Success is fleeting, significance is more … significant. … Don’t chase success. Instead chase new and interesting ways of solving other people’s problems.*

*gapingvoid’s blog: Take something ordinary and elevate it.

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from , where you yourself came from, and where you will go.*
Rebecca Solnit

*Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost.

I couldn’t have learned to teach this without my students who helped me to become convinced about the aliveness of images and the aliveness we feel when we experience them. They can raise the dead hours inside of us that nothing else can reach.*
Lynda Barry

*Lynda Barry’s What It Is.

Being present demands all of us.  It’s not nothing.  It may be the hardest thing in the world.*
Ryan Holiday

*Ryan Holiday’s Stillness is the Key.

The “adjacent positive” is theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman’s wonderful term for all the myriad paths unlocked by every novel discovery, the multitude of universes hidden in something as simple as an idea.*
Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler

*Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler’s Bold.

The three postgrad students were hoping to find
the mindful journaling session,
But it wasn’t happening where the
freshers app said,
So we created our own session,
And this phrase,
Hope fights for me,
Was what it came to me
out of the mindful doodling we included.
Hope isn’t waiting for something to happen,
Or not;
It’s actively working towards
an anticipated future possibility.

The future is dynamic, active, interconnected.  For some reason many of us would rather know the future than create it.*
Erwin McManus

*Erwin McManus’ Uprising.

WE HAVE AN ADVANTAGE: we care more.*
Seth Godin

*Seth Godin’s blog: The unfair advantage.

In life one cannot awaken often enough the sense of a beginning within oneself. There is so little external change needed for that since we actually transform the world from within our hearts. If the heart longs for nothing but to be new and unlimited, the world is instantly the same as on the day of its creation and infinite.**
Rainer Maria Rilke

It’s simple logic: if you don’t walk your true path, you don’t find your true people.^
Martha Beck

I love recommending books
(And I have some books to give away
as a thank you to those who have signed up to
Thin|Silence –
More information below).
The trouble is that I don’t read one book at a time,
And the things I’m appreciating
and taking away from the reading
are the cumulative affect of quite few authors
who are helping me keep on my path.
Indeed the path seems to be
punctuated
by the next book or books.
Yesterday,
I read Austin Kleon’s description of his own
reading methodology:

Looking back, one of the things that occurs to me is how my deep influences are not necessarily a matter of a single book, but of a cluster of books – some batch of books that were read in sequence or simultaneously that spoke to each other in a particular way that made a maximum impact.^^

In my own practice,
I identify a main read –
At the moment it’s Dorie Clark’s The Long Game –
And aim to get through twenty pages each day,
Capturing significant quotes in my journaling.
Around this, I hope to turn a page in several other books,
And am often surprised by overlapping or
juxtaposing thoughts.
I add some reading of blogs –
My “blog tribe” is growing
and at the moment I have more than
300
blogs to slowly make my way through.
A different mix of books and blogs produces different thoughts
that I need because
they help me to change my heart and
keep me on my
path.

(I’ve had to make space for my latest books
so I am giving away around
20 books.
The titles will appear in my blog posts over the next week,
Including how to request one
or a cluster.)

*Jesus asking a question of a religious lawyer: Luke 10:25-28;
**Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters on Life;
^Martha Becks’s The Way of Integrity;
^^Austin Kleon’s blog: A cluster map of books.

I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing.  Just as I believe that a painter cannot sit down to his morning coffee without noticing what colour it is, so a writer cannot see an odd little gesture without putting a verbal description to it, and ought never to let a moment go by undescribed.*
Shirley Jackson

those who produced and traded in colours were known as colourmen, and procured rare pigments from across the globe**
Kassia St Clair

On reading Kassia St Clair’s words a year ago
I journaled,
I think I would like to be a colourman
bringing out the colours in people’s lives.
It’s not only writers and painters
who are
“always on,”
Their particular “light” highlighting everything they encounter
in their essential way,
Take a closer look at yourself –
Inside as well as outside^ –
And you will most likely
spot your dominant light.
There I go again,
The colourman,
Wanting to help you notice your
palette.

*Austin Kleon’s blog: Homework every night for the rest of your life;
**Kassia St Clair’s The Secret Lives of Colour;
^The colour of an object is the colour from the light spectrum it will not absorb and so is the colour it is not.