“The face of afraid keeps changing constantly, and I can count on that change.  I need to travel light and fast, and there’s a lot of baggage I’m going to have to leave behind me.  Jettison cargo.”*
(Audre Lorde)

Audre Lorde is reflecting on her decision not to have a biopsy for treatment for suspected liver cancer.  Instead she sets out from the United States on a teaching trip to Europe.  She also sets out to capture her feelings of fear in her diary.  Lorde catches my attention with her decision to travel light, to jettison cargo, at what was the most difficult point in her life.   She continues:

“I am saving my life by using my life in the service of what must be done.  Tonight as I listened to the ANC speakers from South Africa at the Third World People’s Centre here, I was filled with a sense of self-answering necessity, of commitment as a survival weapon.  Our battles are inseparable.  Every person I have ever been must be actively enlisted in those battles, as well as in the battle to save my life.”*

Lorde causes me to think about how we need to bring together the fullness of who we are and to live for a purpose greater than ourselves.  We save ourselves in saving others.  I cannot live someone else’s life, nor can they live mine.  I can go to the spring of my life, I can only walk with others in their discovery of the spring of theirs:

“Take me down to the spring of my life, and tell me my nature and my name. Give me freedom to grow, so that I may become that self, the seed of which You planted in me at my making.”**

Many things that obstruct the life that wants to flow from the springs of our lives – the things we must “jettison.”  They are different for each of us, but perhaps a common obstruction is the notion that others have a better chance than we do, they have what we do not have.  But it doesn’t matter what others have, only what you have.

I began this morning reading words on curiosity from Hugh Macleod.  Macleod describes a world available to us that was never available to other generations.  Once we have found our curiosity, we can find everything else we need:

‘With all of mankind’s information available at your fingertips, almost anything is knowable. It is something that we have quickly taken for granted. So, being that we are now able to feed our curiosity at any time and in any amount, what is it all for?’^

(*Audre Lorde, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: A Burst of Light.)
(**George Appleton, quote in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(^From gapingvoid’s blog: Curiosity is as important as intelligence.)

‘Decline starts with the replacement of dreams with memories and ends with the replacement of memories with more memories.’**

When it comes to our impossible dream, it’s sometimes about making something happen and sometimes it’s about being able to receive a possibility when it comes to us.  Either way, it’s about attending to identifiable small steps in the meantime.

Of achieving the impossible four minute mile, Seth Godin remarks on Roger Bannister‘s achievement:

‘He did something impossible, but he did it by creating a series of possible steps.”^

Robert Greene adds to this from the other side; if we’re not prepared to do the small things over a long time, we will never gain the mastery we desirer:

‘The very desire for shortcuts makes you eminently unsuitable for any kind of mastery.’^^

Slow down, spot the small steps and, as Nassim Taleb reminds us with today”s opening words, never stop moving towards your dreams.

(*Andy Williams sings The Impossible Dream.  An occasional dose of this in our dreaming diets is very worthwhile.)
(**From Nassim Taleb’s The Bed of Procrustes.)
(^From Seth Godin’s blog: The Bannister method.)
(^^From Robert Greene’s Mastery.)

‘In our interior experience as individuals, as in the public forum of our shared experience as a culture, our courage lives in the same room as our fear — it is in troubled times, in despairing times, that we find out who we are and what we are capable of.’*
(Maria Popova)

Feel for the person not able to change: unable to move from judgement to openness, from cynicism to compassion, from fear to courage.

Yet, if Maria Popova’s imagery is true for fear and courage, then so it is for all of these and I feel hope.

(*From Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: A Burst of Light.)

When it comes to learning, we need both.

College comes from the Latin collegium, meaning “partnership.”  Collage is French, meaning “glueing.”

We’re coming into a time of new learning experiences.

What if small groups of people came together for an agreed set period to learn each other?  That is, everyone brings the things they love and know and can do and share these things in a college and collage experience – we need to glue to partner.

Perhaps around some problem or issue everyone recognises, and everyone sets the curriculum and teaches and learns – an “alchemists’ den”?

HERE’S AN ALTERNATIVE FOR TODAY’S DOODLE

If you want to find out more about how you can use illustration to enhance your work, or about college and collage experiences, drop me a line: whispering@thinsilence.org

‘The first recognition of beauty was one of the most significant events in the evolution of human consciousness.  The feelings of joy and love are intrinsically connected to that recognition.’*
(Eckhart Tolle)

“Or, God’s kingdom is like a jewel merchant on the hunt for excellent pearls. Finding one that is flawless, he immediately sells everything and buys it.”**
(Jesus of Nazerath)

The saying goes that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and we each see different things as beautiful.

An object can be beautiful but also an idea and a way of relating.  It can be organic or inorganic, made with common or rare materials.  It may be beautiful in a way that many people see or just one person.

Each of us is also capable of making beautiful things.  Not easily.  Nothing worthwhile appears quickly or easily.  Beauty is costly in terms of time and effort and learning and resources.  Beauty requires love and sacrifice.  For the beauty we behold, we will have had to ignore or give up other beauties.  Nothing can be given up or die easily and this is what required.

Beauty is as much about the process as the result.

(*From Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth.)
(**Jesus of Nazareth in Matthew 13:46; The Message.)

“Listen to the silence.

It will teach you.  It will build strength
Let others share it with you.
It is little to be found elsewhere.”
(Frances Roberts)

“Little Things in Life supplant the “great events.””**
(Peter Altenberg)

We live in a society increasingly fearful of silence, or so it seems.  Filling our days with distractions to silence, we do not see how silence is our friend, helping us to see most clearly.  To know ourselves.  To see how we see makes it possible to see more.

Otto Scharmer writes about how we do not see how we see:

‘The way we pay attention – the place from which we operate – is the blind spot in all levels of society.’^

This is about our unique way of seeing, how we can bring it bravely and kindly into the world.  In the silence there’s no-one to compare ourselves to: we are not Narcissus, nor are we Echo.  There’s only us and in the silence we find the truth about ourselves to be enough.

Our personal preference for silence may be found in a hidden place or public space, in urban space or rural, in stillness or walking or even something faster.  It will involve removing the earbuds and ignoring the smartphone and being with ourselves in the fullness:

“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart.  Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”^^

‘[L]iving is a privilege.  Life is a gift.  We are so lucky to go through this journey, each of us, to deal with the drama and the nonsense and the happenings.  We can’t say it enough.’*^

(*Frances Roberts, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(**Peter Altenberg, quoted in the Paris Review, 17/10/13.)
(^From Otto Scharmer’s Theory U.)
(^^Carl Jung, quoted in Brené Brown’s Rising Strong.)
(*^Hugh Macleod, from gapingvoid‘s blog: 1/3/17.)

WHY NOT ADD SOME THIN|SILENCE TO YOUR POWERPOINT?

Images can bring out the things you really want to say in a deeper and fresher way.  Thin|Silence can help you to do this with anything from simple to complex illustrations.  Here are a few simple ones (from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy’s What’s the University For?)

Get in touch and find out what this can look like for you

‘Play turns to seriousness and seriousness to play.  Play may rise to heights of beauty and sublimity that leave seriousness far behind.’*
(Johan Huizinga)

When it comes to the game of life, There are two kinds of player: the playful and the serious.

I have an inkling that the playful person finds it easier to move back and forth between play and seriousness than does the serious person – to play is to be free because ‘all play is a voluntary activity.’*    I also suspect that the playful person uses their freedom to bring together the questions of who they are and what they bring into the same inquiry.  They are always, then, fully present – what they do is part of who they are and who they are is part for what they do.

Play on.

(*From Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens.)

“While revering the mystery of others, our individuation summons each of us to stand in the presence of our own mystery, and to become more responsible for who we are in this journey we call life.”*
(James Hollis)

‘The challenge, then, is not only to find our authentic voice but also to enlarge it.’**
(Harriet Lerner)

When we remember something, we extract a memory from our past and make it part of our present.  We may then relive it or we may do something different with it; the ability to do the latter is a skill we can learn.

The discontinuity of this is something writer Eudora Welty saw so well:

“The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily – perhaps not possibly – chronological.  The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is the continuous thread of revelation.”^

The format of the story makes it possible for us to live a life larger than its constituent parts, greater than the sum of its incidents:

‘The frame through which I viewed the world changed too, with time.  Greater than scene, I came to see, is situation.  Greater than situation is implication.  Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined in any frame.”^

We’re not fixed in time, living out the implications of our past.  We are weavers of stories and, so, changers of our futures.  When I work with people around the development of their identity and contribution, it is important to focus on talents and passions, and also experiences – nothing in our lives is wasted:

“Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer’s own life.  This has been the case with me.  Connections slowly emerge.  Like distant landmarks you are approaching, cause and effect begin to align themselves, draw closer together.   Experiences too indefinite of outline in themselves to be recognized for themselves connect and are identified as a larger shape.   And suddenly a light is thrown back, as when your train makes a curve, showing that there has been a mountain of meaning rising behind you on the way you’ve come, is rising there still, proven now through retrospect.”^

I took time to write all Welty’s words in my journal and found myself thinking about the power that exists in being able to tell our story well.  I recalled my friend Steve’s exploration for a year of inviting people to tell their story to a small group of others.  This “audience” could ask the storyteller questions and at the close write encouraging words for the storyteller.  It was a really helpful vehicle for the storyteller, though, to reflect upon their story and how they wanted to tell it.  Those who create the space for us to tell our stories are special.  They provide us with a gift – something that comes from beyond us.  We all need such gifts, something from beyond.  Lewis Hyde writes about the power of the gift:

‘Gifts are best described, I think, as anarchist property.’^^

We receive the gift from someone and we also give gifts to others.  In words that feel as though they connect with James Hollis’ opening words for today’s post, Hyde proffers:

‘Individualism in a gift economy inheres in the right to decide when and how to give the gift.’^^

When we are able to tell our story, we are bringing our best (though developing) self to others and we are also saving ourselves from others telling our story their way – and even if they they still try and do this, the affect is dissipated.

(*James Hollis, quoted in Brené Brown’s Rising Strong.)
(**From Harriet Lerner’s The Dance of Connection.)
(^Eudora Welty, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: The Continuous Thread of Revelation.)
(^^From Lewis Hyde’s The Gift.)

Just different is enough.  With just different come all kinds of possibilities, that is, if we see this as a journey and not a destination.

We have become just different enough through thousands upon thousands of small decisions and choices.  These lie behind our skills and our dreaming.  Today, all those choices and decisions are preparation for what you will now see, feel and do.  There’s today or, if we recognise who we have become and what our contribution can be, there is today with a few more conscious decisions thrown in.

We can rue the past, how we decided this rather than that but it’s impossible to know where that rabbit hole might have taken us.  We only know this is where we are.

What matters more than where we are is how we will see, feel and act here – all of these come from the inside.  Something we take with us no matter where we go.

You can focus on getting to the right place, being with the right people and having the right resources or you can focus on where you are, who you are and what you can bring to others.

The only kind of imposter we can be is an imposter to ourselves.  No one is an imposter.  Everyone belongs here.

If Alan Lightman is right and our technology is getting in the way then we need the remedy of face to face, open conversations in which people are able to explore the deeper possibilities of their lives.

‘When so much of our interaction with other people and with our environment is mediated by the invisible, the visible seems less worthy of our attention.’*

Otto Scharmer describes a greater hope in simple but generative conversations:

‘at the end of the conversation, you realised you are no longer the person you were when you started the conversation. […] You have connected to a deeper source of who you really are and to have a sense of what you are here’.**

(*From Alan Lightman’s The Accidental Universe.)
(**From Otto Scharmer’s Theory U.)