We fail and then we edit and then we do it again.*
(Seth Godin)

When we’re born we are thrust to the front edge of life, and with that comes vulnerability. Our parents keep us safe and then we have to take over, but sometimes we make ourselves too safe. If we want to live our lives at the front edge of something important – not necessarily large or recognised by the masses – then vulnerability has to be embraced:

Failure is the foundation of your work.*

So writes Seth Godin. On another occasion he penned a line that has remained with me ever since I first read it:

Fail and fail and fail again.**

Editing, or reflection, allows us to fail smarter and better each time towards the beautiful possibility off getting things right, making things better, making a difference.

Keep playing at the front edge of what captures your heart.

(*From Seth Godin’s The Practice.)
(**If only I could remember the book.)

The slide toward average sands of all interesting edges, destroying energy, interest and possibility.*
(Seth Godin)

Habituation is our tendency to get used to things. Whether we’ve noticed it or to, the likelihood for the majority of us in this pandemic is we have become used to a limited way of moving through the day-to-day, and that will mean we’re missing an awful lot.

Rob Walker offers us a simple way of awakening our noticing to more, by naming a trio of things we take for granted, or that others do but we don’t.**

This kind of thing always gets me thinking about what we’re missing about our lives: our values, talents and energies. It’s worthwhile nothing these if we want to leave chronic habituation behind. I’m offering a Thin|Silence special online for this. Watch this space.

(*From Seth Godin’s The Practice.)
(**From Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing newsletter: Against Habituation.)

Whatever our intents of the day or in life, we will need our bodies in order to make these happen.

We hardly notice this until we have to, but paying more attention so that we enable our bodies to build up their memories will make it possible to do the things we must even when our thoughts and feelings are resistant, whether it be journaling, coming to our place of work, walking away from something, listening, getting up in the morning, making a journey.

We may want to do these things but our bodies may be too “weak,” and yet, like a trained dancer, when honoured and honed the body can help us perform what it is we have in mind to do, rather than the brain shouting its orders and the body clunkily following.

Why not notice the ways in which your body supports you in some of the most important things to you; how can you improve these actions?

Worrying is the quest for a guarantee, all so we can find the confidence to press on. […] Reassurance is futile […] There will never be enough.*
(Seth Godin)

And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?**
(Jesus of Nazerath)

The alternative to worrying is to get on with our work, that is the contribution we have determined to bring into the world. We have been developing a practice towards this – we may just need to see it for what it is and keep developing it:

The practice is choice plus skill plus attitude. We can learn it and we can do it again.*

What have we chosen to do? What are our talents? What must we stick with each day? This is our practice. It’s a heady brew.

When we are overwhelmed, when we are distracted, when we face the negative thoughts, it is where we need to bring ourselves back to.

There are no guarantees, but if the alternative is to worry instead of practising, one outcome is certain. When we return to our work, though, there is something powerful about the practice and that produces hope in us, and hope always outweighs worry.

I’ll be sharing a little more about how you can identify and hone your practice; watch this space.

(*From Seth Godin’s The Practice.)
(**Matthew 6:27)

Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it your target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue … as the intended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.*
(Mihály Csikszentmihalyi)

It means everything to you but many will not care about what you are doing, others may even hate it, and yet the lives of some will be transformed, including your own.

Successful?

(*From Mihály Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow.)

A refined soul is in general one with the gift of transforming the most limited taks and the most petty object into something infinite by the way in which it is handled.*
(Friedrich Schiller)

What matters most in the end?

Is it not love in all its dimensions and aspects – compassion, passion, etc.?

Add forgiveness to this and you have a fascinating dynamic – the possibility of starting over following failure and towards wisdom.

Love and forgiveness open an infinite field of possibility, a natural environment for the True Self to grow, to become a generator of the field.

(*From Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man.)

It is no surprise that historic male initiation rites forced the young man to face both God and death head-on – ahead of time – so he could know for himself that it could do his True Self no harm – but in fact would reveal it.*
(Richard Rohr)

Richard Rohr revisits the fifth elemental truth that he first wrote about in Adam’s Return, rites of passage that work for all of us as we seek to bring our gift and make our contribution:

Life is hard
You are not as special as you think
Your life is not about you
You are not in control
You are going to die.

The idea being that we face these truths sooner rather than later that our False Self dies and our True Self is freed to live.

It means that the richest and most meaningful thing we want to do with our lives will cost us everything, but, as mythologist Joseph Campbell counsels, we must follow our bliss. There’s no other way to live; the last thing we want to do is reach the end of our lives knowing that we never pursued our deepest joy.

(From Richard Rohr’s Immortal Diamond.)

Basically love works only works inside humility. […] Fullness in a person cannot permit love because there are no openings, no handles, no give-and-take, and no deep hunger. It is like trying to attach two inflated balloons to one another.*
(Richard Rohr)

Personal stability doesn’t come from being powerful or self-sufficient, but through humility, gratitude and faithfulness These infused with love, forgiveness and service.

We must also add pain and suffering – which is to love, forgive and serve ourselves, otherwise we hide from ourselves and our True Self, as well as from others.

Yesterday’s post was pondering what James Carse means by touch and move. Touching suggests intimacy and requires that we be our True Self, as Richard Rohr proffers – moving being how the False Self relates:

intimacy happens when we reveal and expose our insides, and this is always scary*.

We remember that it is possible to hide from ourselves as well as from others.

This behaviour of the False Self being more likely to try and move others in developed further by Carse when he suggests, the things we through up as screens to others being the very means by which we are moved:

This means that we can be moved only by persons who are not what they are; we can be moved only when we are not who we are, but are what we cannot be. […] We can be moved only by way of our veils. We are touched though our veils.**

The veils suggest our power, invulnerability and sufficiency, but the True Self is a poor self, a connected self, an intimate self:

And this is exactly what the moment of intimacy of moment always is, even from God. It is always a moment of “poverty” from one side or the other – or both.*

Until I allow this – which is a true expression of strength – I am likely to moved and react with counter-move, whilst what our world needs is for people to meet each other in their poverty – and their beauty – in order to discover and contribute courage, generosity and wisdom.

(*From Richard Rohr’s Immortal Diamond.)
(**From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)

Whoever must play cannot play.*
(James Carse)

Where shall we go? is an invitation to infinite play, engaging both/all for as long as possible. Of course, it takes longer, that’s why we take shortcuts and play the win-lose game that in the end take longer.

Where shall we go? is an invitation to explore possibility together, not for one or other to have their agenda met. James Carse is right to say that if we’re forced to play then we’re not playing.** We’re doing something less.

Helping us to look inside of what is happening here, Carse writes about the difference between being touched and being moved, the former being win-win, the latter win-lose,

I am touched only if I respond from my own centre – that is, spontaneously, originally. But you do not touch me except from your own centre, out of your own genius.*

In order to understand this play between two or more people people then we must see that it comes from a deeper place. Theory U would understand this be more than opening the mind to one another but also opening the heart. Opening the mind will require us to move from judgement to openness, but this is only pre-play was far as an infinite game is concerned. Opening the heart involves moving from cynicism to compassion. If we are to play, all the players matter.

Touching is always reciprocal. You cannot touch me unless I touch you in response. The opposite of touching is moving.*

Our players are now moving towards generative play, in which something spontaneous and original – which neither have thought of and brought into the game – can happen. Ultimate win-win cannot be pre-meditated.

You move me by pressing me from without toward a place you have already foreseen and perhaps prepared. It is staged action that succeeds only if in moving me you remain unmoved yourself.*

Here one player has come with an agenda and had pressed this through without compromise. Win-lose. It may have occurred amicably but that is a shallow perspective. For one thing, the genius of the other has not been invited into play, and also, as Nassim Taleb points out:

People overvalue their knowledge and underestimate the probability of their being wrong.^

If this is the way we play some of the more important games in life, inhibiting everyone being able to bring their contribution, their genius, we all miss out in a world in which we have such massive and complex problems:

In no way is the source of genius external to itself; never is a child moved to genius. Genius arises with touch. Touch is a characteristically paradoxical phenomenon of infinite play.*

Touch only happens in the kind of play we have been outlining.

Wherever you find yourself in life and whatever you find yourself doing, a conversation with those around you about how effectively you nurture the genius in one another may be a liberating, if difficult, one to have.

(*From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)
(**I would use the word should where James Carse uses the word must.)
(^From Nassim Taleb’s The Bed of Procrustes.)

Now all that is needed is more. More time. More cycles, more bravery, more process. More of you. Much more of you, More idiosyncrasy, more genre, more seeing, more generosity. More learning. It’s not working. (Yet.)*
(Seth Godin)

We know we are alive but there are those moments that leave us feeling even more alive.

It’s as though we have woken up and before we were only drowsing.

What if tomorrow holds the possibility of being even more awake? Perhaps today, we are only dreaming of being awake.

How to awaken ourselves. Wendell Berry has written about his relationship with a physical place, but could well be writing about the life we each inhabit:

I had made a significant change in my relation to the place: before, it had been mine by coincidence or accident; now it was mine by choice. My return, which at first had been hesitant and tentative, grew wholehearted and sure. I had come back to stay.**

The first response feels dulled, the second, quickened.

There’s a place in the apostle Paul’s letter to the Philippian believers where he encourages them to ‘work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.’^ His words not unfamiliar, this time they felt charged with an excited alertness: about choosing to live as fully as possible. The same sense is found in James Carse’s comparison of a theatrical life with a dramatic life. What we are then seeking to release is genius:

Theatrically, my birth is an event of potted repetition.  I am born as another member of my family and culture.  Who I am is a question already answered by the content and character of a tradition.  Dramatically, my birth is the rupture of the repetitive sequence, an event certain to change what the past has meant.  In this case the character of a tradition is determined by who I am.  Dramatically speaking, every birth is the birth of genius.^^

As Nassim Taleb has pointed out, there’s only one thing better than skin in the game and that is soul in the game – aliveness in every part of our being.

I do not feel I am there (yet), but I aim to turn up each day in the process that is shaped by my values, talents and energies. Watch out for more information about an online meetup I’ll be hosting and you can be a part of.

(*From Seth Godin’s The Practice.)
(**Wendell Berry, quoted in Austin Kleon’s blog: My relation to the place.)
(^Philippians 2:12)
(^^From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)