Angelica Sprocket lives next door. Her overcoat has pockets galore.*
(Quentin Blake)

If you begin and end with focus groups, all you’re going to do is what’s been done before.**
(Seth Godin)

I’ve just completed a two-day immersion exploring ways for building competence with complexity. The last participation for the twenty of us was to share in groups of four what we saw in each other in terms of power and edge – something to develop beyond our comfort zone.

The challenge, then, is not only to find our authentic voice but also to enlarge it.^

We will never know our reach unless we stretch.^^

The best kinds of feedback see both our unique contribution and how this can be grown, and it was quite something to see just how accurately this cohort of people had noticed things in one another even after only a couple of days.

We each are able to bring to others what they are not looking for, some way they have not thought of, a response they have not imagined.

Angelica Sprocket, our “pockets” contain all manner of things:

There’s a pocket for mice,
and a pocket for cheese
and a pocket for hankies in case anyone feels that they’re going to sneeze.
[…]
And in case anyone is thinking of dropping off to sleep, there’s a pocket for motor horns that go PAH-HEE-HAR-HAR and BEEP-BEEP.*

I don’t imagine our “pockets” will contain mice and cheese and hankies and motor horns, but they will be crammed with many wonderful things. What’s in your pockets?

(*From Quentin Blake’s Angelica Sprocket’s Pockets.)
(**From Seth Godin’s blog: The trap of listening to feedback.)
(^From Harriet Lerner’s The Dance of Connection.)
(^^From Chip and Dan Heath’s The Power of Moments.)

All amazing journeys begin with amazing people.* (Hugh Macleod)

The human story is full of examples of occasions when out of the depths of crisis some individual or group takes a bold creative step which changes not only the rules but the game itself.** (Maureen O’Hara and Graham Leicester)

Nothing significant and impactful is ever accomplished without a team or tribe coming together.

In John’s Gospel there’s the story of Nathanael who on hearing about a new rabbi in town called Jesus, wonders whether anything good can come out of  place like Nazerath.  He’s sitting under a tree at that moment in time, watching the world go by perhaps, judging performances.

Of course, no team is ever as good as we want it to be but that’s part of the adventure.  Harriet Lerner is here describing a family but she could be picturing a team:

I tend to agree with author Mary Karr, who defines a dysfunctional family as “any family with more than one person in it.”^

Even if we’re the one with the first idea, at some point we’ll need a team – even with dreamwhispering, I need someone to become a dreamwhisperer with me.  I know that success is not guaranteed but I also know that some of the most incredible things can happen in the space we create together leading to new possibilities for the dreamwhisperer.

At some point, whether we’re the person with the idea or hearing the idea, we come to a choice.  Either we continue to sit in the shade of the tree judging he performance or others or we need to get involved in something that may well fail or may become something transformative.

(*From gapingvoid’s blog: Want some great advice?)
(**From Maureen O’Hara and Graham Leicester’s Dancing at the Edge.)(^From Harriet Lerner’s The Dance of Connection.)

Yesterday shows another day is here.* (Ruth Krauss)

How will we measure ourselves today?

There are many ways – our quality of thinking, relating to people around us, getting things done – but perhaps some of the most primal ways include how we’re noticing the world we live in, wowed by it, learning from it.

These ways of measuring change all the others for the better.

(*From Ruth Krauss and Maurice Sendak’s Open House for Butterflies.)

When you shine a light you become the light.*
(Hugh Macleod)

Have you ever noticed how many actions there are to lighting a candle?

When I set out my list of things to do, I began with setting the candle on a flat and safe surface, but now I’m thinking about how I came to get the candle in the first place, even before straightening the wick, opening the box of matches and striking one, carefully lighting the candle and safely disposing of the spent match. And are you just going to live the box of matches lying around or tidy it away?

What we often think of as “lighting a candle” is made up of many details. Imagine, then, how many details there are to shining as the different kinds of light that we are.

Bernadette Jiwa writes about her manager in one of her first jobs. Paula would lead by example, beginning the day with sweeping the floor:

The first thing Paula did when she arrived every morning was sweep the floor. Sweeping the floor became a ritual – her way of preparing a welcome for customers when they arrived. That small act changed Paula’s posture, as well as the attitude of the team who worked with her.**

Jiwa’s story is from the hospitality industry, but it isn’t where Jiwa ended up. Although now a marketer and writer, she remembers this detail from so many years earlier. It made me think about all the years I spent doing all the things my job required of me, paying attention to the details, especially of the things I wasn’t so intuitive or good at so that I could do these things the best I could. It also meant that I would come to notice the things that meant the most to me, things not necessarily valued within that organisation:

I guess my point is that we are what we do, and we need to try and experiment to be able to find who we are and what we are good at.^

Paying attention to the details of what we’re doing and how we react to these (our energies) is how we become able to give ourselves permission to be the peculiar kind of light we are, and which the world needs. The alternative is to wait for the big break or for someone else to notice what matters to us, and that might be as fruitless as waiting for Godot.

The thing about each of our lights is that they are made up of the kinds of details we notice and others don’t, making it possible to bring these together in some new way.

Gerd Gigerenzer and Stephen Jay Gould share how there’s something about humans needing to look beyond probability:

our minds are not built (for whatever reason) to work by the rules of probability.^^

They refer to the Linda example; you can try this one out for yourself:

Linda is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student she was concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice and participated in antinuclear demonstrations.

Which of the following two alternatives is more probably?

Linda is a bank teller
Linda is a bank teller and active in the feminist movement.*^

You probably chose the second possibility because we can’t help ourselves when it comes to details, even though the first possibility is the more probable.

When we free ourselves to notice the details and to create something from these, then our light begins to shine. Youngme Moon warns us:

If we only pay attention to things that we can measure we will only pay attention to the things that are easily measurable. And in the process, we will miss a lot.^*

This morning, I came to the end of Patrick Woodhouse’s account of Etty Hillesum and my attention was particularly caught by his description of Hillesum’s “courage of despair” making it possible for her to notice and write about the details in the transit camp she would soon leave for Auschwitz.

Hillesum writes of the wooden bench she is sitting on as she looks ahead and sees the waving blue heather, of love for people and life, the greetings she received on returning to the camp, pouring coffee, cutting and giving bread, scrubbing toilets, reading Meister Eckhart, dry biscuits and tea, encouraging a young girl with her poetry, and her list goes on.⁺

Seeing these things and helping others to is what made Hillesum a light in Westerbork. Our lights will be different, but they will be found in our worlds of immeasurable details.

(*From gapingvoid’s blog: How to transcend the daily drudgery.)
(**From The Story of Telling: Sweeping the Floor.)
(^Alfredo Carlo in Drawn Together Through Visual Practice.)
(^^Stephen Jay Gould, quoted in Gerd Gigerenzer’s Gut Feelings.)
(*^From Gerd Gigerenzer’s Gut Feelings.)
(^*From Youngme Moon’s Different.)
(⁺See Patrick Woodhouse’s Etty Hillesum: A Life Transformed.)

They just see more because they’ve learned to turn off their minds’ tendency to jump to conclusions.*
(Ed Catmull)

One of the things I found myself doing as I drew the face of someone would be to think a lot about who they were in a deeper way; I would feel the the barriers that we often don’t see, falling away.

Beyond the count of 310 people killed in Sri Lankan churches and hotels, the stories of these lives caught up in the terrorist bombings and hotels are being told. They are no longer numbers, we see the people.

Over seventy years earlier, Etty Hillesum would look into the faces of the Nazis who herded her people around the camp at Westerbork or onto the trains for Auschwitz, refusing to see only the uniforms, the things:

I try to look things straight into the face, even the worst crimes, and discover the small, naked human being amid the monstrous wreckage caused by men’s senseless deeds.**

People who see in this way are our best hope, everyone’s best hope.

(*From Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc..)
(**From Patrick Woodhouse’s Etty Hillesum: A Life Transformed.)

But the overwhelming problem that confronts most of us in the world most of the time is that we are not falling in love with the heart of one another and the heart of other nations and species.*
(Philip Newell)

Mixing what we see, hear, learn, and read – that’s an art in itself, not to be underestimated.**
(Alfredo Carlo)

A few years ago I was told by some within an organisation to “strive towards a more collaborative style and use language and concepts that are more collaborative”.

There’s a world of difference between “collaborate with us” and “let’s collaborate together.”

One asks that we fit in, the other invites us to explore and shape a brave new world together.

One is a finite game, the other an infinite one. In one we are the problem, in the other, we bring something fresh and new.

The fact that the infinite player knows that they must sometimes play a finite game but that a finite player fails to see the bigger infinite game is expressed here by Youngme Moon when she warns us about losing difference:

We respect that statistics matter, but we also respect the fact that to reduce the game to numbers alone is to divest it of its soul.^

Taken to extremes – and we live in a world where extremes exist, when we fail to see and love the differences in one another, when our way is the only way, we see evil played out against each other in extremism.

As Alfredo Carlo helps us to see, playing with our differences is our future. Maybe this is the point of that old Tower of Babel story.

(*From Philip Newell’s The Rebirthing of God.)
(**Alfredo Carlo, from Drawn Together Through Visual Practice.)
(^From Youngme Moon’s Different.)

Yet within us is everything.*
(Philip Newell)

It strikes me that when our futures intersect with our pasts what we have come upon is Easter.

Not only life remembering the past and what it has been able to be, but life also imagining and anticipating a better future.

These last few weeks, I’ve been reading about such an “easter-life” in the form of Etty Hillesum. An astonishingly bright life as it was lived in Nazi-occupied Holland and was ended in Auschwitz. At the heart of this for Hillesum was the attainment of the artist life, as Patrick Woodhouse explains:

For Etty, her spirituality, her prayer, was about learning “to live artistically,” a phrase she took from Rilke. For this, she knew (echoing Rilke again) that “patience is all“; patience and the practising of disciplines.**

We each are able to live artistically, a characteristic of which I consider to be the possibility of imagining the future and then bringing it into being in some form or other. After the imagining, it comes down to the hard work of employing the habits and practices that make this possible. Woodhouse continues, laying out Etty’s own disciplines, quoting her as he lists these:

And what were these disciplines?

• silence – “there is a vast silence in me that continues to grow”
• solitude – “deep inside us, all of us carry a vast and fruitful loneliness”
• mindfulness, n being aware of, and dealing with, “the wild herds” of thoughts and feelings
• the use of images, learning both their powers and their dangers
• reading the Psalms, taking just one phrase and planting it in the depths of the heart where its meaning can grow […]
• learning to listen (to “hearken”) to “everything reaching you from without … and … everything welling up from within” – the development of an intuitive awareness of what is “most essential and deepest” in ourselves, in others, in the inter-connectedness of life.”**

Through this story, hope is formed in me: whatever the past has meant for me, there is always more before in the way of possibilities.

(*From Philip Newell’s The Rebirthing of God.)
(**From Patrick Woodhouse’s Etty Hillesum: A Life Transformed.)

If you’re hoping to be massively successful one day, the first thing to do is lose the sourpuss schtick. The research is in; the latter simply won’t work out for you.*
(Hugh Macleod)

I know that life without a cause is life without effect.**
(Paulo Coelho)

Optimism turns out to be something we can work at. It’s hard work, but worthwhile work.

(*From gapingvoid’s blog: The financial upside of being an optimist.)
(**From Paulo Coelho’s Aleph.)

The leader’s job isn’t to tell us what to do. It’s to remind us who we are, so we can live that story.*
(Bernadette Jiwa)

(**Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were no doors before.**
(Joseph Campbell)

A year ago I was reflecting on how life is comprised of something from everyone rather than for everyone.

There are many forms of light in the universe, most of them invisible to the human eye – a reminder for me of how everyone sheds a different kind of light for those around them. Perhaps the kind necessary to see something about themselves they hadn’t noticed before, the kind of light that is theirs.

Let there be light.

(*From The Story of Telling: On Culture.)
(**From Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth.)

Is it possible to change tiny corners of [the world] with simple, thoughtful ideas, by designing a beautiful colouring book that allows people to pause and create?*
(Bernadette Jiwa)

My idea of the modern stoic sage is someone who transforms fesr into prudence, pain into information, and desire into understanding.**
(Nassim Taleb)

Easter 2019

Climate-change protests.

Deep adaptation.

The best job in the world.

Welcome to Thursday morning.

Death and life, a dying planet, life-changes, doing what we love to do.

One of these may sound like the odd one out, yet my hope for the future will be that as we come to grips with the extremely critical nature of the time we’re living in with our planet (and therefore our ourselves together with all fauna and flora) and as we employ deep listening and deep imagination, we will to live more meaningfully than we can imagine right now, we become the transformative people we are capable of becoming: turning fear into prudence, pain into information, desire into understanding, and death into life.

Check out Seth Godin’s blog, Make things better for an interesting read about possibilities.

(*From Bernadette Jiwa’s Hunch.)
(**From Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile.)