“True wisdom consists in respecting the simple things we fo, for they can take us where we need to go.”*
(Yad)

“Drink in the silence. Seek solitude.

Listen to the silence.

It will teach you. It will build strength
Let others share it with you.
It is little to be found elsewhere.

Silence will speak more to you in a day than the world of voices can teach you in a lifetime.
Find silence. Find solitude – and having discovered her riches, bind her to your heart.”**
(Frances Roberts)

In the silence we are completely free to be no more and no less than who we are – which is a work in progress.

More than this, when we enter the silence alone we carry our silence and the integrity of solitude within.  Then, when we are surrounded by the noise and the crowd, we can be our most true self.

This can be our daily play, this game of silence and solitude.  Kosuke Koyama speaks of nirvana as the “cooled life,” the way of tranquility, which sounds as though it could be the life silence and solitude afford:

‘The affirmed life is new life.
The new life is overwhelmed life.
Overwhelmed life lives with danger and promise.’^

Here we find the person in progress each of us most strongly is.

(*Paule Coelho’s character Yad in Aleph.)
(**Frances Roberts, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(^From Kosuke Koyama’s Three Mile an Hour God.)

“Tone your wants and tastes low down enough, and make much of negatives, and of mere daylight and the skies.”*
(Walt Whitman)

The wonder and glory that is life is all around us.  This new year will be full of such and we only need open our eyes or listen for it or touch it – all ways of saying we are taking notice or paying attention.

Constantin Cavafy wrote of what the wise hear but others do not:

“In their intense meditation the hidden sound of things approaching reach them and they listen reverently while in the street outside the people hear nothing at all.”**

There’ll be much that passes us by in 2018 unless we find ways to be present and open to it.  Kosuke Koyama tells of how he touches the same pine tree in the same place each day on his way to work.  There’s something about being more present and connected in this simple action:

‘Touching my tree day after day, reminds me of time.  It tells me that I can only wait for time.  I cannot push or hold it.’^

The hidden sound of things approaching.  Happy New Year.

(*Walt Whitman quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Walt Whitman on What Makes Life Worth Living.)
(**Constantin Cavafy, quoted in Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness.)
(^From Kosuke Koyama’s Three Mile an Hour God.)

2018 can be a new year, or it can be a new kind of year.

In part, it will be shaped by patterns and rhythms of the past.

It will also be shaped by events outside of our control, some of which will be good and some will be bad.

And a great deal of it will be shaped by our preferences and choices – more than we know.

Okay, midnight on the 31st December is an artificial line drawn into time by humans but why not make it count for something bigger than simply turning over a new leaf?

365 days of exploring your curiosity inventiveness and artistry?  Come the 31 December 2018, you’ll be in quite a different place.  Not bad for new.

‘You can decide you want some new habits.’*
(Seth Godin)

If new possibilities come your way, it’s likely you’ll need some new habits.

Habits create spaces for us to be imaginative and innovative and creative in.  Who thought that getting up earlier or finding some space to be alone or turning some pages of a book each day or just getting out of the usual space (the list is endless)?  Yet it’s in these very places the future forms.

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: New habits.)

‘Profluence, in brief, is about flow.  It means movement, tension, propulsion, unexpected twists, and resolution.  All good stories whether narrative or documentary, are profluent because they create an experience of starting somewhere, and by the end of the story we arrive somewhere else.  We are moved.  Profluence is the narrative connective tissue that transforms moments into scenes, scenes into stories, and stories into connections.’*
(Anthony Weeks)

RecogniseD or not, each of us lives our life within a story.

We can continue in this story or we can change it for another.  Story is powerful, a way of understanding ourselves and the world around us.  The most powerful stories are transcendent – this is really that – and therefore transformative.  As Kosuke Koyama encourages us to see:

‘Beauty is beautiful when it makes non-beautiful beautiful.  Rich is rich when it makes poor rich.’**

Story moves us from functional life to artistic life.

(*Anthony Weeks, from Drawn Together by Visual Practice.)
(**From Kosuke Koyama’s Three Mile an Hour God.)

‘The wanderer becomes one with himself or herself and the universe.  We connect with the energy of all living things.  We live according to our inner nature.’*
(Keri Smith)

A few things about desire.

There’s a desire for building a safe place to be – a hygge place – and there’s a desire to reach out and explore.  We need both.

There is good desire and there’s bad desire but we cannot live without desire.

A bad desire can become a prison for our heart, whilst a good desire can be the expression of our heart with benefits for others.

Bad desires aren’t helped by the fact that the speed of desire, from wanting to getting, has increased in ways we couldn’t imagine twenty years ago.

Slowing down helps a lot to notice our greatest desires, the ones that will define our lives.

(*From Keri Smith’s The Wander Society.)

“I get knocked down, but I get up again
You are never gonna keep me down
I get knocked down, but I get up again
You are never gonna keep me down”
(Tubthumping)

Long before Tubthumping sang their lyrics over and over again, Theodore Roosevelt was encouraging us to keep getting up:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Every story has a beginning and an end.  In between, there’s the middle bit – providing us opportunities to write some different possibilities.

2018 is a whole year of such possibilities.

So that was 2017.  How has it prepared you for 2018?

Because it will have, whether you know it or not.

Life involves a lot of discovering that we have more to give than we often imagine.  The difficult pat is bringing it out.

There comes a natural end to this none of us will escape.  No-one wants to arrive at this point and for it to be said, “They could have given more.”

Yet for a thousand and one different reasons, we hold back.  But take who we are further and not only will 2018 be quite an adventure but 2019 will be even more so.

It’s like being in business, the business of being the best we can be.  (There’s a natural connection between life and business.)

Seth Godin reminds us that the best businesses exist for others just like people:

‘Kindness ratchets up. It leads to more kindness. It can create trust and openness and truth and enthusiasm and patience and possibility.

Kindness, in one word, is a business model, an approach to strangers and a platform for growth.

It might take more effort than you were hoping it would, but it’s worth it.’*

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: Kindness scales.)

‘Be ready when you get there.  Don’t make the mistake of waiting for good things to happen – make good things happen.’*
(Erwin McManus)

Rather than who, make it you.

Rather than when, make it now.

(*From Erwin McManus’ The Last Arrow.)

‘Read, look into other areas, use different learning mediums, ask better questions, reflect, be open to ideas, be surrounded by learners, and prioritise learning.’*
(Michael Heppell)

‘I know perfectly well my own egotism,
And know my omnivorous words, and cannot say any less,
And would fetch you whoever you are flush with myself.’**
(Walt Whitman)

As 2017 comes to a close, Maria Popova reflects upon what has been a turbulent year.  As a means of reflecting on this, Popova alights on the story of the 1977 NASA mission to send the spacecraft Voyager to take images of the outer limits of our solar system:

‘When I was growing up in Bulgaria, a great point of national pride — and we Bulgarians don’t have too many — was that an old Bulgarian folk song had sailed into space aboard the Voyager spacecraft, the 1977 mission NASA launched with the scientific objective of photographing the planets of the outer solar system, which furnished the very first portrait of our cosmic neighbourhood.  Human eyes had never before been laid on the arresting aquamarine of Uranus, on Neptune’s stunning deep-blue orb, on the splendid fury of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot — a storm more than threefold the size of our entire planet, raging for three hundred years, the very existence of which dwarfs every earthly trouble.’^

But there was another dimension to the mission, beyond the scientific inquiry:

‘But the Voyager also had another, more romantic mission.  Aboard it was the Golden Record — a time-capsule of the human spirit encrypted in binary code on a twelve-inch gold-plated copper disc, containing greetings in the fifty-four most populist human languages and one from the humpback whales, 117 images of life on Earth, and a representative selection of our planet’s sounds, from an erupting volcano to a kiss to Bach — and that Bulgarian folk song.’^

I feel that what Popova is describing here – her subtitle for which is illuminating: “Perspective to lift the blinders of our cultural moment” – is true for the mission we find each find ourselves on through space and time: inquiry and poetry.  ,These are the things that help us move forward in the best of ways rather than intoxicated with our own importance:

“In this way of working, you’e got to have a lot of humility.  You don’t have the answers.  You’re creating space for relationships to form and innovation to emerge, which is the responsibility of senior leadership.”^^

Peter Senge is quoting businesswoman Vivienne Cox here.  He later writes, in what is a critically important book for Earth, how we need:

‘to rediscover our capacity for awe at the marvel of the living world and our fellow travellers on Spaceship Earth, without which we are unlikely to discover our place in the larger natural order.’*^

Reality is, we are all voyagers, travelling through time and space, recording and learning from what we see, going beyond the useful to the poetic – the greater story, indeed, the greatest story we’re all included in.

(*From Michael Heppell’s The Edge.)
(**From Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.)
(^From Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: A Reflection on Living Through Turbulent Times.)
(^^Vivienne Cox, quote in Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution.)
(*^From Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution.)