[Complacency] is a cousin to narcissism in expecting experience to conform to a pattern already familiar to oneself; experience seems to repeat routinely rather than evolve.**
(Richard Sennett)

Communities have often been an accident of birth. Built by geography and parentage, you established your identity and your learning long before you went to school. Now, of course, this is changing.^
(Seth Godin)

Complacency requires that we disengage from the unpredictable possibilities of life for the safety of a familiar pattern.

This also means we are in danger of becoming a cliché; what is true for the storywriter is true for each of us:

Like the weeds of repetition, clichés grow in the barren mind of the lazy writer.^^

Clichés work for the storywriter until they don’t; the same is true for us.

The thing about complacency is that it doesn’t want to be noticed. The game is up if we see our lives have become a repeating pattern closed to the unfamiliar and unpredictable.

To read is to take a stranger’s hand and plunge into experiences you want and don’t want, learning all the while to navigate the unexpected places real life will take you.*^

When we read something different, ask questions, experiment outside of the norm then we are disrupting the cliché; Robert McKee’s counsel for the storywriter works for all of us:

To create insightful, original stories, set yourself high standards and never settle for the obvious choice. Indeed, never settle for the first choice. Write it down, sure, then improvise, experiment, pour out as many ideas as your talent can create.^^

(*Thanks to Stingray for the title.)
(**From Richard Sennett’s Together.)
(^From Seth Godin’s blog: A community of practice.)
(^^From Robert McKee’s newsletter: How You Can Win the War on Cliché.)
(*^From Krista Tippett‘s letter to young readers in Maria Popova and Claudia Bedrick’s A Velocity of Being.)

The spin lies in whether we identify with others in their particular circumstances and sufferings, or with others as though everyone is like ourselves; the first is a window, the second a mirror.*
(Richard Sennett)

Worry takes a lot of effort. And worry, unlike focus, learning or action, accomplishes nothing of value. […] Waiting is, sort of be definition, a waste of time. But time is scarce, so wasting it is a shameful act.**
(Seth Godin)

Withdrawing from people and activities has very much become a part of our experience in lockdown, though it was a part of normal life, too.

There are two basic kinds of withdrawal – one is positive and we withdraw in order to do something, the other is negative because we’re trying to get away from something or someone.

Richard Sennett warns that the latter can become narcissistic: in protecting ourselves we lose connection with the other.

Positive withdrawal, however, is about growing ourselves in order to then reach out to others.

Seth Godin writes about the opportunity we have to focus, learn and action something in these times of enforced withdrawal. Not in using every extra moment afforded to us by the lockdown in some kind of activity – there’s something really important in slowing down apart from the rush and busyness of pre-coronavirus. But we have been provided with a gift that may well produce something very important to us post-lockdown.

Slowing down and focusing allows us to see more. It is what artist and nun Corita Kent would do:

I don’t think of it as art – I just make things I like bigger, assuming that if I like them some other people might too. Some do. Some don’t, and that’s ok too.^

Austin Kleon remarks on this artist who is so important to him:

She taught her students to learn to see by looking at the world one piece at a time.^^

Kent’s rules for art class at the Immaculate Heart College look as if they would transfer well to our period of lockdown.

A little focus make life bigger.

(*From Richard Sennett’s Together.)
(**From Seth Godin’s blog: Waiting and worrying.)
(^Corita Day, quoted in Austin Kleon’s blog: Corita Day.)
(^^From Austin Kleon’s blog: Corita Day.)

We use our imagination not to escape reality but to join it, and this exhilarates us because of the distance between our ordinary dulled consciousness and an apprehension of the real.*
(Iris Murdoch)

The effective person is the combiner of knowledge and power, and ability to turn understanding into action.

This is not the kind of power attached to titles and roles but that found in personal integrity.

By integrity I mean connection, to others, to the world, to one’s true self and, if a person of faith, connection to god.

It’s quite something just how these connections not only allow more possibilities to take form in our imaginations, they exist because we have been exerting and building up our power

Iris Murdoch reminds us how imagination isn’t about escaping reality but is our way of joining with it.

We may be able to imagine big things but this isn’t always a good place to start. Power is something we build over time as we engage in the things we’re imagining. Instead of imagining something big and trying to start there, continue with your imagining, but this time come up with the smallest iteration of what you’re seeing.

Feel how much stronger you feel when you’ve accomplished this!

The zing-thing is how I describe connecting what we personally are most curious about and must explore, our talents and abilities, our energies or passions, and then add action.

(*From Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good.)

I settled on a game called I am a contribution. Unlike success and failure, contribution has no other side. It is not arrived at by comparison.*
(Ben Zander)

The world is waiting, not to be held captive, but to be captivated by new voices – for the hopeful messages and stories, each of us has to tell.**
(Bernadette Jiwa)

In my dreamwhispering work with people there are two questions being explored:

Who am I?
What is my contribution?

These cannot be fully answered apart from one another. Richard Rohr describes humans as interbeings, his faith seeing everything that is in this way:

We, exactly like the Trinity, are interbeings. We are also created by interface.^

The very work I do would not exist without tens of thousands of conversations with more than six hundred people, never mind all that I’ve read and heard from others, all contributing to the shaping of who I am.

Directly and indirectly, I am then sum of many people’s contributions, and this person I am is what I return as my contribution.

Ours is an amazing life full of honour, nobility and enlightenment when we make others, rather than ourselves, the centre of attention.

(*From Benjamin and Rosamund Zander’s The Art of Possibility.)
(**From Bernadette Jiwa’s The Story of Telling blog: The Captive Vs. The Captivated.)
(^From Richard Rohr’s Eager to Love.)

Curation is where acts of selecting and arranging add value. […] At its broadest curation is a way of managing abundance.*
(Michael Bhaskar)

Will you bring all of your gifts and talents out into the open and be grateful for them?

You have so many.

Some you have focused on and others are already dismissed. Yet more are of little or no interest and they have almost disappeared into the background. But there are some you haven’t even noticed, possibly because you, or others, don’t have the right words for them.

Curation makes something magical happen to all of them, selecting and arranging and bringing new value – another word for which is story, a common thread full of possibility.

This is my work and I want to make it available to others at this most difficult of times, especially young people facing unemployment. I can’t offer a job centre or careers service but I can help you to explore all the gifts and talents that you are and help you in your imagining of what may be possible.

I’ll be posting more about this in coming days, but if you are interested to find out more then drop me a line at geoffrey@thinsilence.org.

(*From Michael Bhaskar’s Curation.)

But it starts with a whisper, a call from somewhere far away.*
(Elle Luna)

I wasn’t looking for it, coming as it did like a knock on a door.

It was the whisper of a question asking what it was I did well and should be focusing on some ten or eleven years into my work.

The world is full of whispers like this and, because they feel like an imposition from who knows where, we can easily ignore them

Except I didn’t and for this I am very glad – I wouldn’t be where I am, doing the things I love to do – where I live, and what I live for as Henry David Thoreau put it.

When I opened that “door,” allowing the whisper in, I not only found there to be so many whispers I could not respond to them all, but also realised my life had also been whispering to me – I simply hadn’t taken any notice.

There’ll be many more whispers to respond to so I’m not going to call where I am a destination, rather I am still moving on my slow journey in the same direction.

(*From Elle Luna’s essay: The Crossroads of Should and Must.)

The essential thing “in heaven and earth” is […] that there should be a long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life with living.*
(Friedrich Nietzsche)

[E]veryone’s an expert on something. Often, the “something”has nothing to do with what you went to school for or even what you’ve been doing for however many years you’ve been working away at a job.**
(Chris Guillebeau)

I’ve just been out for a quick walk and was privileged to see and hear a skylark, just above me, faithfully doing what a skylark does best. All I want is to do the same – faithfully doing what I do best.

Before we can be faithful towards others we have to be at least willing to be faithful to ourselves, that is, to explore and express more about ourselves and what it is we want to do. There can be nothing better in life than to know who we are and what we want to do and turn up every day to express ourselves.

When we are faithful to ourselves then we are able to develop perseverance and can journey further – our long obedience or faithfulness in the same direction.

John O’Donohue wrote about the wonder of this life:

Time is eternity living dangerously.^

Then perhaps creativity is faithfulness living dangerously?

(*Friedrich Nietzsche, quoted in Eugene Peterson’s A Long Obedience in the Same Direction.)
(**From Chris Guillebeau’s Born For This.)
(^From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)

tunnels allow all sorts of productivity without calling attention to themselves or those that build them*
(Seth Godin)

Travel is still the most intense mode of learning.**
(Kevin Kelly)

I’m more of a tunnel-person, most happy working quietly in the background and not not very comfortable being out in the open. Others are bridge-people and quietness and hiddenness is hard for them. Both are amazingly complex constructions.

Kevin Kelly reminds me, though, to learn is to be alive and that means none of us are fixed.

Jonah Lehrer dips beneath the surface of this and writes of our plasticity:

Our human DNA is defined by its multiplicity of possible meanings, it’s a code that requires context. […] What makes us human and what makes each of us his or her own human is […] how our cells, in dialogue with our environment, feed back to our DNA, changing the way we read ourselves.^

Best I keep moving. Will you join me?

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: Bridges and tunnels.)
(**Kevin Kelly, quoted in Brian McLaren’s God Unbound.)
(^From Jonah Lehrer’s Proust was a Neuroscientist.)

NEFELIBATA. Definition: A cloud walker. An individual who lives in the clouds of her own imagination or dreams. A person who doesn’t abide by the rules of society, literature, or art.
Pronunciation: ne-fe-LE-ba-ta.

A hero is someone who has given his or her life for something bigger than oneself.*
(Joseph Campbell)

The Portuguese word nefelibata was a gift from Valerie while we were taking a walk through the clouds yesterday in our dreamwhispering conversation.

I see nefebilata as those who have learned both to live in reality and to explore their imaginations.

There are many who, for right or wrong, want you to keep our feet on the ground – as they do – and not to go walking through the clouds of a different perspective to the conventions of ‘society, literature, or art’ – and all they encompass and stand for – but you must play:

Creativity is the search for meaning.**

While this may sound individualistic, the reality is nefelibata see others differently, valuing who they are, appreciating how they are completed by others, and so they are very glad to have company, to commit to community,.

It is a gift to be able to live our lives around what we value most of all, trusting that when we allow ourselves and each other to do this, wonderful possibilities will follow. Walking through the clouds is a way of imagining how we can live our lives joyfully and for the good of others.

Valerie happened to send me another gift following our conversation, summing up what walking through the clouds has meant for her:

There are no manuals for the construction of the individual you would like to become. You are the only one who can decide this and take up the lifetime of work that it demands. This is a wonderful privilege and such an exciting adventure. To grow into the person your deepest longing desires is a great blessing. If you can find a creative harmony between your soul and your life, you will have found something infinitely precious. You may not be able to do too much about the great problems of the world or to change the situation you are in, but if you can awaken the eternal beauty and light of your soul, you will bring light wherever you go. The gift of life is given to us for ourselves and also to bring peace, courage, and compassion to others.^

(*From Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth.)
(**From Seth Godin’s blog: Seeing the world anew.)
(^From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)

The pace of words is the pace of walking and the pace of walking is also the pace of thinking.*
Geoff Nicholson)

Above all, this is a book about people and place: about walking as a reconnoitre inwards, and the subtle ways in which we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move.**
(Robert Macfarlane)

Before tourism arrived on the scene people travelled.

These travellers could not help but engage with the lives and scenery they met and traveled through, and this experience would often change them.

Travelling doesn’t have to be to a far away place or to a place at all. We can be travellers through books, through a local initiative or purpose, a local walk with openness, a conversation that is allowed to deepen … . These serve as disruptive experience making it possible to unlearn and relearn.

Pamela Paul writes about how important boredom is to us, how children need to learn how to deal with it rather than being entertained – something important to us whatever our age:

Once you’ve truly settled into the anesthetising effects of boredom, you find yourself en route to discovery. With monotony, small differences begin to emerge, between those trees, those sweaters. This is why so many useful ideas occur in the shower, when you’re held captive to a mundane activity. You let your mind wander and follow it where it goes.^

The protopian, as I play with the word, is the travelling person who knows it is the journey that allows them to keep growing and developing across their lifetime:

Protopia is a state of becoming rather than a destination.^^

Those who travel in this way have many treasures to bring to others. If you have the time, read Constantin Cavafy’s short-though-epic Ithaka.

(*From Geoff Nicholson’s The Lost Art of Walking.)
(**From Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways.)
(^From Pamela Paul’s New York Times article: Let Children Get Bored Again.)
(^^From Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable.)