When we play, we engage fully and intensely with life and its contents. Play bores through boredom in order to reach the deep truth of ordinary things.*
Ian Bogost

Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all.**
Thomas Szasz

Play
and
learning
provide
me
with
movement,
Direction
doesn’t
matter
at
first,
But
it
will
emerge;
I
also
get
to
grow:
Win –
Win.

*Ian Bogost’s Play Anything;
**James Clear’s 3-2-1 newsletter: Four questions for life, how to learn like a child, and seeing things in a generous way.

Isn’t it odd. We can only see our outsides, but nearly everything happens on the inside.*
Charlie Mackesy

The starting place for change is accepting oneself and taking an interest in one’s inner world.**
Edward Deci

How do you tend to
your inner world?
How will we know that
you have?

Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the centre of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world.^

*Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse;
**Edward Deci’s Why We Do What We Do;
^Joseph Campbell, from Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth.

Complex systems create unexpected and unpredictable outputs. They’re probabilistic and unstable, not deterministic the way we expect.*
Seth Godin

And we are amongst the most complex systems in existence.

*Seth Godin’s This Is Strategy.

That’s how we get.  Not by asking, but by offering.*
Seth Godin

There is in the universe a higher kind of beauty.  It is the beauty of sacrifice or giving up for others, or suffering for others.**
Frank Laubach

*Seth Godin’s blog: The generous ask;
**Frank Laubach’s Letters By a Modern Mystic.

If you stick with writing, you will get better and better, and you can start to learn the important lessons: who you really are, and how all of us can live in the face of death, and how important it is to pay attention to life, which is why you are here.*
Anne Lamott

One word follows another,
Sentences queue into lines of meaning,
Lines stacking themselves into
verses or
paragraphs, even
• bullet-points,
Organising in ways the words
resist in our thoughts.**

When we write,^
We are endless,
Not in some fictional way, but
transcendentally:
We can find our
humility, gratitude, faithfulness:
Who we are,
What we have,
What we can do,
And previously unimagined
possibilities tender themselves
to our day.

*Anne Lamott’s Almost Everything.
**Check out Seth Godin’s blog Time well spent, as an example of stacking words;
^Here are some resources: Austin Kleon’s journaling blogs, Julia Cameron’s morning pages, Ryder Carroll’s The Bullet Journal Method, commonplace book-writing.

You have travelled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.
Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.*
John O’Donohue

what you’re desperate for is not the time to do it; it’s the energy to do it**
Katherine Morgan Schafler

My predilection is towards
slow and energy, but I wondered what might be observable if
I set these as one end of x and y axes:
It happens that I found myself active in each of the quadrants,
Though perhaps the quantity or quality were off –
Something for me to work on.

How about you?^

*John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: For One Who Is Exhausted;
**Katherine Morgan Schafler’s The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control;
^Some helpful questions?: Am I successful at this? Does it help someone else? Am I being intuitive? Am I recovering energy? Do I grow as a result of this? Is it meeting a need in me? Am I always meeting someone else’s needs … or demands? Do I waste time? Do I always do as much as possible … or as little? Do I “crash” a lot? Do I notice more than others? Am I always doing the same thing? Have I always got a reason for not spending time on something different? Do I struggle to be? Do I struggle to do? Do I play it safe? When was the last time I explored? Do I struggle with the unfamiliar? Am I open to awe? Do I aim to be with people who are like me or different to me? Am I comfortable or uncomfortable being alone? Am I comfortable or uncomfortable being with others?

It’s a grand thing to get leave to live.*
Nan Shepherd

To be human means not only to be different, but also to become different, that is, to change.**
Viktor Frankl

That you are here is the biggest break of all –
The odds against this were incalculable, and yet
here you are;
Any further breaks are small in comparison to this, but,
More importantly, the next thing to figure out is
how to keep changing, growing, moving,
Something you must do in your own incomparable way.

*Philip Newell’s Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul;
**Viktor Frankl’s The Doctor and the Soul.

When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us.  The rushed heart and the arrogant mind lack the gentleness and patience to enter that embrace.*
John O’Donohue

*John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty.

the only essential is this: the gift must always move*
Lewis Hyde

Dazzling and tremendous, how quickly the sunrise would kill me, if I could not, now and always, send sunrise out of me.*
Walt Whitman

Some believe there can be no such thing as
an unconditional gift –
The giving provoking some kind of repayment – but
this is and isn’t true:
It is true inasmuch as a gift does prompt us to become a giver
(and then the gift changes anyway),
It isn’t true insomuch as the gift is not to be repaid,
But paid forward –
It is always moving away from the original giver.**

*Lewis Hyde’s The Gift;
**The gift comprises the gift itself, the spirit of the gift, and the community of the gift. Whilst the gift may be “consumed”, the spirit and community continue. These comprise the story of the gift. Once a gift moves outside of the community of the gift then it becomes a commodity.

Hope is:
1. a clear and specific goal
2. agency thinking.  Belief you have control over what you do, that your actions matter, and that you can impact the results in your life.
3. pathway thinking.  You see a path, have a path, or can create multiple paths from where you are now to your goal.*
Ben Hardy

It’s a shift from wish-based optimism to reality-based hope.**
Krista Tippett

Erich Fromm^ labels hope the mood of faith –
Faith takes issue with the present reality, foresees a different possibility, and
takes responsibility for bringing it to birth, on the smallest of scales first of all,
Each day, somewhere, for someone.

What do you hope for?

*Ben Hardy’s Be Your Future Self Now;
**Krista Tippett’s Becoming Wise;
^Erich Fromm’s The Revolution of Hope.