It should be obvious that those who live enlightenment lives have demonstrated a unique ability to learn from everyone and everything around them.*
(Erwin McManus)

We can only explain what has happened.

Even then we may summarise because everything in life is way more complex than we acknowledge.

It is not possible to explain what has not yet happened, although we try in the form of predictions, recognising that sometimes we have to do this in order to plan and prepare.

Wisdom, though, encourages openness and a seeking of enlightenment from everyone and everything that we have yet to meet and that is yet to happen.

The world is bigger than explanation, as are our lives through enlightenment.

(*From Erwin McManus’ Uprising.)

Mingle the starlight with your lives and you won’t be fretted by trifles.*
(Maria Mitchell)

I am constantly struck dumb by this mystery [just atoms and molecules].**
(Alan Lightman)

If you want to explain yourself, you’ll need the right words.

In her describing of a children’s book What Miss Mitchell Saw, which tells the story of the 19th century astronomer‘s early life, Maria Popova observes:

Names become a central trope in the book – the dignifying, truth-affirming act of calling all realities by their true names.^

This includes you and me.

Before we find our true names we must find the words that are important to us:

finding the words is another step in learning to see^^.

We each are made up of many wonderful and extraordinary words.

Then may we find our true name, the one that is an adventure and not a prison.

(*Maria Mitchell, quoted in Maria Popova’s brain Pickings: Favourite Children’s Books of 2019.)
(**From Alan Lightman’s Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine.)
(^From Maria Popova’s brain Pickings: Favourite Children’s Books of 2019.)
(^^Robin Wall Kimmerer, quoted in Maria Popova’s brain Pickings: Favourite Children’s Books of 2019.)

Time and again I am surprised by the richness and diversity of their responses. The random images seem to stimulate their meaning making and encourage them to break out of familiar ways of thinking. […] In the words of Bateson […], Without the random there can be no new thing.*
(Daphne Loads)

I thought to read even more randomly as I journaled this morning.

I’d read Daphne Loads’ words on randomness yesterday and made sure to include them.

A dozen or so sources later, I’d reflected on the behaviour of a particular crowd story that had perplexed me for many years …

pondered reconstituting a creative community I have missed since its final event some years ago …

wondered about how the different experiences we go through temper or “voice,” and how to bring this into my work …

thought about how to connect mindful doodling more with this …

considered how the mundane things in our days may be transformed into meaningful games of possibility, allowing us to stay in our flow …

topped off with how the random meetings with people and what’s important to them can create spaces of possibility, and a universe of abundance rather than a world of scarcity.

Would it have mattered if I had not got anything from my random wanderings? I don’t think so.

As long as I trust openness and unhurriedness to provide more:

The least strained and most natural ways of the soul are the most beautiful, the best occupations are the least forced.**

This for all of us; why not find your randomness.

(*From Daphne Loads’ Rich Pickings, quoting Gregory Bateson.)
(**Michel de Montaigne, quoted in Gretchen Ruben’s The Happiness Project.)

It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.*
(Kahlil Gibran)

Or you can be an agent of change, someone who creates tension and then relieves it.**
(Seth Godin)

We tend to take to excess what we care about most.

It’s why we do it and others don’t, hence the word is used as the measurement: “too far.”

Not for us, but for others.

Excessive just feels like normal to those who MUST.

(*From Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet.)
(**From Seth Godin’s This is Marketing.)

The Self wishes to create to evolve. The ego likes things just the way they are.*
(Eckhart Tolle)

For most of us, though, changing our behaviours is driven by our desire to fit in (people like us do things like this) and our perception of our status (affiliation and dominance). Since both these forces often push us to stay as we are, it take tension to change them.**
(Seth Godin)

Seth Godin is touching upon the two basic myths Joseph Campbell believes we all need for our lives: a personal myth and a social one.

Who am I? and What is my contribution?

If we do not shape our own they will be provided for us.

This experience of finding our own can be unsettling and for this reason we avoid it, but it doesn’t take as much as we fear to find the necessary tension to draw something new out.

Once identified, each new day provides opportunity to explore and discover:

People wish to be settled; only as far as they are prepared to be unsettled is there any hope for them.^

(*From Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth.)
(**From Seth Godin’s This is Marketing.)
(Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Ursula K. Le Guin on Art, Storytelling and the Power of language to Transform and Redeem.)

what people want to do is take action (or not take action) that reinforces their internal narratives*
(Seth Godin)

Yesterday, I wrote about the purpose identified where our deepest joy meets the world’s deepest need.

There is a way or path running through the heart of each person, it is the thing they most want to do to make the world better.

The rest of us can help towards this, or get in the way.

If you prefer the former, here are some things you can do:

Ask the people you come across to share their purpose or vision;
Ask them about their talents and abilities that have taken them from the beginning of this journey to here;
Help them to deepen their value and understanding of what it is they seek to bring;
Assist in the development and articulation of their core values;
Inquire how to be a part of this.

(*From Seth Godin’s This is Marketing.)

There’s a gap in the market where your version of better can make a welcome change happen. […] Yes, you have a calling: to serve people in a way that they need (or want). The opportunity is for each of us to choose a path and follow that, nor for our own benefit, but because of what it can produce for others.*
(Seth Godin)

What do you care about? What kind of work serves you? What do you need? What do you want?**
(Bernadette Jiwa)

A calling rarely arrives within as some tub-thumping, light-show of sudden certainty, more as a growing conviction of how we can serve others in accord with who we are.

It will demand everything, but as Bernadette Jiwa reminds us, we need to also attend to how our calling serves us … for the long run, the life-run.

Frederick Buechner’s summing up of calling or propose, then, remains one of the best I’ve come upon: we find our purpose where our deepest joy meets the world’s deepest need.

Here are some reflective exercises to help:

Connect to your purpose and calling, finding different ways to express it: words and images;
Recognise and find joy in the strengths that have brought you to this;
Grow your understanding of the uniqueness of what you bring;
Identify and develop your core values;
Make your new insights and developments available to others.

(*From Seth Godin’s This is Marketing.)
(**From The Story of Telling: Needs and Wants.)

The club is a very ancient institution, but it is a disaster when whole nations turn into clubs, for these, besides promoting the precious qualities of friendship and loyalty are also hotbeds off sectarianism, intolerance, suspicion, superciliousness and quick to defend an illusion that flatters self-love or group consciousness.*
(Johan Huizinga)

[V]astness is repeated in every system of our lives. If we only care enough to zoom.**
(Seth Godin)

The best way to plan for serendipity is to play the infinite game.

Invite as many as possible to play for as long as possible, and change the rules if some threaten to be excluded or the game is coming to a premature end.

What then happens includes new encounters, sharing of ideas, new ideas being born, new possibilities tried, new people met, new ideas encountered, more ideas clustering, more exploring.

Seth Godin includes the following image in his blog for today. Go on, click on it and keep zooming.

Godin’s words, above, pertain to this incredible universe in which we discover more and more as we zoom in … and also people’s amazing lives.

We cannot plan for serendipity by carefully selecting. As many as possible need to turn up and then see what happens.

Douglas McWilliams documents, or zooms in, on the incredible boost to the London and British economy that has added significantly to every person’s life in the UK through the contribution of immigrants – emigrés.

We do to know if there is any limit to our zooming. The adventure is in the finding out.

(*From Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens.)
(**From Seth Godin’s blog: Zooming in – the magic of looking more closely.)

You have the freedom to change your story. You can live a different one, one that’s built around those you seek to serve.*
(Seth Godin)

The more entrenched a system of measurement, the more difficult it is for a deviant, and outlier, or even an experimenter to emerge.**
(Youngme Moon)

If we’re being honest, we’d prefer others to change, not us, the external circumstances to be altered rather than those of our inner worlds, and yet changing our personal stories is where our opportunities are to be found:

It is, however, through difficulty and opposition that we define ourselves. The mind needs something against which it can profile and discover itself.^

The deviants, outliers and experimenters comes to our rescue, and, when we are able to be such for others, we create the kind of tension people need to be able to move.

But first we must spoil the game.

Johan Huizinga names these game-spoilers:

apostates, heretics, innovators, prophets, conscientious objectors;^^

and they lead us into liminal spaces, into a:

temporary abolishment of the ordinary world.^^

Now we have the freedom to change our stories.

(*From Seth Godin’s This is Marketing.)
(**From Youngme Moon’s Different.)
(^From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)
(^^From Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens.)

It is ironic that you must go to the edge to find the centre.*
(Richard Rohr)

We feel most comfortable when things are certain, but we feel most alive when they’re not.**
(Tania Luna)

Life comes with more than one big choice available to us.

If things aren’t as we want them to be, we can adjust.

Originally from the Latin ad “to” and juxta “near.”

We don’t adjust without a good reason, though; that’s human nature.

It’s not easy. It requires time and energy.

We’re like an Australian land-train, not stopping for anything.

It takes a lot of energy to STOP! and notice the way things really are.

Physical, emotional, mental and spiritual energy.

It’s easier to be pushed along our familiar trajectory by the momentum of our story so far.

There’s the cost of admitting we’ve been wrong and probably for a while.

Years and miles of keeping with something when we needed to adjust.

It may be blindingly obvious but every day provides another opportunity to adjust, to move nearer to what we want to do.

That’s the beginning of the good news.

We are also full of astonishing and wonderful things.

Values, talents, passions.

I know this.

It’s my work.

I haven’t yet come across anyone lacking these.

All of which make adjustment possible.

A new direction.

(*From Richard Rohr’s Eager to Love.)
(**Tania Luna, quoted in Chip and Dan Heath’s The Power of Moments.)