Perhaps the life we long for is beyond the point of no return.*
(Erwin McManus)

Some things we have only as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant.**
(Rebecca Solnit)

I took a moment to gaze at the beautiful dark cloud-mottled sky this morning as it waited for the arrival of the dawn.

Wonderful!

Wonder cannot be rushed.

We have to slow down to wonder.

I then read these words from John O’Donohue:

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

Whether the object of our wonder be without or within, it will not appear quickly:

‘But most of the turns, we don’t even see.  We’ve trained ourselves to ignore the. […] a choice isn’t often easy.  In fact the best ones rarely are.’^^

Choice is freedom and it comes from noticing more.  When we see more, we feel more, and when we feel more, we are able to do more.

Rebecca Solnit’s words, above, come from her reflecting on how the blue of distance disappears as we move towards it.

This blueness is a thing.  And it is not only a physical phenomenon but also a metaphor for our lives as we journey from here to there.

I take a moment to look up from Solnit’s words and the sky is ablaze with colour as the sun fires with orange the underside of the clouds.  I cannot keep this picture alive.  The sun will rise and the colour will evaporate, and will have to turn away and get on with my day.  But for a moment longer I stare.

Alan Lightman catches my attention as he writes about Absolutes.  He has been lying in a boat staring up at the stars:

‘I felt connected not only to the stars but to all of nature, and to the entire cosmos.  I felt a merging with something far larger than myself, a grand and eternal unity, a hint of something absolute.’*^

As a theoretical physicist, Lightman knows what these stars are made of and yet there is more to Absolutes than the physical:

‘Absolutes are rooted in personal experience, but they involve beliefs beyond that experience.  A fascinating feature of Absolutes – in fact, a defining feature – is that there is no way to get there from here, that is, from within the physical world.  There is no gradual, step-by-step path to go from relative truth to absolute truth, or to go from a long period of time to eternity, or from limited wisdom to the infinite wisdom of God.  The infinite is not merely a lot more of the finite.  Indeed the unattainability of the Absolutes may be part of their allure.’*^

I found myself thinking about how, whilst I am able to help people explore their dreams and identify their talents and help them choose the next steps, they will not automatically find their purpose and meaning within the universe.

Perhaps, on the way, something else happens?  If I slow down, if I take time to gaze awhile into the blueness.

I used to describe myself within the organisation I worked for more than thirty years as being patiently impatient.  I wanted things to happen but I was prepared to wait for the right time. Looking back, I don’t think I understood or found the rhythm for this.  Maybe now things are different.

The sunrise and its colourful garments are now passed but maybe something of its wonder has seeped into me, just a little, and maybe it has touched my soul a smidgen – this absolute me.

(*From Erwin McManus’ The Last Arrow.)
(**From Rebecca Slnoit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost.)
(^From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)
(^^From Seth Godin’s blog: Degrees of Freedom.)
(*^From Alan Lightman’s Searching For Stars on an Island in Maine.)

In coils of wave, winding in dance, the sea
is too fluent to feel its own silence,
only for the sure gaze an grip of shore
it would not know itself to the the sea.*
(John O’Donohue)

What would you like to accomplish with the rest of your life?**
(Nancy Kline’s mum)

While some want to win some or other kind of lottery, we miss seeing how just being here is the great prize.

Whether we indebt ourselves to the universe or nature or god or chance, here we are … and here is another day … and what shall we do?

Perhaps many times the things we want to escape by winning some or other lottery are the very things that help us to see that we have Enough and what we need is some way of unwrapping this.

By the way, I’ve not coloured today’s doodle in so that you can whilst pondering the question.

(*From John O’Donohue’s Echoes of Memory: Expectations.)
(**From Nancy Kline’s More Time to Think.)

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.*
(T. S. Eliot)

Yesterday, writer and pastor Eugene Peterson died.

Twenty years ago, in his book Under the Unpredictable Plant, Peterson provided me with the words that would help me to set out on a new trajectory, my slow journey in the same direction.

Back then, I would read of how he was ready to give up on the pastoral work he had once felt himself called to, though no longer, and I was ready to give up, too:

‘Every few days or so another pastor gets out of bed and says, “That’s it.  I quit.  I refuse to be a branch manager any longer in a religious warehouse outlet.  I will no longer spend my life marketing God to religious consumers.  I have just read the job description the culture handed me and I am buying it no longer.’**

I think it was Peterson who also introduced me to T. S. Eliot’s words about exploration.

Peterson would agree with his concerned congregation that he would focus on writing and pastoring and they would do everything else.  He was to remain there another twenty years producing some of his richest work.

Here I am at my own twenty year point.  Back then, I had no idea where Peterson’s encouragement would lead me.

I still do not know.

This is not the destination, only somewhere on the journey that is less about geography and more about playfulness with ideas.  (The journey and the exploration is different for everyone.)

It had been a chance encounter, though.  I had been lent the book by friends and I had promptly returned it, but the words and concept remained with me.  More recently, I have read Peterson’s Run With the Horses and A Long Obedience in the Same Direction but it is those original words that have been the most powerful.

There are two things that come from this experience for me.

One is that there’s always an opportunity to take a different direction in life and it’s closer than we think.

The second thing is that I want to hold such a possibility before each person I meet and work with.

This is my simple thank you to Eugene Peterson for putting the words out there so that one day a person like me could trip over them and get up to walk in a different direction.

(*From T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding.)
(**From Eugene Peterson’s Under the Unpredictable Plant.)

Desire leads to conception and conception leads to birth.  This is the efficiency of desire.*
(Philip Newell)

Desire is also at the heart of creativity.  When we engage creatively, we depart from the fixed world of daily routine and grounded facts.  We enter into a kind of “genesis foyer,” where something that not yet is right begin to edge its way from silence into word, from the invisible into form.**

Nancy Kline writes about the people who struggle to enter into her communal thinking environments.  They are driven by, she would say addicted to, the control, urgency and certainty.  Such things are the enemies of creativity, including the encouraging of creativity in others.

They need to be replaced with respect, ease and interest.^

One way leads us into thoughtless make more faster space, the other into the genesis foyer where the things others really need begin to take form.

(*From Philip Newell’s The Rebirthing of God.)
(**From John O’Donohue’s To Bless the Space Between Us.)
(^See Nancy Kline’s More Time to Think.)

Each society and each individual usually explores only a tiny fraction of their horizon of possibilities.*
(Yuval Noah Harari)

When we don’t carry a substantial weight of personal responsibility, we can quickly become stuck. […] A life of ease is not the pathway to growth and happiness.  On the contrary, a life of ease is how you get stuck and confused in life.’**
(Ben Hardy)

Day one is easy.  Day one-hundred-and-one is quite another thing.

When we have found a question that we must answer, it’s the one-hundred-and-first day of learning how to keep going with something that matters so much more moves us closer to the answer

I’ve change one word in this quote from Edgar Schein:

‘The missing ingredient in most lives are curiosity and willingness to ask questions to which we do not already know the answer.’^

(I exchanged the word “conversations” for “lives.”)

Perhaps what emerges from our question is not so much an answer but a story.

(*From Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.)
(**Froom Ben Hardy’s These 20 Pictures Will Teach You More Than Reading 100 Books.)
(^From Edgar Schein’s Humble Inquiry.)

Blue moments open windows of insight into what it means to be human, and they call us to do something – to follow them.*
(Alex McManus)

In the end, nobody knows what freedom really means until one finds out what freedom really costs.**
(Hugh Macleod)

Sometimes, to be really in, we have to be out.

To be curious …

To wonder …

To ask our questions …

To offer the gift that removes boundaries …

(*From Alex McManus’ Makers of Fire.)
(**From gapingvoid’s blog: Here’s to the crazy ones.)

Endeavour to remain aware
Of the quiet world
That lives behind each face.*
(John O’Donohue)

give the person speaking respectful interested Attention**
(Nancy Kline)

I interrupt people.

I interrupt the usual, the same old same old, the what you see is all there is.

My aim to give uninterrupted attention to what lies beneath the rush and familiar and normal.

(*From John O’Donohue’s To Bless the Space Between Us: For a New Position.)
(**From Nancy Kline’s More Time to Think.)

And I hope there will always be an edge between the known and the unknown, beyond which lies strangeness and unpredictability.*
(Alan Lightman)

Those worth listening to are still asking and following their questions, still opening their minds, hearts and wills.

We’re all members of this question-generating species.

(*From Alan Lightman’s The Accidental Universe.)

While finite games are externally defined, infinite games are internally defined.  The time of an infinite game is not world time, but time created within the play itself.  Since each play of an infinite game eliminates boundaries, it opens to players a new horizon of time.*
(James Carse)

Internal life is generating life.

It’s not so much a destination – does anyone have it fully? – but more a state of flux, of movement, of questioning and exploring around a deep core.

It does not come to us unbidden.

(*From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)

We can’t be all things or know everything or do everything.

That’s why we have each other.

Knowing this is one thing, being creative with it quite another