At the core of the world and at the core of the soul is silence that ripples with the music of beauty and the whispering of the eternal.*
(John O’Donohue)

Story is a metaphor for life, and to be alive is to be in perpetual conflict.**
(Robert McKee)

Ben Hardy tells the moving story of Rosalie, whom he met when she was in her eighties.

Rosalie had a traumatic experience more than fifty years earlier that had prevented her pursuing her dream to write and illustrate children’s books.

The traumatic experience?

During an art class, the teacher had corrected her drawing, but no-one else’s.

Rosalie presumed this meant she couldn’t draw, a thought she had whilst watching her teacher that developed into a story that was to shape the rest of her life.

When she told her story, she relived the moment.

It’s a tragic story, Hardy reflecting:

Trauma, in a variety of forms is part of each of our lives. It includes any negative experience or incident that shapes who you are and how you operate in the world.^

I could only hope that Rosalie will find a way to try to open her dream before she dies:

We are kept from our goals not by obstacles but by a clear path to a lesser goal.^^

Trauma robs us of imagination, which is necessary for uncovering the future.

Without imagination, we are held by our past.

Or rather by one perspective of the past which is quite possibly inaccurate.

What if Rosalie had crossed paths with someone who would meet with her for regular story-writing and illustrating sessions, playfully exploring ideas and thoughts, learning to treat failure as a way of learning and growing, points of leverage towards greater possibility? What might her life have become?*^

Works of art are born from the conflict of life. […] Life is about the ultimate questions of finding love and self-worth, or bringing serenity to inner chaos, or the titanic social inequities everywhere around us, of time running out.**

From the encouragement of others, we find our own courage.

Confidence as full, intense trust instilled by others, environments and contexts is important, but at some point we must uncover the inner confidence we need for fuelling our imaginations, ignoring everybody – as we sometimes must, and producing our art.

You can do this. Now you must find out why.

Which is to say, failures and discouragements are simply the means by which we hone our art – whatever that art might be.

Take it from Maria.

*From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
**From Robert McKee’s newsletter: The World According to Writers);
^From Benjamin Hardy’s Personality Isn’t Permanent;
^^Robert Bracht, quoted in Benjamin Hardy’s Personality Isn’t Permanent;
*^I’ve just read on a little more in Ben Hardy’s book and Rosalie dras her first picture in more than fifty years because of their encounter.

Rare, exciting, oceanic, deeply moving, elevating experiences that generate an advanced form of perceiving reality, and are even mystic and magical in their effect upon the experimenter.*
(Abraham Maslow)

I encourage those I’m working with to keep two lists as we’re journeying in conversation together.

They are about noticing energy.

One is for the most enervating experiences, the things that drain and deplete in a way that takes an unusually long time to recover from.

The other list is for those experiences that exponentially energise, so that even when huge amounts of energy are expended, the recovery is quick.

These are where we create our future self.

Between the highly-energising and the greatly de-energising there exists a lot of “noise” manufactured by our energy levels going up a little and down a little.

The noise is where we can become lost, or we can hide.

The point to noticing what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, who we’re doing it with and for, and when we’re doing it when it comes to our energising experiences is so we can make more of them happen.

These are our enriching environments and they are where we grow into the future.

When this happens, everyone benefits.

*Abraham Maslow, quoted in Benjamin Hardy’s Personality Isn’t Permanent.

Hopefully your future self will be far wiser and have a wider range of experiences than your current self. Your future self will have greater opportunities, deeper relationships, and a better self-view. Hopefully your future self will have greater agency and choice than your current self, with more knowledge, skills and connections.*
(Ben Hardy)

It’s an attempt to open our minds to possibilities other than the ones we remember, and the ones we already know we like. Something has to be done to get us free of our memories or choices.
(John Cage)

Where B is Ben Hardy’s quote, above, and A is John Cage’s, what must you and I forget, or let go of, in order to move from A to B?

These could be all sorts of old ways of thinking, feeling and acting/enacting.

Sometimes it seems that we have to forget something in our pasts in order to begin something new from our futures.

Other times, it seems that we must begin something new from our futures to be able to forget our pasts.

*From Benjamin Hardy’s Personality Isn’t Permanent;
**John Cage, quoted in Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting.

We want to start with resistances, those facts that stand in the way of the will. Resistances themselves come in two forms: found and made.*
(Richard Sennett)

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect is extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect it will ever have.**
(Wallace Stevens)

Resistance can turn a fairy tale idea into a story idea.

My experience has been that pushing back on the resistances has brought me to life and work that is more satisfying and open than I could have imagined.

Marcus Aurelius reflected:

The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.

Most important things come to us as we enter the resistance.

Like the first strike of the chisel against stone, we notice the dislodging of a tiny piece of rock, more importantly we have learned to hold the chisel and hammer differently.

We adjust our hold and strike again.

That’s better.

Each time, we continue to improve our grip and strike.

Now we’re building muscle memory, we’re finding our rhythm.

The stone, resisting at first, finds that it cannot hold out any longer because of what we have learnt and developed through pushing back.

Perhaps our first thought had been to reduce the resistance to hardcore, but, as we have continued to press, the idea of a sculpture emerges, a shape hiding within the stone is noticed.

M. C. Richards is correct when she writes:

Ideas live in the world as we do. We discover certain ideas at certain times.^

The obstacle becomes the way.

*From Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman;
**From Wallace Stevens’ The Necessary Angel;
^From M. C. Richards’ Centering.

The real voyage of discovery consists not of seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.**
(Marcel Proust)

Learning to draw is really a matter of learning to see – to see correctly – and that means a good deal more than merely looking with the eye.  The sort of “seeing” I mean is an observation that utilises as many of the five senses as can reach through the eye at one time.  Although you use your eyes, you do not close up the other senses – rather, the reverse, because all the senses have a part to play in the observation you are about to make.**
(Kimon Nicolaïdes)

You may look at the very same thing or person as someone else, but you see it or them quite differently.

The other observer shrugs their shoulders and moves on, but you remain, transfixed, noticing more and more, and smaller and smaller details.

Why?

Could it be that you have committed to looking more deeply and each day are figuring out and practising these skills?

*Marcel Proust, quoted in Benjamin Hardy’s Personality isn’t Permanent;
**Kimon Nicolaïdes, quoted in Austin Kleopn’s blog: Blind contour drawings.

Sometimes,
instead of using so much energy
trying to leave somewhere or something,
if we use this energy to
create a new somewhere or something,
a kind of magic happens.

This is what creativity serves. It endeavours to bring some of your hidden life to expression in order that we might come to see who we are.*
(John O’Donohue)

Creation is life, life is creation.

If we could not create it’s likely we’d implode.

Some do.

We cannot go back and we cannot remain still.

Tied to the universe, we can only continue our journey.

John O’Donohue writes about a concept from the classical period referred to as pleroma or “the urgent fullness of God”:

There is such a fullness brimming in the divine presence that had God not created, he would have imploded. God had to come to expression. Just as a true artist is always haunted by the desire to bring the dreams of the imagination to expression, the failure to follow one’s calling to creativity severely damages one’s spirit.*

Imagine that. Without the opportunity to create, there would be no God.

Whether we believe there’s a God or we are open to the unfolding of the universe, this creative imperative makes sense in our experience.

We are aware of a deep surging within, such energy that must be provided expression.

The vast unfolding of the of the universe is fastened within each of us in miniature.

We’re not able to separate who we are from what we do.

My true self and my contribution are one.

There’s something very practical and critical in this.

For hosts of people made unemployed in a marketplace that was changing before the pandemic arrived, discovering and developing creativity – think talents, passions and energies – will be the way some choose to free themselves for moving forward.

They will find themselves and then each other, forming new cooperatives, collectively using their social media groups to be seen.

We can begin today, without someone else’s permission, following the creative imperative.

*From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty.

Of the many callings in the world, the invitation to the adventure of an awakened and full life is the most exhilarating. This is the dream of every heart. Yet most of us are lost or caught in forms of life that exile us from the life we dream of. Most people long to step onto the path of creative change that would awaken their lives to beauty and passion, deepen their contentment and allow their lives to make a difference.*
(John O’Donohue)

Originality is about thoroughness, not shortcuts. Writers need research to feed the beasts of imagination and invention.**
(Robert McKee)

Swept away by the things that fill our lives every day, carried away from our dreams.

Dreams, the big pictures of possibility, bigger than an idea, but full of ideas and, so very complex.

Beyond romance, our dreams are so much more, waiting for us to find our way back to them.

One day waking up and our dreams will be there and work to be done.

Bringing out the journal.

Three things borrowed and altered a little from Robert McKee because just as a writer cannot drift into writing a story but needs to research, we cannot drift into a dream:

Considering exactly how the dream reflects our own experiences;
Imagining living this dream: the changes to make and how to make them?:
Finding out more about the world around the dream: people, places, systems … .

Towards realising the dream, reading all we can, going to the places and gatherings where we learn more, connecting with people living a similar dream, and living the dream in some expression or other.

Being prepared for for finding a different, better dream.

*From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
**From Robert McKee‘s newsletter: Why You Never Start With “Fade in”.

We might change things in this world, yet the most minimal, seemingly insignificant object outlasts us.*
(John O’Donohue)

As an adult, I’ve come to realise that life isn’t about finding yourself. It’s about creating yourself. Books are clay for exactly that. Crazy adventures can be found in non-fiction, and timeless truths can be discovered in fiction. Like an artist, you blend them, and out comes a unique beauty: you.**
(Tim Ferriss)

The pebble was here long before we arrived and will be here long after we are gone.

It’s a humbling thought.

Something to keep in mind when we also have the wherewithal to create ourselves as the person we want to be and bring the gift we want to share in the world.

The two important questions I work with – Who is my True Self? and What is my contribution? – are really asking Who do I want my True Self to be? and What do I want my contribution to be?

It’s about finding our proper place in the world as the pebble has found its place.

**From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
**Tim Ferriss, from Maria Popova and Claudia Bedrick’s A Velocity of Being.

People of faith and hope are often unrealistic, and the realists have little faith or hope. We shall find a way out of the present situation only if realism and faith become blended again as they were in some of the great teachers of mankind.*
(Erich Fromm)

If we could but find a rhythm of being which could balance a contemplative silence, a poetry of motion and an accompanying stillness and silence, our pilgrimage through this world would flow in beauty through the most ragged and forsaken heartlands of confusion and dishevelment.**
(John O’Donohue)

The place we seek is likely to be where reality and imagination, stillness and movement meet.

Let us not cease from our explorations.

*From Erich Fromm’s The Revolution of Hope;
**From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty.