To stay eager, to connect, to find interest in the everyday, to notice what everybody else overlooks – these are vital skills and noble goals.*
Rob Walker

*Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing.

Never be limited by the small dreams others have for you.*
Bernadette Jiwa

It’s easy to gather the options.
It’s hard to choose one and commit.**
Gabe Anderson

The dreams others have for us
will always be smaller than those we have for ourselves
because these designs lack our talents, our attention to energy, our values.

Having said that, our dreams, once identified, need to become smaller, packaged in detail –
They must fit into today in a multiplicity of iterations of those same abilities, energies and life-goals –
Because a dream is not for the future or for hanging on the wall.

*Bernadette Jiwa’s What Great Storytellers Know;
**Gabe Anderson’s blog: Gathering and Choosing;
^I doodled today’s image in a small Mindful Doodling group I was leading in the past week at the University of Central Lancashire; I’ve included a good quality (vectorised) copy for you to print off if you want to add your own colours. Of course, the best thing would be to create your own doodle. Have fun.

In my experience, there are two uncomfortable pedagogical methods that lead to better learning outcomes:
Doing it poorly on the way to doing it better
Engaging with others in mutual support and exploration*
Seth Godin

The human mind has evolved to quickly navigate the complexity of our world; create and sustain tribal bonds; establish beliefs; make rapid decisions; and do this in an imperfect way that also comes with a range of biases, shortcuts, blind spots, and other quirks.**
Dan Ariely

This morning, I awoke from my dreams remembering some
painful and mortifying moments from my teenage years;
As I later read Seth Godin’s words, I realised these two methods have helped me
to change over the years, to rewrite my story –
Learning from mistakes and determining to be a better person,
And finding communitas with others where this experience has been intensified,
Helping me to tackle inaccuracies and falsehoods in my thoughts
and behaviours, as well as gaining new insights and see new possibilities.

There’s a lot to be sorted out in me –
It could take a lifetime,
But I’m glad to always have these two means readily to hand.

*Seth Godin’s blog: “I don’t learn that way”;
**Dan Ariely’s Misbelief.

What if our life skills had more value than our worldly possessions. The most content human by far is one who creates a world out of nothing.*
Keri Smith

We are the obscene and joyous embodiment of a fool’s errand.**
Nick Cave

It may sometimes appear to others that we have created something
from nothing, but really,
We imagine and we make out of what others have not
taken the time, or been willing,
To notice – in ourselves, in others, in the world around us, in the past and
in the future.

*Keri Smith’s The Wander Society;
**Nick Cave’s The Red Hand Files blog: #210.

We look but we do not see, because our traditional common-sense assessment of abilities distracts us from what is actually there.**
Sir Ken Robinson

The imagination awakens the wildness of the heart.^
John O’Donohue

Sometimes we need to move beyond common-sense;
There lies a wildness in each of us
Waiting to be noticed, waiting to be expressed –
We’re waiting to see what you have
for which there is no comparison:
I settled on a game called
I am a contribution.
Unlike success and failure, contribution has no other side.
It is not arrived at by comparison.^^

Where to begin:
Come up with the smallest iteration of
the idea that is forming in you,
And then play it out,
Watch what happens,
Adjust if necessary,
Repeat.

*Seth Godin’s blog: I was wrong about sun tea;
**Ken Robinson’s Out of Our Minds;
^John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
^^Ben and Rosamund Zander’s The Art of Possibility.

The imagination keeps the heart young. When the imagination is alive, the life remains youthful.*
John O’Donohue

The more a man is, the less he wants.**
Maxwell Perkins

How quickening is a lively imagination;
When it begins to wain, so do we –
We look after our bodies, considerate of what we feed them,
Why not our imaginations?

David Abram proffers how the imagination isn’t a thing in itself,
Thereby implying ways we might nurture and grow our foreseeing:
That which we call imagination is from the first an attribute of the senses themselves;
imagination is not a separate mental faculty (as we so often assume)
but is rather the way the senses themselves have of throwing themselves
beyond what is immediately given, in order to make tentative contact
with the other sides of things that we do not sense directly,
with the hidden or invisible aspects of the sensible.^

Accordingly, we open ourselves by unfolding our senses to
new thoughts, places, and people,
Or we go delve into the unexplored and unknown hinterlands
of what and who we thought we knew, then
noticing what our minds begin to see or ask or construct,
Employing these as further ways of prospecting and sharing and creating.

There aren’t many things I desire in this world,
But an animated imagination is one.

*John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
**Ryan Holiday’s Discipline is Destiny;
^Maria Popova’s The Marginalian blog: Ecologist and Philosopher David Abram on the Language of Nature and the Secret Wisdom of the More-Than-Human World.

Three factors characterise human existence as such: man’s spirituality, his freedom, his responsibility.*
Viktor Frankl

*Viktor Frankl’s The Doctor and the Soul.

What do you want to say?  Why does it need to be said?  What if you could say it in a way that has never been done?  How might you do that?*
Warren Berger

*Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.

Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what is called for is a little discomfort? … Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment.*
Oliver Burkeman

I profoundly believe that we don’t grow into creativity; we grow out of it.**
Sir Ken Robinson

An uncomfortable place for us to begin is to
listen, to notice, to pay attention;
We want to move on, but,
Perhaps, just maybe,
This will be an opportunity
to grow and gain more substance towards a
weightier, more meaningful life,
Where we shall sharpen our superpowers
and make a difference:
this older and more experienced self knows
that the painful things are often the things that
ultimately give substance and meaning to life.^

*Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks;
**Ken Robinson’s Out of Our Minds;
^Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files blog: #176.

What if we became experts in the field of grace? What if we made it our language, our essence, our genius?*
Erwin McManus

The moments when it’s most difficult to be kind are the moments where it matters the most.**
Seth Godin

Grace can describe how a person moves,
More critically, it’s how we treat each other –
Grace …
Doesn’t squash the one in error,
Finds another chance, another opportunity from somewhere,
Doesn’t have to be waited for,
Is future-opening,
Sees the best person,
Builds connection,
Can inspire and motivate others …
And sometimes we need to offer it
to our own self.

Far from being effortless, this kind of grace is
effortful, and yet it still produces a crop greater than
the original investment;
Grace is good news:
The thing is,
no one is born graceful.
It’s a choice.^

While practise makes us more graceful over time,
We carry a resistance that must
be overcome by the continuing choice.

*Erwin McManus’ The Genius of Jesus;
**Seth Godin’s blog: The unwarranted smile;
^Seth Godin’s Graceful. a short but delightful eBook that costs £2.