“Taking” lessons. What an accurate and horrible term. […] Learning is different. Learning is something we get to do, it’s a dance, an embrace, a chance to turn on some lights.*
(Seth Godin)

Just about everything important in our lives will have been gained through a degree of difficulty demanding our presence, dexterity, persistence, time and love.

We discover life is artistic and we want more:

Art isn’t painting or canvas or prettiness. Art is work that matters. Art is the work we do because we must.**

Hard as a noun is overtaken by hard as a verb.

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: “Taking” lessons.)
(**From Seth Godin’s blog: A useful definition of art.)

It may be nothing to others but it’s everything to you.

Don’t give up.

It will be everything to someone out there.

It doesn’t have to be for everyone.

Choosing what we rehearse is a way of choosing who we will become.*
(Seth Godin)

May we become better explorers of generosity: the ways we think and feel as well as do.

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: Memories of memories.)

It’s the “or don’t” part of this statement that is a real tragedy.

The flow experience, like everything else, is not “good” in an absolute sense. It is good only in that it has potential to make life more rich, intense and meaningful; it is good because it increases the strength and complexity of life.*
(MIhaly Csikszentmihalyi)

Interiority refers to a richer perceptual universe and awareness of self.**
(Peter Senge)

We’re born with basically the same amount of energy: our body, brain, the mysterious-heart sizes are roughly the same, as too the potential lengths of our lives – no-one has grown to twenty feet tall with a twenty-five pound brain and lives two hundred years.

Yet, although we are roughly the same from a distance, when we get up close to people – really close so we can touch their thoughts and their passions – we can see how this energy provided by the universe looks so different. There are not two people alike. Understanding and growing this is what Peter Senge is referring to as interiority and what it leads to is flow.

But there’s still that “or not” hanging menacingly over so many. Many are learning to focus there energy so it looks like so much more while others don’t focus it and it looks less.

We learn to focus our energy through being open to one another’s. Those we see with high amounts of energy have likely been supported by at least one other – perhaps something they’ve read or a special person in their lives. It means that, unless more of us turn up in our energy, we won’t know what we can be capable of individually or together.

The good news is, it’s never too late to begin.

(*From Mihály Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow.)
(**From Perter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution.)

It’s September but I still spotted small brown butterflies as I passed through the neighbouring park for my morning walk. I think they were probably Speckled Wood butterflies.

Nature , in the form of this butterfly, was reminding me of an important life experience.

What you experience in the universe outside of you also exists in the universe within you. The universe literally flows through you. […] The universe has one intention: to create life.*
(Erwin McManus)

What a caterpillar is doing, in its self–imposed quarantine, is basically digesting itself. It is using enzymes to reduce its body to goo, turning itself into a soup of ex-caterpillar — a nearly formless sludge oozing around a couple of leftover essential organs (tracheal tubes, gut).**
(Sam Anderson)

I’m sorry if that was a little messy but, in essence, the chrysalis is an image for a place of confinement in which we can imagine new possibilities and experience transformation.

Sometimes we are flung into the chrysalis-state by something that happens to us, other times, we enter voluntarily. The caterpillar enters the chrysalis once, but we will probably need to enter many times because, unlike the butterfly, we can turn back into caterpillars.

It is a place for facing ourselves because the biggest issues we have in the world lie with ourselves:

The warrior faces their great adversary when they have to face themselves.*

I’ve just got hold of a copy of David Brooks’ The Second Mountain and came upon these words about those who have come to realise there is a more than one mountain to climb in their lifetime:

They want to want the things that truly worth wanting. They elevate their desires. The world tells them to be a good consumer, but they want to be consumed by a moral cause.^

That sounds very much like the experience within the chrysalis, the possibility of a larger life awaiting us.

It turns out that for the wannabe butterfly, the key elements in the chrysalis goo are “imaginal discs,” the elements that feed on the proteins to become the important structures of the butterfly.

In terms of what we’re thinking about for ourselves, these are our values, talents, and our energies that we notice and feed. The butterfly is our new story to live. (Everything from the old, caterpillar story is still present, but in a radically different way.)

(*From Erwin McManus’ The Way of the Warrior.)
(**Sam Anderson, quoted in Austin Kleon’s blog: Advice from a caterpillar.)
(^From David Brooks’ The Second Mountain.)

As in the case of lines, your are likely to stop when you are no longer sure you should go further – at the rear edge of the region of uncertainty.*
(Daniel Kahneman)

When man is born, the race as well as individual, he is thrown out of a situation which was definite, as definite as instincts, ito a situation which is definite, uncertain and open.**
(Erich Fromm)

The are born with lives full of lines into a world of lines.

The ones within are flexible, the ones without less so.

Some need to be more firm than others but not all of them.

From an early age, the lines within become more set, because of where we are born and to whom, how we’re schooled and where these schoolings allow us to travel.

All the time, the lines are becoming more predictable.

All the time we are believing a lie.

The lines aren’t really as fixed as we think – both those within and those without.

We can play with the lines, playing them into something more beautiful, meaningful and good.

Playing with the lines throughout our lives.

We need to help each other to remember this.

(*From Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking: Fast and Slow.)
(**From Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving.)

What you have exists in the present, but what you hope for exists only in the future.*
(Erwin McManus)

We’re only as much as what we can give to others.**
(Hugh Macleod)

Faith may sound like a religious word, but it isn’t.

It’s definitely human, the ability to see something that exists in the future and to bring that future into the present.

As I’m pondering it today, to see who we can be and what we can make happen.

We can often make things complicated (“I don’t want to talk about it; it’s complicated”) but this will ask us to move into complexity: connecting to one another and to the world and universe and, yes, ourselves. Because after doing all the interconnecting with everything around us, we are not the same people.

It will not be easy, it may take a lifetime: we must persist.

Don’t give up becoming.

It’s worth everything.

(*From Erwin McManus’ The Way of the Warrior.)
(**From gapingvoid’s eBook: Love in the Time of Coronavirus 2.)

The way we store energy is through our desires, values, passions, hopes, dreams, and aspirations, and ultimately our greatest capacity for energy storage is through what we love.*
(Erwin McManus)

Yes, there’s a great deal of resistance to what you offer, but the same universe containing the Higgs boson, galaxies and black holes also produced the beauty of your imagination, the possibilities only you can dream of:

when it’s over,
I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement,
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited the world.**

Stay close to what you must do, don’t give up exploring the universe within: all the wonders you contain that provide you with the nearest shore to set out from in exploration:

The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.^

(*From Erwin McManus’ The Way of the Warrior.)
(**Mary Oliver, quoted in Philip Newell’s The Rebirthing of God.)
(^From Neil Gaiman’s Art Matters.)