It should be obvious that those who live enlightenment lives have demonstrated a unique ability to learn from everyone and everything around them.*
(Erwin McManus)

There are the sensory impulse and the formal impulse, both of which aim at truth, and neither of which get there without the other.**
(Friedrich Schiller)

The phrase “to pay attention” is an interesting one.  To be attentive costs us not only in time but especially in energy; it’s why it is so hard to give.  And yet, attention or openness is critical for the attainment of wisdom.

So is knowing, the accumulation of information about people and the world and things.

Between our dynamic openness to the new and our static body of knowledge lies wisdom as graceful expression: openness increasing knowledge, knowledge demanding openness.

Wisdom cannot exist when one or other is absent.

(*From Erwin McManus’ Uprising.)
(**Friedrich Schiller, quoted in Harriet Harris’ The Epistemology of Feminist Theology.)

One cannot live in the pure present: it would consume us if care were not taken that is overcome quickly and thoroughly.  But in the past one can live; in fact, only there can a life be arranged.  One only has to fill every moment with experiencing and using, and it ceases to burn.  And in all the seriousness of truth, listen: without It a human being cannot live.  But whoever lives only with that is not human.*
(Martin Buber)

When we only live in the present, without reflecting on the past or imagining the future, we never fully discover our heavy energy.

Heavy energy is more than the sum of our atoms and molecules, it cannot be measured in pounds or kilos of joules but is found where our deepest joy meets the world’s greatest need.

This will mean something different for each person, that’s the wonder of this life:

‘You work that you may keep pace with the earth and the should of the earth
[…]
I say to you that when you work you fulfilled a part of earth’s furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born […].’**

(*From Martin Buber’s I and Thou.)
(**From Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet.)

You may ask, “Who actually is doing the changing?”  And the answer is the relationship.  Because in the arena of possibility, every thing occurs in that context.*
(Roz and Ben Zander)

Building a relationship is a process that begins in the initial contact that the helper has with the client.**
(Ed Schein)

If we desire to create spaces of possibility with others asking open questions can be the best place to begin: “What do you want?”

Knowing ourselves allows us the confidence to be open in such a way as this, without agenda – agendas being one of the killers of spaces of possibility:

‘A positive attitude makes it easier to trust people, makes it easier to find collaborators,  makes it easier to say “Let’s give this a go and see what happens.”‘^

Ed Schein reminds me how important commitment, curiosity and caring** are to helping others – and when you think about it, just about everything that happens between humans is helping, whether we do this at what Schein identifies as level one – contractual, professional, level two – more personal because this person matters, or level three – more intimately for those who are closest to us.

Our openness of mind and heart helps us to more fully see one another and what each brings:

‘Naming oneself and others as a contribution produces a shift away from self-concern and engages its in a relationship with others that us an arena formalising a difference.’*

(*From Rosamund and Benjamin Zander’s The Art of Possibility.)
(**From Edgar Schein’s Humble Consulting.)
(^From gapingvoid’s blog: Let’s give this a go and see what happens.)

A life story is a “personal myth” about who you are deep down – where we come from, how we got this way, and what it all means.  Our life stories are who we are,  They are our identity  A life story, however, is not a strategic account.  A life story is a carefully shaped narrative that is replete with strategic forgetting and skilfully it opens meaning.*
(Jonathan Gottschall)

As long as we don’t forget or hide away the difficult bits.

The difficult bits of our stories are where we learn and grow most of all, and, so, we may argue, where we are most alive.

Jonathan Gottschall’s use of the word myth for our personal stories is a helpful one.

A myth is something generally true but not specifically true.

A myth helps us wrestle with some of the bigger themes of life, of our lives.

It is why we can hold on to some of the more painful experiences of life, how we can re-tell these in our own words … generously, rather than allowing them to be told by others, why we can pursue meaning and find our happiness – bliss as one of the great mythologists Joseph Campbell names it.  Bliss not as happiness but as meaning producing happiness along the way.

Why not have a go at capturing your story in some daily pages?

(*From Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal.)

People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.*
(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

The Self wishes to create to evolve.  The ego likes things just the way they are.**
(Eckart Tolle)

Unsettling doesn’t have to be abrasive or dynamic in some popular sense; see this from Ed Schein:

‘I humbled myself to their needs, allowed myself to get curious, wanted to help them, and found an effective adaptive move unconsciously.’^

This is an unsettling approach with the “effective adaptive move” emerging being the interesting part of what can happen if we are open to the other.  Joseph Jaworski wrote out of his own experience:

‘My sense of identity had shifted, and I was beginning to lose myself as part of the unfolding generative order.’^^

Around a century earlier, Khalil Gibran had written these words about children:

‘Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing.
[…]
You may strive to be like then, but strive not to make
them like you.’*^

Perhaps this is one of the most open forms of openness, to learn from the young?  To be open to what is wanting to emerge through others:

‘The child and the artist are pilgrims of discovery.’^*

(*Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Ursula K. Le Guin on Art, Storytelling and the Power of Language to Transform and Redeem.)
(**From Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth.)
(^From Edgar Schein’s Humble Consulting.)
(^^From Joseph Jaworski’s Source.)
(*^From Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet.)
(^*From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)

Each person has a story they want to live, a difference they want to make, somewhere, somehow, for someone.

As a storytelling course made clear, the best stories have character, contrast and conflict.

We become.

We hope for something different.

We struggle to bring this about.

Sometimes we just need the nudge to move into this.

Today, do you need the nudge, or are you the nudger?

We are the miracle, we human beings. […] It’s wondrous and amazing how such complex, aware, creative, caring creatures could have arisen in accordance with these laws [of the universe].*
(Sean Carroll)

In real life, true empathy drills down into unhappiness.**
(Hugh Macleod)

We have an amazing beginning, so full of promise.

These bodies, these brains and, often, a whole load of years to do something with them.

To play.

It may look magical and playfulness may sound great.  They’re full of imagination and creativity.  They’re also about hard work and help and love:

‘Civilisation, in a sense, always played according to certain rules, and true civilisation will always demand fair play.  Fair play is nothing less than good faith expressed in play terms.’^

(*Sean Carroll, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Existential Therapy from the Universe.)
(**From gapingvoid’s blog: The extra mile.)
(^From Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens.)

Have pity on those who are fearful of taking up a pen, or a paintbrush, or an instrument, or a tool because they are afraid that someone has already done so better than they could, and who feel themselves to be unworthy to enter the wonderful mission of art.*
(“Petrus”)

The acknowledgment of abundance all around you awakens the dormant abundance within.**
(Eckhart Tolle)

Some wonder why they haven’t been invited; others wonder why they were.

For some, it is important that many haven’t been invited.

For others, it is difficult to get their heads around why what they do should be considered important.

That which is important to us, that we have developed and honed, that we have mastery of and bring to others is the art of our living.  Whatever this is, it can be developed, a noticing of our own worthiness, and noticing this opens up more:

‘The good craftsman uses solutions to uncover new territory: problem-solving and problem-finding are infinitely related in his or her mind.’

(*The character Petrus in Paulo Coelho’s The Pilgrimage.)
(**From Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth.)
(^From Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman.)

When love beckons you, follow him.  Though his words are hard and steep.*
(Khalil Gibran)

The larger lesson here is that we can help our friends, our co-workers, our employees, and ourselves when we remember that love and caring matter.**
(Dan Ariely)

Love and caring don’t require a larger budget or more hours to be found.  Indeed, there’s every possibility that existing budgets and hours will reduced because love and caring speeds up our imaginations, collaborations and making.

Erich Fromm writes about how society must not be allowed to separate us from our basic loving nature:

‘Society must be organised in such a way that man’s social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it.’^

Our purpose and meaning lie beyond the economic where lives become commodities to trade:

‘All activities are subordinated to economic goals, means have become ends, man is an automaton – well-fed, well-clad, but without any ultimate concern for what which is his peculiarly human quality and function.  If man is to love, he must be put in his supreme place.  The economic machine must serve him, rather than he serve it.  He must be enabled to share experience, to share work, rather than, at best, share profits.’^

We have yet to see what loving and caring can achieve.

We know it well as we count the things that matter most to us, that make life better, that change things, and yet these insights fail to be carried into working places and into our politics.  Yet loving and caring are ways of making the invisible visible, the unimagined tangible.  It’s all around more practical than we allow:

‘As people feel connected, challenged, and engaged; as they feel trusted and autonomous; and as they get more recognition for their efforts, the total amount pf motivation, joy, and output for everyone grows much larger.’**

These words from Dan Ariely connect with what I have read heard from others, including Robert Greene and Peter Diamandis, that we may consider to be about love: what matters to us as humans is to live with autonomy, to do something well and to live for a purpose greater than ourselves.

Such love has implications for more than our species, as Peter Senge helps to make us aware:

‘A regenerative society is about life flourishing, not just human life.’^^

The difference in today is simply you.

“When your mind is filled with love, send it one direction, then a second, a third, and a fourth, then above, then below.  Identify with everything without hatred, resentment, anger or enmity.  The mind of love is very wide.  It grows immeasurably and eventually is able to embrace the whole world.”*^

(*From Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet.)
(**From Dan Ariely’s Payoff.)
(^From Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving.)
(^^From Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution.)
(*^The Buddha, quoted in Karen Armstrong’s Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life.)

What happens to us matters a great deal, but even more powerful are the stories we repeat about what happened.*
(Seth Godin)

Technology, publicity and propaganda everywhere promote the competitive spirit and afford means of satisfying it on an unprecedented scale.**
(Johan Huizinga)

The Christian apostle Paul was probably being compared to super-apostles when he admitted his own weakness, concluding, “When I am weak, then I am strong,” and pointing to the relationship he had with his god.

Perhaps he could have also said of the community he was writing to in Corinth, “When we are weak then we are strong.”

These days, we’re more likely to come together in our projected strengths and rightness:

‘what Aristotle calls alazony: the hyperbole or boastfulness that is nicely captured by the modern term “bigging up”’.^

Brené Brown uncovers some of what we are hiding by this:

‘We’ve sorted ourselves into factions based on our politics and ideology.  We’ve turned away from one another and toward blame and rage.  We’re lonely and untethered.  And scared.  So damn scared.’^^

We’re scared of so many things and seem to find it every more difficult to find one another and to share these things, to admit we’re wrong and to learn more:

‘Some people don’t like to pivot- they think it looks weak. […] The thing is, pivoting isn’t  a sign of weakness. Pivoting is a sign that you learned something today that you didn’t know yesterday.’*^

Yesterday I had the joy of visiting the story hut that is visiting the University of Edinburgh for an alternative learning week.  An old shepherd’s hut, the wheeled space hosts eight people, keeping them cosy with a wood-burning stove and is filled with all kinds of thing to stimulations the senses – instruments from different countries, boxes with questions and objects inside of them, fine carving, old toys (spinning tops), old photos and more objects than I can remember.  I picked up the two centimetre tall model of Pinnochio, finely crafted and had to tell the story of David, someone I knew who worked in printing during the day but made models, rich with detail in his non-work time.

Imagine a space in which we can tell stories to one another, just our very human stories, without the need to “big up,” to be with one another, just as we are, and out of these stories dream a brave new world.

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: The repetition of stories.)
(**From Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens.)
(^From Anne Pirrie’s Virtue and the Quiet Art of Scholarship.)
(^^From Brené Brown’s Braving the Wilderness.)
(*^From gapingvoid’s blog: The one thing to do when things aren’t working.)