One of the stories about time told by Alan Lightman in his excellent little novel Einstein’s Dreams is of a world in which effect precedes cause.

In such a world, people don’t act in order to make something else happen, but as a result of something we’ll hope for or decide upon in the future.*

Forty years ago today, I began a spiritual journey, and, turning Lightman’s story into a question, “Was the decision to begin the journey back in 1976 really  the effect of where I have now arrived?”

Or, “Is the place I have come to (I can’t say I’ve not arrived) more or greater than the reason I began?”

My answer has to be “yes,” and, it’s why I began.  Now I press on, and the question comes again, “Is this the effect from a choice I’ll make in the future because of the new, larger, more colourful place I find myself?

Only time will tell, this strange time.

I see how, looking back, I thought I’d begun this journey with a fully formed way of seeing, feeling, and behaving, and I see, as I’ve continued the journey, how so much of this was burned up along the way – a letting go in order to let come.

‘[E]very mass-produced product comprises a bundle of “take-it-or-leave-it” features or dimensions offered to all customers.”**  

Now I see this journey could only be understood as one of becoming, and as I continue to open my thinking, my feeling, and my behaving, this path of fire continues to burn up what is unnecessary to my becoming an authentic human being.

And it is the same for all of us.

“The new foundation consists not in objective statements but in subjective reality.”^

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

(*Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams.)
(**From Joseph Pyne and James Gilmore’s The Experience Economy.)
(^Jesuit Bernard Lonergan, quoted in Richard Rohr’s The Naked Now.)
(^^From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)

What if our search is not for happiness but for wisdom?

What if happiness is something we experience along the way?

Wisdom as in being present in the moment, to others, to ourselves, to what we have, to the world in which we live and to its needs – not simply knowing but living out the intimacy of our knowing.   Moments of dignity, of nobility, of enlightenment – and the universe has just witnessed something very special.

We may think these moments are here or there, now or then but what if they are always and everywhere, meaning that we won’t miss them, neither own them.  Wisdom and happiness must be available to everyone all the time, wherever they are,

We help one another to be open, here and now – openness is the most important thing.

‘We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are.’*

Welcome to the always and everywhere.

(*From Richard Rohr’s The Naked Now.)

‘Time paces forward with exquisite regularity, at precisely the same velocity in every corner of space.  Time is an infinite ruler.  Time is absolute.’*

The business news for today included the story of SwiftKey joining Microsoft.  SwiftKey’s mission is to ‘enhance interaction between people and technology,’  and claims to have saved its users 10 trillion keystrokes, or 100,000 years of typing time.**

My question was: how were those 100,00 years of saved typing time used?

Have you ever been told: “You don’t know how to use your time well!”?

Time can come to us with a voice of judgement: “What do you think you’re doing?  You haven’t got time for this.”

Time can also come with a voice of openness: “This is your time to explore, to ask, to be.”

If I’m to move towards what Alex McManus calls the open possibilities of tomorrow’^ then I need to find some time now to begin.  Then we hear the voice of judgement: “You haven’t got time for this” – time to fail, learn, and try again. But finding the time now can be a better use of time than waiting for the right time and the right thing which we think will not fail.

‘You can avoid jeopardising your company’s future by slowing down and considering all the relevant factors before making a decision.’^^

This is also true for the company of one – my life or yours.

I guess I’m finding myself playing with time.  I make time for my journalling so that I can lose track of time in ideas, whilst also having a time-piece close by to make sure I “have the time” to do everything I need to.  It’s not perfect or complete, but I keep exploring.

One thing I know, now is the time.

“When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”*^

(*From Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams.)
(**From SwiftKey’s Blog.)
(^From Alex McManus’s Makers of Fire.)
(^^From Jim Clifton and Saengeeta Bharadwaj Badal’s Entrepreneurial StrengthsFinder.)
(*^A Buddhist saying, quoted in Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project.)

‘At some time in the past, scientists discovered that time flows more slowly the further from the centre of the earth.’*

Time and presence are bound together.

If you happened to be around northern England or southern Scotland today, I hope you were able to spot the rare and amazing nacreous clouds, not just to know these were formed in the stratosphere at -85C, but to marvel at their gorgeous colours and gossamer-like appearance.

Alan Lightman tells one of his stories about time, imagining how some, in an attempt to add seconds to their lives, lives at the top of mountains in houses built on stilts.  Others, though, not caring if they age a few seconds faster, come down from their lofty dwellings:

These adventurous souls come down to the lower world for days at a time, lounge under the trees that grow in the valleys, swim leisurely in the lakes that lie at warmer altitudes, roll on level ground.  … When others rush by them and scoff, they just smile.’*

We know we each have the same amount of time as one another, and that or some time is plenty, whilst for others, it rushes by.  There are those who never have enough time to do what they really want.  For others, time melts into moments of being present.  I not only want to know about something, I want to taste it, be moved by the flow of it, to feel it.  Presence is wisdom, beyond knowledge: it’s ‘how we do the moment’**

Such experiences are all around us, in people, in ideas, as well as in nature.  We also get to make these moments of presence around what we love and value.

Enjoy.

(*From Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams.)
(From Richard Rohr’s The Naked Now.)

‘The great teachers are saying that you cannot start seeing or understanding anything if you start with “No.”*

There’s a link between “Yes” and happiness.

As we grow older, though, do we find ourselves increasingly on the slippery slope of saying no to what comes our way – new experiences in life, the experience of what is?

When we do experience something for what it really is – arguably rare, but a facet of happiness – then it simply is.  It’s not “this or it could be that:” in the experience, we’re not caught in “two minds” – we are simply present.

Wonderfully, there are many open windows in life – as Frank Laubach named them**.  Even a closed window can actually be an open window, as Marcus Aurelius pointed out:

“What stands in the way becomes the way.”^

Saying yes opens up the quest for happiness, and there’s something more.  We can’t say yes to everything, we know, but the more we are open to all there is, the more we’ll come upon the things of our happiness and know what we must say no to – something we don’t want to get this the wrong way around.

Today will have many open windows – an idea to explore, a person to speak with, an action to execute.

A quest is always about questioning, and saying yes to take us deeper..

(*From Richard Rohr’s The Naked Now.)
(**Frank Laubach’s Letters By a Modern Mystic.)
(^From Ryan Holliday’s The Obstacle is the Way.)

“I wonder about you sometimes!”  Wondering 1.0 – disbelief, even judgement.

“I wonder what this means?”  Wondering 2.0 – curiosity and questioning.

“It’s wonderful!”  Wondering 3.0 – experience and awe.

Moving from wonder to wonder, we emerge from our our disbelief or closed mindedness about something or someone by beginning to question and inquire.

We emerge from our continual questioning when we notice what we enjoy and are energised by and move towards these.

‘In this world, there are two times.  There is mechanical time and there is body time. … The first is as unyielding, predetermined.  The second makes up its mind as it goes along. … there are those who think their bodies don’t exist.  They live by mechanical time.’*

Time is not only to be measured but to be enjoyed.  When we journey from wonder to wonder to wonder, we’re moving towards a larger life which engages us heart, physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.  This is different for every person.

‘Customers don’t want choice; they just want exactly what they want.’**

‘They say that people teach what they want to learn.’^

How do we know what we want when we’re unable to see all there is?  When we take up life’s offer to be lifelong learners, regardless of the role we find ourselves in, then a universe of wonder open to us.

The journey opens to us when we live with effort.

To move beyond the world as we see it will require we suspend judgement.

To move beyond a world of always questioning will ask us to redirect our attention to what we feel.

To move beyond inner feeling to experiencing, will need our willingness to let go and join in, because, ‘when you wonder you are drawn out of yourself.’^^

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

(*From Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams.)
(**From Joseph Pine and James Gilmore’s The Experience Economy.)
(^From Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project.)
(^^From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)
(The cartoon quote comes from is included in Alex McManus’s Makers of Fire, and originates in Cirque de Soleil’s Varekai.)

Perhaps one of the most defining human characteristics is how we learn from our mistakes and pass the benefits on to others.  We tend to think of this as developing our civilisations and cultures, but there’s a larger story asking, “Who are we becoming?”

If we step back to take a larger view of our world,  we see how, whilst we’ve taken a more cerebral and metaphysical way of development, in the East there has been a greater concern for harmony (Yin Yang) and in the South it has been solidarity (Ubuntu).

We might even conject that there are at least three different kinds of human in the world.

Perhaps we can also see our future: cerebral, harmonious, and connected humans nurturing the Earth for the good of all flora and fauna.

‘The concern in Tibetan Bhuddism is not to achieve a conceptually perfect answer, which then has to be defended, but to call forth a happy, loving, aware, and perceptive human being.’*

In Bhutan, the government has been concerned to not only measure the output of their country by gross national product alone, but also by gross national happiness.  Someone I know is part of a group reading Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project, so I thought I thought I’d pick up a copy and join the conversation.

If this sounds a little strange, it’s more about how we’ve been brought up within our particular culture than it being plain weird, and therefore discounted.

Every day  provides us with this opportunity to try a new path, combining and increasing reflection and action and community in our lives

(*From Richard Rohr’s The Naked Now.)

If it were to produce a map for our lives which showed every path we had taken and every path we decided not to take, then, simply on the major decisions alone, it would be a mesmerising spider’s web of pathways.

We’re crossroads people.  Not only finding ourselves at crossroads and having to make decisions, but also being creators of  crossroads for ourselves and for others.

The latter are the crossroads of necessity – something akin to Harry Potter’s Room of Requirement.  When we’ve ventured down a road or path and find it to be the wrong one, we don’t have to retrace our steps but we can produce a crossroads which allows us to take a different direction.  Like hyperlinks, or blue moments, as my friend Alex names them, these crossroads make it possible for us to travel a different route.

‘Blue moments open windows of insight into what it means to be human, and they call upon us to do something to follow them.’*

There are a few realities to be aware of.

It isn’t possible to produce a crossroads of necessity to somewhere we can never go and to something we haven’t got the skills to do.  To be humble – the ability to have an accurate and true picture of ourselves; to be grateful – the ability to see just how much we have; and, to be faithful – the daily practice of turning these into small steps of thinking, relating, and behaving is what makes things happen:

‘When you come into the rhythm of your nature, things happen of themselves.’**

My friend Jo and I were chatting just today about how important saying yes to people is, providing permission to do what they want to do with all their heart – which is really about encouraging them to give themselves permission.  She’s a great example of a crossroads person.  Jo has recently made a crossroads of necessity for herself and lives her life making crossroads available to others.

Each of us is more than capable.

(*From Alex McManus’s Makers of Fire.)
(**From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)

‘Persons who have been transported back in time are easy to identify.  They wear dark, indistinct clothing and walk on their toes, trying not to make a single sound, trying not to bend a single blade of grass.  For they fear that any change they make in the past could have drastic consequences for the future.’*

Alan Lightman’s novel plays with many notions of time, around the last months of Albert Einstein concluding his theory of relativity in 1905.

There’re other ways we can play with time, of there being people from the future among us.

These future people are are from the present, though they appear to be from the future because their minds and hearts are so open they’re able to imagine future possibilities vividly, so much so, they begin to build these in the present.

Richard Rohr writes about a “third eye” of seeing.

The “first eye” sees something for what it is and enjoys it.

The “second eye” sees and enjoys something for what it is but wants to understand what is seen, too.

The third eye, though, whilst enjoying and understanding, wants to be be one with ‘an underlying mystery, coherence, and spaciousness that connected him with everything else’.**

Simplicity, complexity, SIMPLICITY = BIG simplicity:

“For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn’t give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.”^

This can also be understood and experienced as the wisdom of mind and heart and being one.

All of us know the compulsion to “grow up.”  Like the force of a Star Trek tractor beam, we feel the force to leave the simplicity of childhood behind – it almost takes too much energy to resist it.

Geographer William Bunge notices how, when it comes to maps, “there seems to be no geography of children, that is, the earth’s surface as the home of children”^^  Maps are about knowing, and knowing is power – the dark side of the power of the second eye.

Denis Woods then asks this question about how we use maps:

‘What is this?  It is the heat of the darkness of our times, the assurance (and arrogance of the … expert … that he knows better than you.*^

Here is the danger of the one who knows.  Nassim Taleb speaks of how it is too hard t0 remain open to there being more than what we see and understand, to walk through time as a sceptical empiricist.^*  It’s hard to become an “un-expert”:

‘You have no idea what you are doing.  If you did, you’d be an expert, not an artist.’⁺

This simplicity on the far side of complexity is where our future lies, and we are all able to move into the art which awaits us there.

Three myths about creativity which will disappear in the future are: only a a few people are creative, creativity is a solo occupation, and, creativity is about finding answers rather asking questions.

There are those among us who are drawing maps from the future, so connecting us to possibilities of what might be rather than only what has taken place, of what cannot yet be seen rather than what we understand.

‘In no walk of life have people failed to use the power of the map to connect themselves to the world.’*^

(*From Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams.)
(**From Richard Rohr’s The Naked Now.)
(^Attributed to writer and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.)
(^^William Bunge, quoted in Denis Wood’s The Power of Maps.)
(*^From Denis Wood’s The Power of Maps.)
(^*See Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan.)
(⁺From Seth Godin’s The Icarus Deception.)

‘We can change the script,’ claims Alex McManus,* and he’s not wrong.  Alex’s brother Erwin offers: ‘When we embrace our responsibilities, we open up our opportunities.’**

Here are three realignments we can try:

from separation to being with others,
from being apart from the Earth to being a part of it, and,
from a fixed mindset about who we can be (What You See Is All There Is) to one of growth.

The person we’re able to be is already within us, already imagining the future.  We must listen, be present to the whispers, and, then, grow – or zoom the things we do, as Seth Godin names it.

We’ll know we’ll never be perfect but we can be increasingly connected. We know we’ll never complete but we know we are more than enough to bring our art to the world.  And while ours is an ongoing journey, we know we’re strong enough to keep going.

When we recognise and embrace who we can be, the responsibility only we can take up, we become script-changers – for ourselves and for others.

While we’re breathing, it’s our turn to change the script, and it’s not too late to begin.

(*From Alex McManus’s Makers of Fire.)
(**From Erwin McManus’s Uprising.)