[W]ith reading and writing, language becomes billions of times more powerful. We can learn from people who live on the other side of the city, or the country, or the world. We can learn from people who are dead, and we can teach people who have not yet been born […] of all human inventions, it’s the printed world that multiplies our powers the most*
(Steven Pinker)

In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives he chooses one and eliminates the others; in fiction of the almost inextricable Ts’ui Pên, he chooses simultaneously all of them.. He creates in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork.**
(Jorge Luis Borges)

In 1530, Florence was besieged by the combined forces of Charles V and Pope Clement VII. Michelangelo Buonarroti was put in charge of defending the city and part of his preparations involved laying mattresses over the defensive walls to minimise the damage from enemy cannon fire. Mattresses and warfare became connected, popularly re-emerging in The Godfather in the phrase “Go to the mattresses,” meaning prepare for battle.

“Go to the library” is what we do when we want to move into the future with more options. The library with all its shelves – fiction, factual, children’s, adult’s, ancient, modern, text, audio, visual, person … – provides us with the many forking paths we need.

To see your futures, go to the library.

(*From Steven Pinker’s letter to young readers, in Maria Popova and Claudia Bedrick’s A Velocity of Being.)
(**From Jorge Luis Borges’ The Garden of Forking Paths.)

We want to start with resistances, those facts that stand in the way of the will. Resistances themselves come in two forms: found and made.*
(Richard Sennett)

I am grateful for the resistances I’ve faced, resistances that sometimes have even meant I have had to move on with my family – three times, but there is life after the resistance. They’re never pleasant at the time but they force us to ask more important questions prompting our imaginations to come up with the increasingly better. Without resistance, I wouldn’t be doing the work I love.

Wallace Stevens warns that our imaginations need to meet the real if it is to do what it does best:

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect is extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect it will ever have.**

And there’s a sense of ideas of requirement when M. C. Richards writes:

Ideas live in the world as we do. We discover certain ideas at certain times.^

Our imaginations are largest and brightest when we’re being true and honest about who we are and what we can do – not making ourselves more and not making ourselves less. Then, when we face the resistance with our imagination – and prototype or experiment in some way or other, something shifts.

(*From Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman.)
(**From Wallace Stevens’ The Necessary Angel.)
(^From M. C. Richards’ Centering.)

cooperation precedes individuation: cooperation is the foundation of human development, in that we learn how to be together before we learn how to stand apart*
(Richard Sennett)

Most of the progress in our culture of the last 200 years has come from using truth as a force for forward motion. Centralised proclamations are not nearly as resilient or effective as the work of countless individuals, aligned in their intention, engaging with the world. […] It pays to curate the incoming, to ignore the noise and to engage with voices who are willing to show their work.**
(Seth Godin)

If we find a misalignment between the truth of who we are – think values, talents and how we flourish through action – and the person we portray then we need to realign. The old word for this is repent, more than being sorry about something, it means we do something.

To know the truth about ourselves and the truth about each other provides a powerful force for moving forward together.

(*From Richard Sennett’s Together.)
(**From Seth Godin’s blog: Reality as an organising principle.)

The earth-self observing the Cosmos and trying to understand the Cosmos by scientific principle from which its self is excluded is, beyond doubt, the strangest phenomenon in all of the Cosmos, far stranger than the ring Nebula in Lyra.*
(Walker Percy)

After reading this, I wanted to see the Ring Nebula of Lyra, a beautiful gaseous aura created by a dying star. As a result, I found myself holding the phrase “I’d love to see that (before I die).” That being many things.

That is something different for each of us, intimately connected to our curiosity, interest, exploration, imagination and creativity:

Creative work is a training of each individual’s perception according to the level on which he is alive and awake; that is why it is so difficult to evaluate.**

We are made of the same “stardust” as the Ring Nebula of Lyra, part of what it is we are observing, and this invites us to observe differently. Here Kimon Nicolaïdes describes a fuller, deeper observation:

Learning to draw is really a matter of learning to see – to see correctly — and that means a good deal more than merely looking with the eye. The sort of ‘seeing’ I mean is an observation that utilises as many of the five senses as can reach through the eye at one time. Although you use your eyes, you do not close up the other senses – rather, the reverse, because all the senses have a part in the sort of observation you are to make.^

And what if I allow my emotions to be a part of this seeing? Will I see even more? And will listening to others whelp us to deeply see not only more of our world and universe, but also more of ourselves, helping us to remove from the centre of our worlds – remembering Percy’s warning:

The self of the sign-user can never be grasped, because, once the self locates itself at the dead centre of its world, there is no signified to which a signifier can be joined to make a sign. The self has no sign of itself. No signifier applies.*

When we are seeing, observing, attentive with all of our senses – the whole of our lives – then we come to more than a sign, that is, something we have named, and enter into the signified itself:

Wherever you attention alights, at this very point, experience.**

Nicolaïdes adds to this encouragement from M. C. Richards:

It’s having a particular kind of experience, which can continue as long as you have patience to look.^

I do not think I see in this way, and believe it may take the rest of my life to explore even a small part of it. Yet, if I go back to the question that formed itself when I’d read the opening words from Percy – “I’d love to see that (before I die)” – it is perhaps one of the most important things life offers me.

(*From Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos.)
(**From M. C. Richards’ Centering.)
(^Kimon Nicolaïdes, quoted in Austin Kleon’s blog: Blind contour drawings.)

The primary markers of physical capacity are strength, endurance, flexibility and resilience. These are precisely the same markers of capacity emotionally, mentally and spiritually.*
(Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz)

Some want their external circumstances to change in order to feel happy, especially the behaviour of others. They miss the wonder of being able to change their happiness from within:

What I want to say is that as our personal universes expand, if we keep drawing ourselves into the centre again and again, everything seems to enhance everything else.**

M. C. Richards is picturing the clay on a potter’s wheel being shaped both in and out, up and down – all in motion. A picture for our lives, Richards encourages the need to avoid becoming fixed, of thinking This is it:

What I mean here is that in poetry, in pottery, in the life of the mind, it seems to me that one must be able to picture before oneself the opposite of what has just been declared in order to keep alive the possibility of freedom, of mobility, of growth.**

Whatever our craft and way of thinking may be, we must keep moving. Never saying This is it or This is me, holding the opposite is a way of pushing ourselves out of settlement into motion.

We are most Human in motion.

Imagine or draw a grid of vertical lines made up of the four capacities of body, emotions, mind and spirit, and horizontal lines made up of the four markers of strength, endurance, resilience and flexibility. What is the significant “motion” taking place at each of the sixteen intersections for you? (There’s perhaps a journaling exercise here for the next sixteen days?)

For instance, mind and flexibility: What are you discovering, changing your mind about, using as exercises for developing openness, developing for listening to others and the world?

Here is a life in motion with four markers which can be maintained until the day we have to return our energy to the universe. When the wheel stops spinning, and not until, our lives are able to be shaped. Only after the clay is removed from the wheel is it allowed to harden and then be fired.

If you’re reading this, the wheel is still spinning. Why live as if it’s stopped?

I leave you with some words from Alan Lightman’s creation novel:

“But surely it has significance for them, I said. Each one of them tries to desperately to find meaning. In a way, it doesn’t matter what particular meaning each of them finds. As long as each creature finds something to give a coherence and harmony to the jumble of existence. Perhaps it might be as simple as a discovery of their own capacities, and a thriving in that discovery. And even if they are mortal, they are part of things. They are part of things larger than their universe, whether they know it or not. Wouldn’t you agree?”^

(*From Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz’s The Power of Full Engagement.)
(**From M. C. Richards’ Centering.)
(The character “Nephew,” in Alan Lightman’s Mr g.)

The written word has the magical power of transferring thoughts from one person’s brain into another’s – over distance and time. […] Even people who were dead. […] This felt like a super power. It still does. […] Use your words.*
(Ev Williams)

It’s good that you’re feeling bored. Bored is an actual feeling. Bored can prompt forward motion. Bored is the thing that happens before you choose to entertain yourself. Bored is what empty space feels like, and you can use that empty space to go do something important. […] I’m glad you’re feeling bored, and now we’re excited to see what you’re going to go do about it.**
(Seth Godin)

Our lives are full of words.

Words we have gathered over our lifetimes.

Many of these words we have in common, but some are very special words to us alone. They make us come alive with excitement, provoking our imaginations, forming possibilities we’re then impelled to pursue.

Even though others may use the same words – unless we’ve made up our own – they hold a greater meaning to us because they’re linked to and explain our curiosity, imagining and creativity.

These are our lexicons, the words we need to use.

And if we’re bored – that feeling we have just before we get up and do something challenging – our words can be the means by which we get ourselves moving. We don’t need anybody else to do this for us because the reality of who we are is that we are all able to begin forming something out of nothing.

Why not start gathering your special words into one place, providing each with a short description – the world each word is to you (words are never only words)?

And look out for new ones, play with them, keep some, leave others, like coruscating,^ which I came across today.

(*From Ev Williams‘ letter to young readers in Maria Popova and Claudia Bedrick’s A Velocity of Being.)
(**From Seth Godin’s blog: Thoughts on “I’m bored.”)
(^coruscating/ˈkɒrəskeɪtɪŋ/ 1. flashing; sparkling.”a coruscating kaleidoscope of colours” 2. severely critical; scathing.”his coruscating attack on the Prime Minister”)

in each a beauty and
a gift, laid conjoint upon
this new earth’s altar

As an adult, I’ve come to realise that life isn’t about finding yourself. It’s about creating yourself. Books are clay for exactly that. Crazy adventures can be found in non-fiction, and timeless truth can be discovered in fiction. Like an artist, you blend them, and out comes a unique beauty: you.*
(Tim Ferriss)

The industrial era, struggling for the last decade or two, is now officially being replaced by one based on connection and leadership and the opportunity to show up and make a difference.**
(Seth Godin)

Something is coming to an end and something is about to begin.

When we re-enter day-to-day life following the lockdown there’ll be plenty of challenges because the world we return too will have shifted significantly, but there’ll also be opportunities.

One we have full responsibility and control of is recreating ourselves following our experiences and discoveries of the last few weeks, concerning ourselves, one another, the technical world and the natural one.

Tim Ferriss’ words helpfully highlight the questions that are at the heart of my work with others: Who am I? and What is my contribution? These more accurately are Who do I want to be? and What do I want my contribution to be?

In his faux self-help book Lost in the Cosmos, Walker Percy plays with a story set in 2050 when a ship from Earth arrives at the planet PC3 where it has been established there is intelligent life. Communication is established and time taken to work out how different way of communicating and language can be interfaced. When this is accomplished the earth-ship wants to land, but the inhabitants of PC3 want to know what kind of consciousness earthlings have: C1, C2 or C3?

When the occupants of the ship ask for definitions for these, PC3 replies for C1:

Well. something like the consciousness of a child grown mature and sophisticated but maintaining its innocence permanently and avoiding the malformations of self-consciousness, enjoying the beauty of our planet and each other and or science and art without weariness, boredom, guilt, or shame.^

It appears that the C2 person has fallen into the:

pit of itself […] the consciousness becoming self-conscious but not knowing what its self is, and so ending by being that which it is not saying that which is not, and making others what they are not.*

A C3 is a recovered C2, which I think is us, where we find ourselves to be, imagining who we want to become. An ongoing new beginning of self rather than resetting to a norm that no longer exists.

(*From Tim Ferriss’ letter to your readers in Maria Popova and Claudia Bedrick’s A Velocity of Being.)
(**From Seth Godin’s blog: And now, what’s next?)
(^From Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos.)

Before there’s a great story – a legend, even – for how an individual or a group of people made a breakthrough or triumphed over some great challenge, there was a problem and more than likely a number of crabbit** people ready to revolt.

If it were possible to read this the other way around and, just as we’re about to get frustrated, angry and disagreeable with each other, see how we could move forward and overcome the disruption, interruption, challenge or predicament, with a triumph, then we would be expressing prescience.

It’s not magic, just sheer hard work and skill.

John O’Reilly names three necessary practices for businesses when facing disruption: ideation, incubation and investment.^

We’ll borrow these for our developing of prescience: developing as people of imagination and ideas each according to our leaning, being persistent to see what will work and what will not and willing to give of ourselves in a way that will see it prevail.

We’d be on to something.

(*crabbit. (cra·bit) Dialect, chiefly Scot -adj. 1. ill-tempered, grumpy, curt, disagreeable; in a bad mood [esp. in the morning].)
(**From John O’Reilly’s video: Why Great Businesses Fail.)

What brings out the best in you? What brings out the worst? […] Can you change your posture so that the situations you’re in a lot bring out your best instead of your worst? […] Ideal situations are often rare—now more so than ever. But we can redefine ‘ideal situation’ if we choose.*
(Seth Godin)

We don’t spend a lot of time reflecting on our skills and talents, because we’ve been conditioned to be humble. We largely focus on our ‘areas for improvement’ – the things we lack confidence and competence in, to the detriment of our gifts and our genius.**
(Bernadette Jiwa)

We may be waiting for a while if hoping for just the right situation and opportunity to turn up.

What we don’t have to wait for is the wherewithal to make things happen – this by connecting to our values, talents, and the transformative environments these can lead to. Here we find our imagination to be alive and well, with abilities and energy to transcend the imminent. I’ve put a few things together to explore here for connecting to these – doing rather than waiting things.

It’s like your own personal artesian well of refreshment and renewal, opened by reading (or equivalent), reflection, pursuing what interests you most, talking with people doing similar things and experimenting.

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: What brings out the best in you?)
(**From Bernadette Jiwa’s The Story of Telling: On Strengths.)