Getting hit by lightning, finding the perfect job, having a djinni grant three wishes – these are all lotteries. […] The problem with lottery thinking is that it takes us away from thinking about the chronic stuff instead. The pervasive, consistent challenge that will respond to committed effort.*
(Seth Godin)

Afraid of being alone, we struggle to pay attention to ourselves. And what suffers is our ability to pay attention to each other, we lose confidence in what we have to offer others.**
(Sherry Turkle)

Before each of us there exists three futures: expected, possible and preferred.

The most developed of these is the expected: because of previously experienced trends, we have the data to extrapolate and put together our plans. The problem is, the world can change around us.

When we popularly talk about dreams we probably positing possible futures: led by events we can imagine happening and telling ourselves stories of what will be if we meet the right person or win the lottery, so we play with “what if”scenarios. The problem is, such events are few and far between and can be malevolent as well as benevolent.

The least explored future is the preferred and is what I’m thinking about when I mention dreams: this future calls for vision, creativity and courage as we both vision-cast from the present into the future and back-cast from the future into the present in order to make it happen.

These three exist together for us, so the future is complex requiring that we build our own capacity for complexity so we might navigate what is thrown up by all three. It’s why Sherry Turkle’s words caught my attention this morning; we’re not paying attention to ourselves in the best ways for developing our complexity.

Ahead of the neuroscientists, George Eliot noticed a critical human characteristic:

[George Eliot] believed that the most essential element of human nature was its malleability, the way each of us can “will ourselves to change.”^

To open our preferred futures, we need to pay attention to ourselves but not be willing to accept the first answer that comes, this in relation to our values, talents and energies.

Our values are our truest goals in life.

Name at least three. Where have they come from? How do they connect with your own experiences in life? How do they join with each other? How do they shape a good world for others?

Our talents are our naturally occurring ways and means of connecting with our world.

Name at least five. Talents are what lie behind our surface actitivities, be they piano-player, boutique owner or writer (so you wouldn’t name these). For each, identify if they help you get things done, build relationships, produce ways of thinking, or influencing others. Then identify examples for each – at least five.

Our energies are physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.

We want all of these to be working together in a state of flow. Often we think about what we are doing. Noticing our energy turns this around to notice what our whole life is showing us first and, when we feel the energy, we stop to notice what we’re doing, because we are wanting to make more of these times happen.

There are also de-energising things our lives are trying to show to us. Again, we need to notice this and turn our attention to what we are doing, because we want to stop these things happen or figure out a way of managing them better.

There are four things you can spot for both the positive and negative experiences: what you are doing, why you doing it, who you are doing it with or for, and when you are doing it (as in, beginning or finishing something, or perhaps the time of day).

Now you’re beginning to really pay attention to yourself. Work out ways of practising these things each day for the next year and you will find yourself in quite a different future – one that you want to shape.

These are the things I will be exploring in a special provision of my dreamwhispering work for those who find themselves unemployed as a result of the coronavirus lockdown. Please pass on to those you think may be interested; those interested can message me at geoffrey@thinsilence.org.

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: Lottery thinking.)
(**From Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation.)
(^From Jonah Lehrer’s Proust was a Neuroscientist.)

Lift is created by the onwards rush of life over the curved wing of the soul.*
(Robert Macfarlane)

We were living the process as we created it.**
(Joseph Jaworski)

Perhaps abundance is not what we have but
a path we walk,
begun by noticing
what we have,
moving us
into flow,
becoming lost
in complexity,
until we emerge,
grown into
abundance –
scarcity being
not to take the path.

Following a flow experience, the organisation of the self is more complex than it had been before. It is by becoming increasingly complex,that the self might be said to grow.^

[Edward] Thomas taught [his wife Helen] to walk differently: “with [her] body, not only with [her] legs,” feeling the landscape as she moved over it.*

(*From Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways.)
(**From Joseph Jaworski’s Source.)
(^^From Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow.)

One day after another –
Perfect.
They all fit.
(Robert Creeley)

If here is the place our curiosity and imagination have brought us to then it is the best place of all.

No matter what is happening around you, keep coming here.

Here, every day, you will be able to engage in the work that is in front of you.

Here, we bring the power of our imagination to the pressure of reality through attention, presence and letting come.**

If you are not in this place just yet, identify what is your curiosity and pursue it every day. Take a journal along (and doodle too) alongside your curiosity.

You’ll find your imagination awakening with more thoughts and ideas than you can handle meaning you’ll have to let some go to keep hold of others.

After all of this, though, where you will be is here, doing the work that is in front of you, every day.

(*Robert Creeley, quoted in Austin Kleon’s blog: Doing the work that’s in front of you.)
(**Thank you to Wallace Stevens for his powerful imagery in The Necessary Angel.)

Waterfall constant of arterial road
Craw of crow
Stoccato joy of small bird
Gentle percussion of foot
Sway of grass moved by I don’t know what
Warm presence of sunshine reaching through haze
Still attention of grass, blackberry, thistle, cow parsley this windless day
Swish of clothing
Soft rumbling of air as I press forwards
Accidental choir of different birds singing
Joy of colour attracting humming bees
Panting of dog and hello of owner
Hollow cowbell clang of barrier closing
Rattle and thud of machinery preparing ground …
I am listening to the day

Good engineers don’t whine about trade-offs, because they realise that they’re the entire point. If there were no trade-offs, we wouldn’t need their help, there would be no interesting problems worth solving.*
(Seth Godin)

We are partners in the unfolding of the universe.**
(Joseph Jaworski)

The universe is unfolding …. and we are universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.

How much unfolding is there left in me?

How much in you?

We will be surprised, I think, for when we embrace trade-offs and compromises, that is, when we let go in order to take hold of what is wanting to come then we’ll find there’s a lot of unfolding yet to happen.

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: The magic of trade-offs.)
(**From Joseph Jaworski’s Source.)

It is this, I think, that draws us to books in the first place, their nearly magical power to transport us to other landscapes, other lives.**
(Davis Ulin)

For most of human history, most people couldn’t read at all. Literacy was not only a demarcator between the powerful and the powerless, it was power itself.^
(Ursula Le Guin)

I have a wall of books, which is surprising, really, because for more than the first half of my life, I read very little. Really, I need two walls, but there’s no space, so the one will have to do while every so often I will let some books go.

They are simply arranged, by the author’s last names. I like to see the unlikely rubbings of shoulders: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi with Roald Dahl, Italo Calvino with Joseph Campbell. What would they talk about together if they were sipping coffee together for an hour?

Through my journaling, I eavesdrop on my current reads: Alain de Botton and Robert Macfarlane, Rainer Maria Rilke and Tom Hodgkinson. Who knows what they might end up talking about.

It feels as though reading books and walking various terrains have a lot in common – I’m wandering through text-terrains, picking up and pocketing things as I go.

Miguel Angel Blanco has created a library far larger and more unusual than mine, the Library of the Forest – La Biblioteca del Bosque. Bound in a rich variety of colours, the spines contain no title; each being individually boxed, they contain only a few pages of handwritten pages of text and the remainder of the book is a reliquary for items gathered and recording Blanco’s many pilgrimage walks – seaweed, flints, the wing of a bird, thorns, timber scorched by lightning, resin, pottery … .

I am intrigued by this library:

Choose three books from the library, The first tells you of your past, the next shows your present and the last will see your future.^^

Blanco’s wife Elena adds:

the books will choose you, not the other way round*^

How can this be?

I imagine each book to be a koan, jerking their chosen recipient out of their predictable path into pilgrimage – the pilgrim walks both an exterior and interior path.

I find myself exploring where ways and words connect. My journal and pen and books and wander make it possible to take a pilgrimage walk through words and images, joining inner and outer worlds, and Blanco is quite right when he claims:

To walk is to gather treasure.^^

Try reading several books alongside each other; you herbert know what’s around the next corner.

(*Vaclev Cilek, quoted in Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways.)
(**From David Ulin’s The Lost Art of Reading.)
(^From Ursula Le Guin’s Words Are My Matter.)
(^^Miguel Angel Blanco, quoted in Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways.)
(*^Elena Blanco, quoted in Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways.)

The new sciences of chaos and complexity tell us that a system that is far from stable is a system ripe for change […] a whole new level of creativity after crisis […] in which we adapt to the Earth rather than the other way around.*
(Janine Benyus)

In a crisis, there’s maximum attention. And in a crisis, we often discard any pretense of caring about systems and resilience and focus only on how to get back to normal. This is precisely why normal is what normal is, because we fight to get back to it.**
(Seth Godin)

Normal is simply a system, a technology of our creating:

we live in a culture of compliance that we are ever more conditioned to accept orthodoxy as normal, and to accept that there is only one way of doing it^.

That we see only one way to do things shows it to be a prescriptive technology, being disconnected from the greater system we exist within, with ecological laws we dismiss or ignore at our peril:

We are still beholden to ecological laws, the same as any other life-form. The most irrevocable of these laws says that a species cannot occupy a niche that appropriates all resources – there has to be some sharing. Any species that ignores this law winds up destroying its community to support its own expansion. Tragically this has been our path.*

All of this is true at a personal level also. When the normal and prescriptive churns out “circus and bread” so well, who wouldn’t want to return to it? Or so the argument goes.

On a personal level, we are living more holistically when we move in the direction of our values, dreams, talents and energies. We can live in many ways with these tings, but some are better than others.

The simple truth is that some systems work and some don’t; some can be adapted and some need to be changed.

We can do this when it comes to our planet and also with our lives.

To open our minds, hearts and wills to more is to embrace holistic technology.

(*From Janine Benyus’ Biomimicry.)
(**From Seth Godin’s blog: When can we talk about our systems?)
(^From Ursula Franklin’s The Real World of Technology.)

Why not start doodling today?

I’ve included a doodling alphabet in my doodle. You can use these to explore some mindful doodling. Build up your image while slowing and deepening your breathing, adding different shapes as you feel.

Afterwards, why not add colour – it will change again.

Another play is to take a continuous line for a walk across your paper – no taking the pen away until you are completed, which is different to finished.

Doodling is for listening.

Colouring is for relaxing.

Enjoy.

Thank you to my wife Christine for sending me a message from work to wish me Happy National Doodle Day.

Stocktake/ˈstɒkteɪk/Learn to pronounce
noun: an assessment and record of the amount of stock held by a business.”a major annual stocktake”
verb: assess and record the amount of stock held by a business.”they were stocktaking on that day”

Meddle/ˈmɛd(ə)l/Learn to pronounce
Origin:

Designer and artist Laurene Leon Boym is playing with a lockdown series entitled Shelf Life, drawing everyday items from her cupboards. This kind of stocktake is not for inventory but to see and feel things in a different way.

We can overlook the obvious and the ordinary in our lives, missing the wonder of who we are and what our lives are crammed with, misled into believing and feeling we need more than we have. I’m thinking curiosities, interests, ideas, values, talents, dreams, knowledge, experiences.

Noticing these things in a deeper way – akin to Boym’s drawing of her cupboard contents – by writing them down and talking about them and, yes, drawing them – allows us to value the ordinary that is not as ordinary as we think. More significantly, it makes it possible to imagine and experiment by putting them together in different ways.

I encourage everyone to be meddlesome.

The “powers-that-be” want us to leave things as they are, but once we really notice them, we just can’t leave these things alone.

This experience of stocktaking and meddling is something I want to make available to those who have found themselves unemployed as a result of the Covid-19 lockdown. Please spread the word, especially to young people.

We have more in our lives than we know.

It will be the most important thing I’ve ever done.*
(Steve Dilworth)

Artist Steve Dilworth describes his art thusly:

I have spent my life making ritual objects for a tribe that doesn’t exist.*

The most important thing he will ever do is to remove the top of a huge boulder on Harris as if it were a lid, bore out a shaft large enough to place his sculpture Hanging Figure,** replace the “lid,” and, some moss-replacing years later, all would be hidden.

I couldn’t avoid the unalloyed questions this posed:

What will be the most important thing I’ve ever done?

Am I prepared for this most important thing to be unknown to many?

They’re the kind of questions that come into view as you move towards this strange line in the sand called retirement.

As I was ruminating, I read some words from Maria Popova that pointed me win the direction I want to live:

against every choice of destruction, there is always the choice of creation; that against the extractionist, there is always the generative, against the exclusionary, always the inclusionary and the generous^.

Moments later, Austin Kleon would concur, writing:

Worry less about making a mark Worry more about leaving things better than you found them.^^

This helps me and my attention turns to what I must do rather than what I should:

I don’t know for sure what kind of flowers I’m planting with my days on this planet, but I intend to find out, and so should you.^^

Tom Hodginson’s friend John Moore says to his wife as she urges him to get out of bed:

I’ll get up when there’s something worth getting up for.*^

It makes me realise that I’ve messed up; I see how I’ve been making something I want to get up for every day and it gives me joy:

Joy tends to involve some transcendence of self. […] Joy often involves self-forgetting. […] We can help create happiness, but we are seized by joy. We are pleased by happiness, but we are transformed by joy.^*

David Brooks’ words help me to see how I find my true Self so that I may give it away: joy in the surrender of self.

(*Steve Dilworth, quoted in Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways.)
(**Sculpted from a human skeleton, seagrass, prepared calf-meat and organs, and horsehair.)
(^From Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Grammy Award-Winning Jazz Vocalist Cecile McLorin Salvant Reads Audre Lorde’s Poem “The Bees.”)
(^^From Austin Kleon’s Keep Going.)
(*^John Moore, quoted in Tom Hodginson’s How to be Idle.)
(^*From David Brooks’ The Second Mountain.)