Nothing makes play more fun than some new toys. Seek out unfamiliar tools and materials. Find something new to fiddle with.*
(Austin Kleon)

The technium – the modern system of culture and technology – is accelerating the creation of new possibilities by continuing to invent new social organisations.**
(Kevin Kelly)

Some people live for point B.

Every day they live out the journey of A to B.

One day there’ll be C but that’s for the future, not now. There’s a lot of saving up to be done for C.

Every so often a smaller version of C is experienced. Bags are packed, the passports are found and there’s a flight to c.

Until then, they must continue getting out of A and travelling to B, putting in a day’s shift.

B is very big.

B

It’s hard to see around it some times.

There are two ways to try and see and experience D an E and F and P and X … :

One is to make yourself look at something different and play with it a while.

The other is to find a group of people you can travel along with.

A third way is to try some dreamwhispering.

(*From Austin Kleon’s Keep Going.)
(**From Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable.)

My advice to the person suffering from lack of time and apathy is this: Seek out each day as many as possible of the small joys.*
(Hermann Hesse)

Each sensory organ, each motor function can be harnessed to the production of flow.**
(Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)

It isn’t the best job in the world but
You notice the smallest elements
That give you joy
And you repeat,
Stretch and
Repeat:

Your real work is play.^

(*Herman Hesse, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Tiny Perfect Things.)
(**From Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow.)
(^From Austin Kleon’s Keep Going.)

The deepest need of man, then, is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his loneliness.*
(Erich Fromm)

But we know exactly how we and where we can be hurt and why. That is as good a definition as any of self-consciousness. We are aware of our own defencelessness, finitude and mortality. We can feel pain, and self-disgust, and shame, and horror, and we know it. We know what makes us suffer. We know how dread and pain can be inflicted on us – and that means we know exactly how to inflict it on others.**
(Jordan Peterson)

Here is Jordan Peterson’s description of nakedness, having reflected on the Genesis story of Adam and Eve’s eyes being opened to their nakedness, far more than having nothing to wear. It had all begun with eating the fruit of good and evil.

If the human story ended there, we’d be in trouble, but we know how to include wonderful stories of mercy and grace, of forgiveness and new beginnings.

It’s about knowing how we’re all naked in the ways Peterson lists and to cover them with some love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control.^

Fruit from another kind of tree we get to shake the fruit from today.

(*From Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving.)
(**From Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life.)
(^Galatians 5:22 – perhaps Paul was imagining another kind of tree when he listed these fruit.)

Chaos is the domain of ignorance itself. It’s unexplored territory. […] Oder, by contrast is explored territory. […] To straddle that fundamental duality is to be balanced” to have one foot firmly planted in order and security, and the other in chaos, possibility, growth and adventure. […] That is where meaning is to be found.*
(Jordan Peterson)

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.**
(Albert Einstein)

What we want our lives to mean isn’t to be found here.

We’ve stopped moving a little too early.

If we stop here we may find ourselves head as a prisoner of our past.

We must step out into the other, the unknown, the seemingly chaotic – seemingly chaotic because absolute chaos is unsurvivable.

What appears chaotic is often simply what we do not know … yet:

True innovation isn’t about finding an alternative that gets us from A to B; it’s about envisioning new As and Bs. It’s about being open to redefining where problems begin and where solutions must end.^

(*From Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life.)
(**Albert Einstein, quoted in Ben Hardy’s These 20 Pictures Will Teach You More Than Reading 100 Books.)
(^From Bernadette Jiwa’s Hunch.)

To stand up straight with your shoulders backs to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open.*
(Jordan Peterson: the first rule for life)

Saying “no” to the world can be really hard, but sometimes it’s the only way to say “yes” to your art and your sanity.**
(Austin Kleon)

The most courageous thing we can do is to be who we can be.

A person of integrity: connected to others, to our world and to ourselves.

This growing out of humility, the kind which says no to the many lives others want us to live.

What must you do and how will you do it today?

This is your responsibility and yours alone.

It is your restoration project.

I have mine.

(*From Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life.)
(**From Austin Kleon’s Keep Going.)

I must listen to my life telling me who I am*
(Henri Nouwen)

Beware roots. Beware purity. Beware fixity. Beware the creeping feeling that you belong. Embrace flow, impurity, fusion.**
(Lauren Elkin)

Jordon Peterson writes about the natural world in which we all have to live:

Considering nature as purely static produces serious errors of apprehension.^

We’re already who we are and we’re always in a state of flux.

To try and remain the same is a highly energy-sapping strategy. The trick is to keep changing in the same direction and, when we do, discover flow is open-ended :

The flow experience, like everything else, is not “good” in an absolute sense. It is good only in that it has potential to make life more rich, intense and meaningful; it is good because it increases the strength and complexity of life.^^

You have your roots, you have your purity, you have your fixity but don’t be satisfied with these: life is found in both the arriving and the journeying – into the flow, impurity and fusion.

(*From Henri Nouwen’s Discernment.)
(**From Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse.)
(^From Jordon Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life.)
(^^From Mihaly Csikzsentmihalyi’s Flow.)

The fastest increasing quantity on this planet is the amount of information we are generating.*
(Kevin Kelly)

The relativists of my generation […], many of whom became […] professors, chose to devalue thousands of years of human knowledge about how to acquire virtue, dismissing is as passe, “not relevant” or even “oppressive.” They were so successful at it that the very word “virtue” sounds out of date, and someone using it appears anachronistically moralistic and self-righteous.**
(Norman Doidge)

Is information the waste product of technology?

Where do we go to find the knowledge once contained in our myths?

In the “overture” to his book 12 Rules For Life, Jordan Peterson proposes:

the great myths and religious stories of the past, particularly those derived from an earlier, oral tradition, were moral in their intent rather than descriptive. Thus, they did not concern themselves with what the world was, as scientist might have it, but with how a human being should act.^

These words caught my attention because I’d just been reading these words from the apostle Paul:

holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. ^^

I can’t think that I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of these from another person, nor they to be receiving of these from me.

I’m not against more information, though it must have ways and means of becoming knowledge if it is to have a chance of blossoming into wisdom.

Our myths make this possible.

Doidge and Peterson made me look again at the five elemental truths I keep in mind and often mention. Ha!, I thought, they are elements of a great myth:

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.*^

I feel these to be half-said, needing to be completed into our personal and collective myths and stories:

Life is hard but … .

(*From Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable.)
(**Norman Doidge in his foreword to Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life.)
(^From Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life.)
(^^Colossians 3:12-14)
(*^From Richard Rohr’s Adam’s Return.)

When man is born, the human race as well as the individual, he is thrown out of a situation which was definite, as definite as the instincts, into a situation which is indefinite, uncertain and open.*
(Erich Fromm)

We often compare ourselves to others. We don’t set out to do it, it just sneaks up on us.

Comparing jobs, holidays, homes, happiness, social media followings … .

We become distracted from what we have, the adventure to be lived, with all its challenges, betrayals, overcomings, failures, inspirations, disappointments, victories, beneficences. Of course, the distractions are in there, part of a bigger rip-roaring tale

This is what our birth throws us into.

Joseph Campbell captures all of this in the language of myth. Myths exist because we live:

The call to adventure signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual centre of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown. This fateful region of both treasure and danger may be variously represented: as a distant land, a forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves or above the sky, a secret island, lofty mountaintop, or profound dream state: but it is always a place strangely fluid and polymorphous beginnings, unimaginable torments, superhuman deeds, and impossible delights.**

All I can say is, write out your myth in some way every day. Capture the story you are living to see what you have achieved and what yet lies before you, but don’t do this alone. Take some companions along when writing in what you’re reading or watching or listening to.

Agree with yourself how much time you will spend in this then begin. When the time is up, stop. There’s always tomorrow to continue. Leave yourself wanting more.

(*From Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving.)
(**From Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey.)

It turns out that the typical school spends most of its time on just one of those skills (obedience through comportment and regurgitation). What would happen if we taught each skill separately?*
(Seth Godin)

Seth Godin names the following skills as important to life and, so, important to learn in our educational years:

Obedience
Management
Leadership/cooperation
Problem-solving
Mindfulness
Creativity
Analysis

Edward de Bono wrote about six thinking hats that help us live life more fully:

Neutral and objective
Emotional
Negative
Positive
Creativity and new ideas
Organisation**

Whether we identify six or seven (or fifteen) skills, we need to figure out ways of honing these every day. They are the horizontals moving through the vertical walls of subjects.

One day, they’ll also make it onto the school curriculum.

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: Pivoting the education matrix.)
(**From Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats.)

The future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.*
(William Gibson)

It’s the direction we’re moving in that matters, not the speed of our travel.**
(Harriet Lerner)

Your future is already here.

Don’t look around for it, look within.

We prefer to change the things around us before we have to change ourselves: our clothes, our job, our partner, our friends … .

But to change ourselves is to move from victim to protagonist.

Bill Moyers speaks of Ariadne’s thread given to Theseus so he could find his way out of the labyrinth:

Sometimes we look for a great power to saves us, or great ideas to save us, when all we need is that piece of string.^

Here the piece of string is the story that allows us to explore the labyrinths of our own lives and yet return to be with others. Change is coming but only if we want it. The hardest change of all is to change ourselves:

Humans are unique in their ability to willingly change. […] But only when we want to. The hard part, then, is changing it. It’s the wanting it.^^

(*William Gibson, quoted in Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable.)
(**From Harriet Lerner’s The Dance of Connection.)
(^Bill Moyers from Jospeh Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth.)
(^^From Seth Godin’s blog: People don’t change.)