You must have a place to which you can go, in your heart, your mind, or your house, almost every day, where you do not know what your owe anyone or what anyone owes you. You must have a place you can go to where you do not know what your work is or who you work for, where you do not know who you are married to or who your children are.*
Joseph Campbell

You can’t step in the same river twice, because your footprint the first time turned the river into a different river. And it changed you as well.**
Seth Godin

Leave your ordinary world awhile, and
enter your special sphere,
Be lost with yourself, less selfish
with all you carry, to
be restored to yourself, and find you are
unable to remain the same.

*David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea;
**Seth Godin’s This is Strategy.

Thirty years from now, therapy is going to centre on what is going well and why.*
Katherine Morgan Scafler

No one is ever ready until they start. Life begins at the edge of your comfort zone.**
Chris Fontana

How old will you be if you wait thirty years to
be able to do what you can do today?

There may not be thirty more years of wisdom to accrue-
Wisdom grows when we start.

You may not believe yourself ready for
the things that bring you to your edge, your truest you.

But these already lie within you,^ the means by which you
embrace and navigate the effort, change, risk, and journeying.

*Katherine Morgan Scafler’s The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control;
**Jean Houston’s The Wizard of Us;
^Dreamwhispering is all about uncovering the things that help you start; drop me a line to find out more.

The stories of gods or heroes descending into the underworld, threading through labyrinths and fighting with monsters, brought to light the mysterious workings of the psyche, showing people how to cope with their own interior crises.*
Karen Armstrong

Mythological images are the images by which consciousness is put in touch with unconsciousness. That’s what they are. When you don’t have your mythological images, or when your consciousness rejects them for some reason or other, you are out of touch with your own deepest part.**
Joseph Campbell

The next time
I find myself awake in
the long darkness of the night,
Wading through and unable to resist
all the difficult stuff,
I am going to reimagine it within
my myth^ – dark caves to navigate with
burning torches, fearsome creatures to be
provided with form to shrink them – because
a myth is not only about the enjoyable stuff,
It also succours our wellbeing, enabling us to be
agents rather than victims.

*Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth;
**Joseph Campbell’s Pathways to Bliss;
^The megamyths of history may not serve us as they did our forebears, but they can still inform our more personal myths so necessary for today. Such a myth requires the metaphysical/mystical, cosmological, sociological, and pedagogical. And if our myths are not to our liking, or are not working, we can change them.

Surprise is the great enabler of seeing.*
Alan Jacobs

*Alan Jacob’s Snakes and Ladders blog: Architectural Thoughts.

Enough comes from the inside.*
Ryan Holiday

*Ryan Holiday’s Stillness is the Key.

The best way to achieve freedom is to take responsibility for the actions you’re taking. And the best way to be clear that you’re taking responsibility is to highlight the externalities and own them.*
Seth Godin

*Seth Godin’s blog: Embracing externalities.

Perhaps most awe-inspiring of all, our brain allows us to imagine.*
Jonah Paquette

*Jonah Paquette’s Awestruck.

rules only make sense in the service of love*
Brian McLaren

*Brian McLaren’s Faith After Doubt.

I don’t wait for inspiration. I’m not, in fact, quite sure of what inspiration is, but I’m sure that if it’s going to turn up, my having started work is a precondition of its arrival.*
Quentin Blake

Successful people figure out how too trade their time and their effort for the change they seek to make in the world.**
Seth Godin

Turning up is always a good strategy towards
something happening – investing time and effort is productive – but when we do this smarter,
Filling the space with multiple (re)sources, are humble and open, practice divergence
and delay convergence, then
something wanting to emerge may appear –
It feels almost magical, but we know it isn’t.

Just begin the work. The rest follows.^

*Quentin Blake’s Words and Pictures;
**Seth Godin’s This is Strategy;
^Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic.

Far more frequently … the life-enhancing route is to think of decisions not as things that come along, but as things to go hunting for.*
Oliver Burkeman

What happens because of what happens next?**
Alex McManus

Not all decisions are equal –
Some carry a five exclamation-mark (!!!!!)
risk score whilst
others hardly register one.

What are some of your best decisions? –
I’m guessing these are !!!!!:
your life-partner?, the work you do? –
And when you look more closely,
are they actually multiple decisions within a strategy? –
To find someone to share life with and work at it?,
To create work you love that makes a difference despite resistance?

Decisions are great for getting us
moving, but it’s unlikely that one decision will
get us to where we want to be, so
better to conceive of a series of decisions.

Are you in? –
Careful how you answer.

Good process leads to good outcomes.^

*Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals;
**Alex McManus’ Makers of Fire;
^Seth Godin’s The Practice.