One of the reasons you are rushing about is because you are running away from yourself.*
(David Brooks)

in finding your True Self, you will have found an absolute reference point that is both utterly within you and utterly beyond you at the very same time**
(Richard Rohr)

Slowly the flame reduces, its wildness lost, heat dissipating, brightness diminishing and then it changes colour. Welcome to Acedia:

Acedia is the quieting of passion.*

David Brooks claims the state of acedia exists within the world of meritocracy, a place people are pulled into because they are given a load of freedom but nothing to help them figure out what they really want to do with it, their passion or desire:

Desire makes you adhesive. Desires pushes you to get close – to the person, the job, or town you love. But lack of desire leaves you detached, and distils in you over time an attitude of emotional avoidance, a phoney nonchalance. In short, the meritocracy encourages you to drift into a life that society loves but which you don’t. It’s impossible to feel wholehearted.*

I am playing with a few ideas to see how they overlap.

Remembering Ursula Franklin‘s proposal that all systems are technologies, I wonder whether prescriptive, production technologies are more likely to separate us from our True Self whilst holistic, growth technologies are more likely to join us.

I also wonder whether James Carse would equate the false self with a finite game (exclusive, goal-driven, rule-bound) and the True Self with the infinite (inclusive, game-driven, rule-changing).

Life is bigger than any of us know, but we are all invited to enter and explore. Rainer Maria Rilke writes about nature being greater than culture, and I borrow this sentiment for the larger life:

But, again and again throughout millennia, those forces shake off their names and rise like an oppressed class against their little masters, or not even against them – they simply rise and the various cultures slide off the shoulders of the earth, which is once again great and expansive and alone with its oceans, trees, and stars.^

We are cordially invited to leave Acedia for our great passion and True Self.

(*From David Brooks’ The Second Mountain.)
(**From Richard Rohr’s Immortal Diamond.)
(^From Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters on Life.)

Live from day to day, just from day to day. If you do so, you worry less and live more richly. If you let yourself be absorbed completely, if you surrender completely to the moments as they pass, you live more richly those moments.*
(Anne Morrow Lindbergh)

[Young people] are thrown into a world that is unstructured and uncertain with few authorities or guardrails except those they are expected the build on their own.**
(David Brooks)

As far as the universe is concerned, a day is given without meaning. We have to add meaning, but more than at any other time in human history, it is in short supply yet absolutely abundant.

Meaning may come from your deepest work or a philosophy, a worldview or faith, but each of these requires work on our part.

David Brooks’ argument is that in an age of individualism the generations have less and less to work with. After being given a load of freedom, they are handed ‘a big box of nothing.’**

It’s why finding the time to work on what Joseph Campbell identified as two critical myths is so important – the personal and the social, and why U.Lab‘s two questions are so helpful because they reinforce this: Who is my true Self? and What is my contribution?

Don’t be thrown off or distracted by tomorrow. Be present here, today, to know, to feel and to do.

(*Anne Morrow Lindbergh, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(**From David Brooks’ The Second Mountain.)

The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your next adventure.*
(Joseph Campbell)

Perhaps we need to get off this road from certain to certain.

(*Joseph Campbell, quoted in Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly.)

The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the working of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us.*
(Nassim Taleb)

Defining our freedom, articulating our mastery and connecting to a purpose that will likely outlive us that is more than a mental exercise will most likely involve more than a little risk.

And with risk comes the possibility of getting things wrong and messing up.

Better pack some forgiveness.

For others and for yourself.

(*From Nassim Taleb’s Skin in the Game.)

This is what it means to be young: this thorough faith in the most beautiful surprises, this joy in daily discovery.*
(Rainer Maria Rilke)

It’s never too late for us to rediscover the wonder of childhood.

(*From Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters on Life.)

The strong of sorrow may only be used extensively if one vows to play on them at some later point and in their particular key all of the joyousness that accumulates behind everything that is difficult, painful, and that we had to suffer, and without which the voices are not complete.*
(Rainer Maria Rilke)

My grandmother was fond of repeating the proverb: “Where there’s a will there’s a way.” She’d say it to encourage us to try.  I don’t think I’ve fully appreciated its power until now.**
(Bernadette Jiwa)

We’re on holiday, but some of the things we had hoped to do, we can’t because we’re not supposed to travel outside of our health board areas at the present moment. Of course, plenty of people will, which compounds our sorrows.

Rainer Maria Rilke reminds me, though, that if I want to play the sorrowful tune, I must also be prepared the joyful ones, too.

And even now, in the midst of this reality, there is imagination and the possibilities this will. Thank you to Wallace Stevens for reminding me of this, the way, if we have the will:

It is not only that the imagination adheres to reality, but also, tat reality adheres to imagination and that interdependence is essential.^

(*From Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters on Life.)
(**From Bernadette aiwa’s The Story of Telling blog: The Will and the Way.)
(^From Wallace Stevens’ The Necessary Angel.)

The familiar, precisely because it is familiar, remains unknown.*
(Georg Hegel)

Most people don’t know how beautiful the world is and how much magnificence is revealed in the tiniest things, in some flower, in a stone, in tree bark, or in a birch leaf. Adults, being preoccupied with business and worries and tormenting themselves with all kinds of petty details, gradually lost the very sight for these riches that children, when they are attentive and good, soon notice and love with all their heart.**
(Rainer Maria Rilke)

I remember telling our children when they were very young, “You look with your eyes, not with your hands.”

How wrong I was.

I am sorry.

May we look with everything we have.

(*Georg Hegel, quoted in John O’Donohue’s Echoes of Memory.)
(**From Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters on Life.)

There are at least two kinds of game. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.*
(James Carse)

The sense of wonder can also help you to recognise and appreciate the mystery of your own life.**
(John O’Donohue)

We all have a different way into the infinite game.

It is where we notice that we want to include as many people for as long as possible and will change the rules if these things are threatened.

For me, it is about helping people to discover just how amazing they are and to see more of what they can bring into being.

This is only how I enter the game; my appreciation of just how infinite the game is comes through paying attention and valuing how others play.

As yet, I can see no end to it.

(*From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)
(**From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)

reciprocity/ˌrɛsɪˈprɒsɪti/noun

1. the practice of exchanging things with others for mutual benefit, especially privileges granted by one country or organisation to another.

I’d like to stress that reciprocity is not feedback.*
(Ursula Franklin)

There’s a difference between the kind of feedback proffered in a finite game to that provided within an infinite game.

A finite game has a specific goal, is played by a designated number of players, and follows the rules.

In this way, James Carse states, it is dramatic, that is, scripted:

Finite play is dramatic. As soon as it is concluded we are able to look backward and see how the sequence of moves, though made freely by the competitors, could have resulted only in this outcome.**

In a game of football, the outcome is always going to be a win, a loss or a draw, it isn’t going to be a herd of cows. Yet, in an infinite game, who knows? This is played with as many people as possible for as long as possible and when the rules threaten participation or continuation, they are changed.

In this game, the kind of information taking place when we mess up, get things wrong and fail is reciprocal. It flows in all directions to ensure that everyone can play for as long as possible. The openness expressed in reciprocity means growth and development is maximised for all.

Okay, we know that we have to play finite games, but, we know, ultimately, we are players in an infinite game. Yes?

The sense of wonder can also help you to recognise and appreciate the mystery of your own life.^

(*From Ursula Franklin’s The Real World of Technology.)
(**From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)
(^From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)

We have spent centuries of philosophy trying to solve “the problem of evil.” yet I believe the much more confounding and astounding issue is “the problem of good.” How do we account for so much gratuitous and sheer goodness in the world?*
(Richard Rohr)

One of the greatest legacies a person can leave is a moral ecology – a system of belief and behaviour that lives on after they die.**
(David Brooks)

In the many conversations I have with people in the course of my dreamwhispering work, I encounter again and again, people who want to bring goodness into the lives of others in some way or another. It’s a wonderful thing.

As with anything that grows, we need to feed goodness, and the conversations I have show there to be so many ways. When we find ours and lean into them, we will find our imaginations stirring and doing-goodness following.

Notice the things that really energise you, find the goodness in them, make more of these times happen, grow.

(*From Richard Rohr’s Immortal Diamond.)
(**From David Brooks’ The Second Mountain.)