Even with all the choices we have made to go this way or that way, whether consciously or unconsciously, we still find ourselves pondering many possibilities

Perhaps, though, there is something which stands out beyond anything else?  Something we must do?

Seth Godin counsels:

‘Obsessively specialise.  No niché is too small if it’s yours.’*

Sometimes the smaller something is, the more concentrated it becomes, the more powerful an impact it can make.

It’s unlikely we were helped to develop the skills for navigating all the possibilities life affords.  Schools, even universities, don’t help people to know how to go about being reflective so they will be able to identify and focus throughout their lives on the twisting path of what matters most of all for them.  There can be an assumption that this happens automatically as subjects and courses are selected and learnt.  For some it does, though, I suspect, not for the majority.  It’s not either/or education and life-skills but both/and.

We need to be able to go to the places our dreams come from.

From Where You Dream is a book on writing creative fiction by Robert Olen Butler.  K. M. Weiland mentions it in her writing blog.  I like the title very much and also the encouragement from Weiland, which I translate from the story a novelist is working on into our personal stories.  This is followed by a reflection from Richard Rohr, who knows something of the value in being able to see ourselves:

‘Sit in a dark room or go outside at night.  Light candles or a fire pit.  Turn on some powerful music.  Just sit there for an hour or two and let you mind wander over your story.  Don’t get too conscious in planning your plot or figuring out your characters.  Just let the images float through your mind, like the snippets of scenes in a movie trailer.’**

‘Eventually, you will discover s detached place of quiet self-observation.’

The things I take from this are making uninterrupted time to be alone so we can ask questions of our stories, to feel for where they have come from and where they are going.  The details are akin to answers, and they will come, but having time to see the big picture of our lives is more about asking questions and is more valuable than gold.

(*From Seth Godin’s Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?)
(**From K. M. Weiland’s blog 3 Ways to Make Your Writing More Visual.)
(^From Richard Rohr’s The Naked Now.)

Flow as in moving continuously and easily.  It comes from within.

Flux as in those things that aid free movement and change.  Often coming from without.

Flow and flux having an inestimable number of ways of weaving in and out of each other – right now it’s happening in seven billion lives.

Flow also means we’re in something and that something is in us.  It is able to expand and increase because of flux.  Flux in the shape of things that happen in and around us, from others, the world we live in, events, ideas, and more.

There’s an ongoing debate – it’s thousands of years old – as to whether personhood is substantial or relational.  Here is an attempt by me to ponder these things a couple of days ago.  Flow and flux is another attempt on my part to get my head around this, though not as some intellectual exercise but as a means to help people know their intrinsic worth (substance and flow) and their relational worth (nature and nurture, David Shenk’s control board’s knobs and witches inside every human cell,* presence and absence), making it more possible to remain in a state of flow (continuity) and flux (alteration).

To be continuous, that is, to know who we are, flow requires some way of being held together.  As Erwin McManus points out:

‘When we lack integrity, we find ourselves several people depending on the circumstances.’**

Story is how we do this.  When you tell me your life history, what you’ve done when and where, and how you moved from there to here, you are telling me a story.  Story is powerful.  It helps us know who we are (substance, continuity) but it makes it possible to open to others, our world (relationships, change) – we can keep writing more into our stories.

Here is the author Neil Gaiman speaking of his experience in the Moth Community – who “promotes connection and visibility through the practice of personal storytelling”:

“The Moth connects us, as humans.  Because we all have stories.  Or perhaps, because we are, as humans, already an assemblage of stories.  And the gulf that exists between us as people is that when we look at each other we might see faces, skin colour, gender, race, or attitudes, but we don’t see, we can’t see, the stories.  And once we hear each other’s stories we realize that the things we see as dividing us are, all too often, illusions, falsehoods: that the walls between us are in truth no thicker than scenery.”^

It’s important to have boundaries to our lives – to know who we are and who others are – but fixed boundaries are dangerous to our wellbeing.  Eckhart Tolle’s writes about the part of us that is offended by how others speak and act towards us.  He calls it our “painbody” – an expression of our ego (false self).  The painbody in us wants to be hurt by what people say or do; it underlines for us just how we were right to think about ourselves and others in the way we do.  Porous boundaries, on the other hand, make it possible to receive from others in ways that allow= growth and imagination and creativity to unfold in our lives.  As such, we become the kind of space or environment for others to be affirmed and encouraged into their flow and flux.

(*See David Shenk’s The Genius in All of Us.)
(**From Erwin McManus’ Uprising.)
(^Neil Gaiman, quoted in Maria Popova’s BrainPickings: How to Tell a True Tale.)

To look a second time.

Moses gave a second look to a bush that appeared to be burning but wasn’t and his epic story began.

Seth Godin gives a second look to a banana tree – the Cavendish – from which half the bananas in the world come.  If bananas are a part of our diet, it’s likely we’ve eaten one, but, as Godin points out, monocultures can be wiped out.  His point is:

‘variation brings resilience and innovation and the chance to make a difference.’*

Respect is about taking a second, deeper look.  In this case, not at bananas but at people.

‘We know things in their depth only by this second gaze of love.’**

When we take a deeper look both at those around us and ourselves, we open up more possibilities, more ideas, more  talents and more innovations.

We make ourselves weaker when we do not respect who others are and what they bring.

Entrepreneur and author Jacqueline Novocratz encourages us:

‘It’s important to think about that time and place and activity where you shine, where you feel most alive.’^

Yesterday, walking from one work venue to another, I passed the most beautiful single yellow flowered rose trees.  I had to stop and turn back.  I didn’t take a picture, I just gazed.  Wonderful.  Later in the day I would find myself in two conversations with individuals and found myself gazing once again, this time on incredible lives.

‘Wonder is a beautiful style of perception; when you wonder at something your mind voyages deep into its possibility and nature.  You  linger among its presences.’^^

(*From Seth Godin’s blog The Thing About Bananas.)
(**From Richard Rohr and Mike Morrell’s The Divine Dance.)
(^Jacqueline Novocratz, quoted in Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)
(^^From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)

Everything exists because of relationships.  What if life appears most brightly when we are figuring out how to share our greatest joys with each  others?

Here are two comments about relationship which I came upon this morning, the first from author and aviator Anne Morrow Lindbergh looking like descriptions of absence and presence, then from Professor in Social Studies and Technology Sherry Turkle reflecting on the ways we use social technologies:

“Some people came into my room and rushed in and rushed out and even when they were there they were not there – they were in the moment ahead or the moment behind.  Some people who came in just for a moment were all there, completely in that moment. […] If you let yourself be absorbed completely, if you surrender completely to the moments as they pass, you live more richly those moments.”*

”a stream of messages make it impossible to find moments of solitude, time when other people are showing us neither dependency nor affection.  In solitude we don’t reject the world but have the space to think our own thoughts’**

I then read these words from Richard Rohr and found myself thinking about how important solitude is to becoming the people we can be – Rohr argues that we are relationships over substance:

‘We’re not of independent substance; we exist only in relationship.’^

Technologies mean we never have to experience solitude and yet this is arguably our most critical relationship.  It seems that life invites me to explore and deepen my relationships with people, my world, my worldview, and with myself.  Is solitude then when I see what has been shaped?

Technologies ought to be a boon if we’re relationship before we are substance but, at best, technology is changing the shape of humans and, at worse, we’re losing ourselves.

I found myself wondering whether healthy relationships lead to substance, that is, the sense of self, with the possibility of being present – as Anne Morrow Lindbergh observed it.

Everything exists because of relationships.  What if life appears most brightly when we are figuring out how to share our greatest joys with each  others?

(*Anne Morrow Lindbergh, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(*From Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together.)
(^From Richard Rohr and Mike Morrell’s The Divine Dance.)

When I outline a problem and also give you the solution then I take away from the intellectual and emotional worth you are able to bring to the task or conundrum.

‘Define the problem, not the solution.’*

In my reading this morning, Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler lay down this as one of their parameters for setting up a challenge and prize.  They want to release the imagination and creativity of the many by not telling them how to succeed.

Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne in Blue Ocean Strategy describe how a fair process (engagement, explanation, and clarity of expectation) is blue ocean because it allows people’s intellectual and emotional worth to be recognised and valued.  They warn that if this doesn’t happen then intellectually people ‘will not share their ideas and expertise’ and ‘they will reject others’ intellectual worth,’ and emotionally, they will not ‘invest their energy in their actions.’**

Hours earlier, I’d found myself pondering how there is something so powerful about people finding the freedom to act (autonomy), the possibility of being skilful (mastery), and living out a purpose greater than themselves (meaning), even whilst the opportunity for manifesting these may only come later in life or occasionally, it fills the whole.  I can’t remember why I was thinking about these things but I do know there is something very powerful at play when these are present.  They’re not so much substancel as relational – all the best things in life are.

Autonomy could be said to be about the relationship with ourselves, mastery about our relationship with our world, and meaning about our relationship with others.

Red ocean scenarios witness our copying and competing with what everyone else is doing, whilst blue ocean scenarios are about discovering and developing perople’s uniqueness: one closes down possibilities, the other open possibilities up:

‘Creating blue oceans is not a static achievement but a dynamic process.’**

Hugh Macleod offers a blog that is more of a poem when he writes:

‘When I’m not free, you’re not free.
When I’m in danger, you’re in danger.
When your voice is being drowned out, no one can hear me either.
To guarantee my freedom, I have to guarantee yours too.
Because I only matter when you matter.’^

And this from Seth Godin, underlining relationship over substance further still:

‘Showing up with empathy is difficult hard to outsource and will wear you out.  But it’s precisely what we need from you.’^^

(*From Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler’s Bold.)
(**From Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.)
(^From Hugh Macleod’s gapingvoid blog If You’re Not Free, What Does That Say About Me?)
(^^From Seth Godin’s blog: Empathy is the Hard Part.)

To know who we are, where we are, what we have is how we tend to us the word inalienable.  It means we’re more likely to be at the centre rather than the edges.  To risk any of these is to become an alien, an edge-person, an outsider.

In our modern world, we still struggle with people who aren’t like us, people who are different in the way they look and think, the stories they tell, the places they come from.  It’s a view from the centre.

‘The embrace of a person’s uniqueness is what makes a community trustworthy.’*

This comment from Alex McManus is interesting because it asks us to see how a group, society, or nation’s ability to both see the differences in others and to value them are better measurements of the maturity of a people.

Nassim Taleb provides insight in inimitable fashion:

‘We find it in extremely bad taste for individuals to boast of their accomplishments; but when countries do so we call it “national pride.” […] The nation-state: apartheid without political incorrectness.’**

This is the self we cannot see from the centre.  Richard Rohr speaks of this as the ego self.  It’s a smaller self when each of us is capable of more:

‘The ego self is the unobserved self.  If you do not find an objective standing point from which to look back at yourself, you will almost always be egocentric – identified with yourself instead of in relationship to yourself.’^

Edward Deci refers to this True Self as the intrinsic self

‘The intrinsic self is not a genetically programmed entity that simply unfolds with time. […] It is instead a set of potentials, interests, and capabilities that interact with the world, each affecting the other.’^^

What’s intriguing about Deci’s comment is this larger self can only develop through interactions with those on or beyond the edges of self: the inalienable must meet the alien, we might say.

Ben Zander tells of his father’s saying about our best interactions with people:

“Certain things in life are better done in person.”*^

As they share this, the Zanders are reflecting on the practice of enrolment – turning up, engagement with risk:

‘Enrolment is the art and practice of generating a spark of possibility for others to share.’*^

Risking deeper engagement includes the possibility of rejection – which is  the experience of the alien.  If this is so then it’s a conundrum for sure.  The possibility of the larger life requires we walk away from our inalienable world, to become the outsider.

“perhaps, the wild ones among us are our only hope calling us back to our true nature’^*

(*From Alex McManus’ Makers of Fire.)
(**From Nassim Taleb’s The Bed of Procrustes.)
(^From Richard Rohr’s The Naked Now.)
(^From Edward Deci’s Why We Do What We Do.)
(*^From Benjamin and Rosamund Zander’s The Art of Possibility.)
(^*Joel McKerrow, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)

Life is about letting go and letting come.

When we get this right we are connecting and more present but if we get it wrong then we we become more disconnected and absent.

Another way of thinking about it is that we have to clear some things out of our lives to make room for new things

There are arguably four major areas of connection/disconnection, letting go and letting come, emptying and filling: others, our world, our worldview, and ourselves.*

Roz and Ben Zander contemplate giving way to passion when they write about barriers and participation  – I’d add talents, dreams (hopes), and experiences to passion:

‘The first step is to notice where you are holding back and to let go.  Release those barriers of self that keep you separate and in control, and let the vital energy of passion surge through you, connecting you to all beyond.  The second step is to participate wholly. Allow yourself to shape the stream of passion into a new expression for the world.’**

The ultimate test for what we let go a=if and what we allow to come will be love.  Love connects and love is produced by connecting.

(*Theory U names three major disconnections: ecological, social, and spiritual-cultural.)
(**From Rosamund and Benjamin Zander’s The Art of Possibility.)

When we make journeys into the things we’re curious about and make our discoveries then what we return with is also valuable to others.  In some sense of the word, we have become a guide.  When this is welcomed by others – and it always needs to be – then our movement has produced a blessing.

We might also imagine it this way.  Our journey through the wonders of the universe which speak to us most of all become a meal and a conversation when we have returned and are at rest.

I want to describe this as my “zing.”  This is the excitement I feel inside when I am connecting with something that is deeply meaningful to me.  I share the following because we all have zing, and zings are all different and good.

I came to call my zing dreamwhispering.  My friend Alex McManus heard me use this term and described it in far better than I could.  I make my journeys through thoughts and speculation and experimentation and then come to a table, with coffees and teas, sharing these things with others:

‘Often […] entrepreneurs of the spirit are dream whisperers who awaken hope.  They connect meaning to action.  The craft narratives that release human energy.  They make new maps that guide us into places where there are no paths.  As importantly, they help us discover the courage it takes to journey towards our humanity.’*

So what is your journey about, and what does the table and coffees look like that you share with others?

Alex mentions meaning and narratives.  In a random universe, these are the patterns life invites us to make.

Geoff Nicholso in his book on walking describes nature as ‘rough, scary, sometimes beautiful, but always utterly indifferent.’**  He’s right, and continues:

‘In the face of this, a walk seems like exactly what it is; something but not much, certainly not a means of salvation.  It may be pleasurable and worth doing, it may stop you getting depressed, but in the end it’s just a walk.  Why would you want it to be more?’**

Nicholson is also wrong – as are we all.

We are the universe.

We make up our meaning but I have to wonder how the universe might be offering meaning through a species made of stardust and moons and meteors.

With this, through our journeys and our tables shared with others, we are guides.

(*From Alex McManus’s Makers of Fire.)
(**From Geoff Nicholson’s The Lost Art of Walking.)

I love the idea of restoring the future rather than the past. opening up the future through the way we are prepared to think, feel, and act in the present.

The future is where we find hope. We don’t have to repeat the mistakes of the past. We don’t have to feel trapped by old patterns and habits but can create new ones. It’s where new insights can replace the old ones that no longer work.

Because the future emerges through people, itt will require the kind of conversations the like of which we have rarely seen or experienced.

Sherry Turkle picks up some weak echoes of the future in the way young people use instant messaging and avoid phone calls.

‘All the Richelieu sophomores agree that they thing to avoid is the telephone. Mandy presents a downbeat account of a telephone call: “You wouldn’t want to call because then you would have to get into a conversation.” And conversation, “well, that’s something where you only want to have them when you want to have them.”‘*

This is only a weak signal. We don’t know whether or how much such a resistance to conversation might develop.

Some would remind us that adolescents have always avoided conversation and have been monosyllabic. We were all there once.

We’re left pondering just how the integration of technology into our lives may make deeper changes in us as a species because of our neural plasticity and so. affecting the quality of our conversations.

A hopeful future will require four important conversations.

One.

The first conversation is with ourselves. It concerns how we listen to our lives and what we must do as a consequence. We soon need to include conversations with others, otherwise we become too fixed in our thinking, feeling, and doing.

Two.

The second conversation involves those who are not like us. It arguable that conversations with others who are like us is really a first conversation – these only reinforce what we already think, feel, and do. The second conversation, however, introduces to us the thinking, feeling, and doing of others and can lead to anything from retreating into our first conversation to moving on into the third. There’s usually a lot of debate and disagreement in this conversation and we have to figure out some way of bringing all of this together into something more effective and productive.

(In the weeks ahead, towards 2017 general election in the UK, I’m expecting we’ll witness a lot of one and two conversations – it’s how the system is set up.)

Three.

‘We don’t move enough. Maybe you do, but the collective ‘we’ – we’ve left that part of our lives behind.’**

The third conversation includes others and also their worlds and, collectively, the world we share. Stepping into each others worlds means something more, a third thing, is happening. Maria Popova’s reflection on Anne Lamott’s book on mercy is very helpful here. Lamott reckons mercy will “buy us a shot at a warm and generous heart.”

“Mercy is radical kindness. […] Mercy, grace, forgiveness, and compassion are synonyms, and the approaches we might consider taking when facing q great big mess, especially the great big mess of ourselves – our arrogance, greed, poverty, disease, prejudice.”^

Conversation Three helps us to find our warm and generous heart as we step into each other’s worlds – a possibility Lamott hopes is still to be found in each of us:

“the sweet child in us who, all evidence to the contrary, was not killed off, but just put in a drawer”.^

Four.

Out of our openness to the contributions everyone has to bring, a more hopeful future is able to emerge, imagined and designed by more people for more people.

In their book on creating new markets, Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne tell the story of a company that came up with a win/win strategy. The problem was not everybody had been in the room when it was put together. The salespeople would sabotage it:

‘The strategy was doomed because the sales force fought it. Having not been engaged in the strategy-making process nor apprised of the rationale for the strategic shift, sales reps saw the expert system in a light no one on the design team or management team had ever imagined.’^^

‘[T]he capacity to be present to everything that is happening, without resistance, creates possibility.’*^

In coming from the future, Conversation Four, in one sense, means no-one is an expert, one of the causes of resistance. Instead, we are required to learn and practise a new set of skills. There are many but I borrow the following six from my friend and mentor Alex McManus, adding a little interpretation of my own.

Reflecting: We slow things down to consider everything, not just the first or perceived needs or issues, but all of them.

Anticipating: Our openness to the weak signals coming from the future; we will often find these coming from what everyone in the room is seeing, not just the few.

Imagining: We are the imagining species; we want to imagine and we will if we remove the barriers: time, hierarchies, privilege, limited means of contributing, etc.

Synchronising: Integrating our thinking, feeling, and doing with what is emerging and being imagined so that more details will emerge.

Designing: Making something happen sooner rather than later – meaning prototyping and experimentation and pilot schemes.

Creating: The final “product,” shaped by the many, tested to see whether it’s really the future, and finally delivered.

The future is already in the conversations we will have.

(*From Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together.)
(**From Hugh Macleod’s gapingvoid.)
(^Anne Lamott, quoted in Maria Popova’s BrainPickings.)
(^^From Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.)
(*^From Rosamund and benjamin Zander’s The Art of Possibility.)

We don’t need others to fail or struggle or get hurt to feel good about ourselves.

Anne Lamott “fesses up” how she feels about others and her own need for mercy,  How someone getting hurt can make her feel better but not for long.  Mercy is a daily requirement for the human condition:

“So why today is it absolutely all I can do to extend mercy to myself for wanting to nip an annoying relative’s heel like a river rat? Forget extending mercy to this relative, who has so messed with me and my son – she doesn’t even know she needs my mercy.  She thinks she is fierce and superior, while I believe she secretly ate her first child.  Horribly, she is perfectly fine.  I’m the one who needs mercy – my mercy.  The need for this, for my own motley mercy, underpinned most of my lifelong agitation, my separation from life itself. […] I came here with a huge open heart, like a big, sweet dog, and I still have one.  But some days the only thing that can cheer me up is something bad happening to someone I hate, preferably if it went viral and the photo of the person showed hair loss and perhaps the lifelong underuse of sunscreen.  My heart still leaps to see this.  I often recall the New Yorker cartoon of one dog saying to the other: “It’s not enough that we succeed. Cats must also fail.”  This is the human condition.”*

Our lives, though, are bigger than we know.  Big enough to be bigger with others – big enough to be bigger with ourselves.  We only need to see it.   Erich Fromm writes:

‘The fact is that most of us are half asleep while we believe ourselves to be awake.’**

We’re already in the flow of something that does not require another to fail so we feel better about ourselves.  Rather the success of another adds to our understanding of what we might call an infinite dance – after the infinite game which aims to include as many as possible for as long as possible and when the rules threaten to exclude from or to end the game, the rules are changed.  Such a dance and such a game would be full of mercy.

‘The fool views himself as more unique and others more generic; the wise views himself as more generic and others more unique.’^

We haven’t explored this for long enough with enough people yet to know just how our lives, and the lives of others and our communities might be changed.

It’s possible to dance alone, two begin to change the danc , three changes the dance for ever, making  it possible for the fourth and fifth and more to join in.

It could change everything.

(*Anne Lamott, quoted in Maria Popova’s BrainPickings.) 
(**From Erich Fromm’s The Art of Listening.)
(^From Nassim Taleb’s The Bed of Procrustes.)