Wildlife in woodlands appear without notice.  Awakened is what we become in their presence.  Curiosity leads us forward on an unknown path, even if it is a path of well-placed steps made out of pink granite here in Acadia.  For a precious moment we touch and taste life uninterrupted.  Awe sneaks up on us like love.  We surrender to the ecstatic outpouring of life before us.*
(Terry Tempest Williams)

We are becoming aware that the natural world is the womb in which our species is developing.**
(Alex McManus)

Pleasure is unable to stand up by itself.  Pleasure for it’s own sake can become quite nasty and ugly and taking.  But pleasure that derives from making or giving or relationship is quite another thing – something we need and the world in which we find ourselves makes possible:

From 5 September 2017

‘Human creativity suggests a thin fissure in a purely cause-and-effect view of the world.’^

Pleasure also comes from finding.  I love reading through my books in a morning and coming upon the treasures hiding within their pages, and I am also pleased to find wonderful things growing in the spaces between them – ideas and thoughts emerging from simply reading them side by side.

(My main reason for posting some thin|silence every day is not to provide some specific information on a particularsubject, but simply to offer a different place to look upon the things you love.)

We each have some guilty pleasure.  By guilty, I mean how we can feel as if we are taking something that isn’t ours or seeing something that others do not see.

Employers may think employees enjoying themselves are taking from them but the opposite is likely to be the case.  Pleasure allows people to give.  A guilty pleasure is something we enjoy but wonder if there is any value in, yet perhaps it will be thing that changes everything.

Last year I’d been reflecting on the speed of light whilst also reading about curiosity, and I found myself wondering what is the speed of our curiosity.  Where we find our curiosity to be fastest may have nothing to do with our work or contribution right now but may well be the thing that brings us to our greatest meaning whilst on Earth:

‘Allowing your ignorance, or allowing curiosity to lead you, is often the best guide to what to ask about.’^^

What is your guilty but good pleasure?

(*From Terry Tempest Williams’ The Hour of Land.)
(**From Alex McManus’ Makers of Fire – eBook version.)
(^From Alex McManus’ Makers of Fire.)
(**From Edgar Schein’s Humble Inquiry.)

In landscape ecology, an ecotone is defined as “the border area where two patches meet that have a different ecological composition.  Think forest meets the ocean; meadow meets the woods; a desert becomes flush with a river.  These edges create lines of tension.  Call it a mete of creativity where the greatest diversity of species merge.*
(Terry Tempest Williams)

Love thine enemies because they are the instruments of your destiny.**
(Joseph Campbell)

Just when we think we’ve found the thing, what it is we must do in our lives, the direction we must take, the opportunity to be taken, the step out of the mundane, then something goes wrong, the chaos pushes back, hopes are dashed and we are left with our forlornness.

Sometimes, though not always, we may see here things we will not see anywhere else, possibilities beyond those we had previously imagined, the chance to grow and develop even more.  We need a way to process this, to see what it is, and we’ll be moving.

(*From Terry Tempest Williams The Hour of Land.)
(**Joseph Campbell, from Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth.)

“What’s new?”

That’s a fine approach to staying up to date on a situation or field where you are well-informed.*
(Seth Godin)

It turns out to be very difficult to devise a theory to describe the universe all in one go.  Instead, we break the problem up into bits and invent a number of partial theories.  Each of these partial theories describes and predicts a certain limited class of observations, neglecting the effects of other quantities, or representing them by simple sets of numbers.’**
(Stephen Hawking)

I have learned many things but I am not very wise.

In Theory U, Wisdom 1.0 is someone telling others what they need to think … and do.

Wisdom 2.0 is about others taking the initiative to find things out and use them to their own benefit.

Wisdom 3.0 sees the shortfalls in this and adds the knowledge of others.

Only Wisdom 4.0 sees how we need to not only join up the wisdom of everyone, including those who have gone and those yet to be born, but also of all flora and fauna within an immense and expanding universe.

In such a world and universe, questions become more valuable than answers:

‘Answers cure you, answer help you.  Asking questions make you feel alive.’^

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: A good day for the backlist.)
(**From Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.)
(^From Albert Espinosa’s The Yellow World.)

Silence will speak more to you in a day than the world of voices can teach you in a lifetime.
Find silence.  Find solitude – and having discovered her riches, bind her to your heart.*
(Frances Roberts)

It’s a multiple-use area that still protects the ecosystem, but now it’s largely being leaked by oil companies.  It’s being cut to pieces by energy development and it’s having an impact on the park with new roads and oil pads sprouting up like corn.**
(Valerie Naylor)

One of the problems with being human is that we think everything’s for us.  The future, though, will demand that we be more-than-human.

The silence will help us to see more.

Valerie Naylor is the Superintendent of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park and noticing her time more and more “mitigating the drilling on the boundaries of the park, and that is more than a full-time job.”**

The oil companies are fracking for oil, apparently concerned for now and unable to see the future.  Seth Godin warns us that we must be very careful when working with means and ends:

‘The way we choose to get to where we’re going defines what it’s going to be like when we get there.’^

In the silence, though, we perhaps find the means to become more than human, to listen to our neighbours, whether they be birds, trees or hornets:

‘Each time I look out and see the bends in the river of the Little Missouri, these grasslands, these ships of clouds floating over the prairie, I am possessed by a sense of discovery,  […] this openness, these unending views, the silences, the empyreal sky.  This – dare I use the word? – completes me.’^^

(*Frances Roberts, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(**Valerie Naylor, quoted in Terry Tempest Williams’ The Hour of Land.)
(^From Seth Godin’s blog: The ends and the means.)
(^^From Terry Tempest Williams’ The Hour of Land.)

Some people came into my room and rushed in and rushed out and even when they were there they were not there – they were in the moment ahead or the moment behind. Some people who came in just for a moment were all there, completely in that moment.*
(Anne Morrow Lindbergh)

she wanted to see in between [the tadpole and the frog], like the silence between the musical notes, where the mystery is**
(Anne Lamott)

We often think life is about being present in the big moments but often the thing that makes the difference is being present to the moments in-between.

(*Anne Morrow Lindbergh, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(**From Anne Lamott’s Hallelujah Anyway.)

Whoever belittles another lacks sense, but an intelligent person remains silent.*
(Proverbs)

As automation increases, people hungry for more personal and authentic experiences begin to put a premium on advice, services, and interaction involving actual humans. […] Humans stubbornly seem to prefer other humans.**
(Rohit Bhargava)

Menneskebiblioteket = Danish for “human library” – an illustration for “human mode..” – another of Rohit Bhargava’s trends for 2018.

I like this idea of checking out real people from a Menneskebiblioteket for a half-hour conversation because it connects with #libraryofawesome, a concept I and a number of others play with from time to time.

What if it were possible to walk off the street into such a library and ask a “librarian” (though we thought they should be called “wizards”) what recommendations are possible for doing something different with their lives.  The wizard would find the resources, including people, to help the person change the direction of their lives.

It’s about life becoming more human-intensive rather than technology-intensive but in a more savvy way.

Every day we can help one another upgrade our lives.

(*Proverbs 11:12.)
(**From Rohit Bhargava’s Non Obvious 2018.)

The adventure is its own reward – but it’s necessarily dangerous having both negative and positive possibilities, all of them beyond control.*
(Joseph Campbell)

It is a very recent disease to mistake the unobserved for the non-existent; but some are plagued with the worse disease of mistaking the unobserved for the unobservable.**
(Nassim Taleb)

If we think we have the answers then we judge everything by them; when we are prepared to live with the questions then even more will open up to us:

‘Choosing to be curious is choosing to be vulnerable because it requires us to surrender to uncertainty. […] There is a profound relationship – a love affair really – between curiosity and wholeheartedness.’^

To be curious means to take care.  To take care always requires more information and so we ask questions.

Questions lead us into the “Other,” and the Other leads us into ourselves more fully, as Martin Buber alludes to here:

‘The concentration and fusion into a whole being can never be accomplished by me, can never be accomplished without me.  I require a You to become; becoming I, I say You.  All actual life is encounter.’^^

This way of exploring the world, including the worlds of others, through questions rather than through answers, is too difficult for some, as Hugh Macleod has noticed:

Telling people what to do is easy.  Forcing them to do it is easy. […] Building a consensus, selling your idea, gaining friends and followers, and creating a cause people want to join.  That’s hard.’*^

It is hard because, as Buber expresses, we cannot know ourselves apart from others and we cannot know others apart from knowing ourselves, and this, for some, is not a place they want to venture.

(*From Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth.)
(**From Nassim Taleb’s The Bed of Procrustes.)
(^From Brené Brown’s Rising Strong.)
(^^From Martin Buber’s I and Thou.)
(*^From gapingvoid’s On modern leadership.)

As the tamed horse
still hears the call of her wild brothers
and as the farmed goose flaps hopeful wings
as his sisters fly overhead,
so too, perhaps,
the wild ones amongst us
are our only hope in calling us back
to our true nature.*
(Joel McKerrow)

Who are the wild ones and who are the domesticated?

Here are two different contributions to the importance of wildness.  The first is prose from Terry Tempest Williams and the second, poetry from Mary Oliver:

‘Humility is born in wildness.  We are not protecting grizzlies from extinction; they are protecting us from the extinction of experience as we engage with a world beyond ourselves.  The very presence of a grizzly returns us to the ecology of awe.’**

“Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
There light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say, “and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.””^

This wildness is not savage but beauty and randomness.

Sherry Turkle tells what may be a more extreme story of our growing dependence on technology, what may be seen as a form of domestication:

‘When a feeling bubbles up, Julia [16] texts it.  Where things go next is guided by what she hears next.’^^

As I reread these words about dependence on technology, I was also reading Rohit Bhargava’s description of a 2018 trend he names “light-speed learning,” noticing, as he had, the revolution in how we are able to learn today online.*^

I love the fact that education is opening up in this way, challenging how traditional institutions of learning make knowledge available, but as I first write these words in my journal, it is with a nibbed pen.  I feel its resistance, slowing me down as I move across the paper.  I hear it, too – the scratching sound of slowness.  We also have a need for slow learning.  Søren Kierkegaard wrote:

“Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.”^*

Kierkegaard was a wanderer, taking a slower approach to life.

I’m not arguing against technology; far from it.  It’s about both technology and slowness, but we are losing the art of slowness, the enjoyment of pen on paper, and what can rise out of this tangible slowness.  Perhaps it is our wildness, our connectedness to everything and what it is we must contribute.  Hugh Macleod describes this well:

‘The hunger will give you everything.  And it will take from you everything.  It will cost you your life and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.  But knowing this, of course, is what ultimately sets you free.’⁺

Let us not hasten past.

(*Joel McKerrow, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(**From Terry Tempest Williams’ The Hour of Land.)
(^Mary Oliver, quoted in Philip Newell’s The Rebirthing of God.)
(^^From Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together.)
(*^See Rohit Bhargava’s Non Obvious 2018.)
(^*Søren Kierkegaard, quoted in Jay Cross’ Informal Learning.)
(⁺From Hugh Macleod’s Evil Plans.)

Whatever the forces are that make people do dumb things, they are powerful, they are often invisible, and they lurk even in the best of environments.*
(Ed Catmull)

Seth Godin writes about when smart phones aren’t so smart:

‘Teaching complicated ideas to people on a phone is like trying to teach geography to a bunch of sugared-up kids who just had a triple espresso, while they are standing on one foot being bitten by a swarm of mosquitos.’**

Mix this with what Rohit Bhargava identifies as the trend of “manipulated outrage” – when information is shared in a way to incite outrage and anger – and you have a very dangerous concoction.  It doesn’t matter whether the information is true or false, its whether people believe it is.

Godin also spots this dangers and his suggestion is to go to a larger screen:

‘There could be a direct correlation between smart phone usage and underinformed mass behavior.

Sometimes it’s worth opening up a laptop and slowing down just a bit.

Yes, opening up a laptop might count as slowing down a bit.’**

There’s also the option of no screen – which is the biggest screen possible, and possibly the one that will make the most difference as we seek to make progress as humans.  It’s also the slowest one, allowing us to listen and watch and interact most carefully and caringly in order to notice the connections to everything and everyone:

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”^

(*From Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc..)
(**From Seth Godin’s blog:  On one foot.)
(^John Muir, quoted in Ben Hardy’s These 20 Pictures Will Teach You More Than Reading 100 Books.)

Most people are not even aware of their need to conform.  They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and inclinations, that they are individualists that they have arrived at their own opinions as a result of their own thinking – and that it just happens that their opinions are the same as those of the majority.*
(Erich Fromm)

You were sent to the earth to become a receiver of the unknown.**
(John O’Donohue)

Outside my home this morning: twelve magpies pecking around together.  I find myself reminded of the rhyme about magpies, considered to be a bird of ill omen, as well as the children’s TV programme of the same name, ITV’s to rival the BBC’s Blue Peter:

“One for sorrow,
Two for joy,
Three for a girl,
Four for a boy,
Five for silver,
Six for gold,
Seven for a secret,
Never to be told.
Eight for a wish,
Nine for a kiss,
Ten for a bird,
You must not miss.”

I am not sure what twelve magpies mean, but here where a dozen birds, all black, white and blue, hanging out together.  We can look out with people who are just the same as us but we don’t have to.

As I read more of Rohit Bhargava’s non obvious trends for 2018 he describes another, that of backstorytelling.  Bhargava is thinking of how companies are increasingly telling their backstories as part of their marketing … and I’m thinking of listening to the backstories of others, how we each got to be here, as a way of breaking out of our ways of understanding and belonging:

‘The hearing ear and the seeing eye—the Lord has made them both.’^

(*From Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving.)
(**From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)
(^Proverbs 20:12.)