, but there are many more who may only realise their wonder through the generous attention of another.

Maria Popova writes of the opaqueness that exists in both the story and a life:

Because we are always partly opaque to ourselves even at our most self-aware, fiction and real life have something wonderful in common, wonderful and disorienting: the ability to surprise even the author – of the story or the life.^

I may have made the decision to set out on my own journey of discovery, but it was the different things others shared with me that has and continues to make the difference.

David Whyte describes this experience of surprise and discovery well:

A life sincerely followed is always surprising and always leads you into places you did not feel you could either enter or that you could deserve. And part of the ability to hold the silence as we move and as we tiptoe, or walk or taker our pilgrim path to another is our ability to not name things too early and to allow yourself to be surprised as to where you’ve arrived.^^

If it were possible for our life to be written as a novel, then we would discover it to be larger than the life that is presently our experience, full of undiscovered uncertainty and nuance, as Milan Kundera writes:

A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man* can become, everything he’s capable of. Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering this or that human possibility. But… to exist means “being-in-the-world.”  Thus both the character and his world must be understood as possibilities … [Novels] thereby make us see what we are, and what we are capable of.*^

You may feel this to be a moment for opening yourself to this story that is larger than we are:

We drift through this grey, increasingly nowhere
Until we stand upon a threshold we know
We know we have to cross to come alive once more.^*

*From Richard Sennett’s Building and Dwelling;
**From Dacher Keltner’s Born to be Good;
^Maria Popova, from The Marginalian: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Opaque to Ourselves: Milan Kundera on Writing and the Key to Great Storytelling;
^^David Whyte, quoted in The Marginalian: source lost;
*^Milan Kundera, quoted in The Marginalian: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Opaque to Ourselves: Milan Kundera on Writing and the Key to Great Storytelling;
^*From John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: For the Time of Necessary Decision.

Are all self-improvers in principle created equal, or is self-improvement much harder for some than it is for others?*
Anna Katharina Schaffner

Creativity doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.**
Seth Godin

The author of the blog Clothes Make the Man was being interviewed on the radio show I was listening to this morning. The subject being the comeback of flares.

Whilst clothes do not make a person, many of us, including myself, enjoy finding the clothes we feel most in tune with. I can also remember flares from the first time they were with us: I had a pair of 28″ flared trousers: definitely not something I would ever want to wear again.

We each have our rules and codes about clothing: shirts to be worn outside of jeans but inside of trousers, et cetera.

It’s Anna Katharina Schaffner’s question that is more important to me than whether flares will make a comeback and what will be the next fashion after this one. Her book is exploring self-improvement through the centuries and identifies ten timeless practices.

At the heart of all of this is the question: What does it mean to you to be human?

Is to be human a fixed existence, or is it one of endless development, or somewhere in-between?

Our answer will likely affect what happens next.

*From Anna Katharina Schaffner’s The Art of Self-Improvement;
**From Seth Godin’s The Practice.