I have found that perhaps the greatest gift you can give another human being is the gift of being understood.*
Erwin McManus

Seeing is a form of pure being, unlike watching or looking at. Seeing is why we’re here.**
Anne Lamott

Perhaps understanding others is
our best practice for one day
understanding ourselves.

*Erwin McManus’ The Genius of Jesus;
**Anne Lamott’s Dusk Night Dawn.

Whatever pain you can’t get rid of, make it your creative offering … It’s not that pain equals art. It’s that creativity has the power to look pain in the eye, and to decide to turn it into something better.*
Susan Cain

That’s the process of evolution. An evaluation criteria for determining whether to convert input to output, I think the initial values that the brain is equipped with are pain and discomfort.**
Ryunosuke Koike

We wish there were no pain,
But it’s always been an important element when it came to
life or death, or at least between
stick or twist,
Being awakened to the power of our imagination to face the
pressure of reality, somehow alchemising
transcendence;
It’s likely that we’re here
doing something we’re pretty good at because of pain
rather than comfort.

*Susan Cain’s Bittersweet;
**Ryunosuke Koike’s The practice of Not Thinking.

Being present demands all of us.  It’s not nothing.  It may be the hardest thing in the world.*
Ryan Holiday

*Ryan Holiday’s Stillness is the Key.

The idea is simple. You have a purpose so big and inspiring it transforms your entire life.
Ben Hardy

An overnight success almost never is. Might as well plan for the journey.**
Seth Godin

Of course, you may have planned a trip
rather than a journey,
Or a jaunt, an outing, an excursion, or even a junket;
However, the longer the travel,
The greater the variety of sceneries, topographies, terrains and
perspectives, and the greater the possibility of
change, and even transformation, a re-connecting with
the wild without and the wild within:
meaning has to be located outside ourselves –
discovered in the world rather than our own psyches.^

*Ben Hardy’s Personality Isn’t Permanent;
Seth Godin’s blog: All at once and quite suddenly;
^Anna Katharina Schaffner’s The Art of Self Improvement.

A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.*
Joseph Campbell

Fear is self-focused. Day-to-day our fear is about us … And generosity is about others. “How can I help?”**
Seth Godin

The hero’s journey begins
in humility, which is to know oneself and
to recognise others –
The truth of you and the truth of me;
Erich Fromm would perhaps say that
we are thus brought into the presence and
promulgation of beauty:
Here lies the connection between beauty and truth.
Beauty is not the opposite of the “ugly,” but of
the “false”;
it is the sensory statement of the suchness of a thing
or a person.^

Suchness is about being oneself, which
also turns out to be one of the most
difficult things
we’ll ever do –
So many forces pulling us from
without and within:
The great law of life is: be yourself.
Though the axiom sounds simple, it is often the
most difficult task. To be yourself, you have to
learn how to become who you were dreamed to be.
Each person has a unique destiny.^^

It is difficult because to be ourselves
we must not only recognise but
empathise with others, so that
our deepest joys can meet their deepest need,
And vice versa –
The hero, more than anyone, knows that
they are not super-human.

To have a shot at this, there is great benefit in
beginning the day alone; I stretch David Whyte’s words to
cover more than our paid work, to describe our
greater contribution, something he names
Prime:
Prime is the time we establish
ourselves in the world on
Individual, equal terms.
Once we have contact again
with an essence and a sense of
accomplishment, then we can offer ourselves
to others for conversation in a new way.*^

*Anna Katharina Schaffner’s The Art of Self Improvement;
**Seth Godin’s blog: Generosity and fear;
^Erich Fromm’s The Revolution of Hope;
^^John O’Donohue’s Benedictus;
*^David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea.

I love that word treasure. What if we saw ourselves that way? As worthy of treasuring?*
Sam Radford

This is your mistake, which means there’s something valuable in it, something that can teach you about yourself.**
William Seighart

Anne Lamott lists three conditions
toxic to the soul:
Perfectionism,
Contempt for self,
Wanting to be right and better than^ –
A fourth, and a result of this trio, is to perhaps
look away from the messes and mistakes we make,
Fearful of what we may find:
With the mistake your life goes in reverse.
Now you can see exactly what you did
Wrong yesterday and wrong the day before
And each mistake leads back to something worse^^.

Lamott is always disarming in her personal honesty,
Finding a way to tread the healing side of the
self-compassion/self-destructive line,
Helping us to learn how to follow because
it is likely that we, too, are ailed by
at least one of these injurious conditions, finding
at least three soul-skills we are capable of:
Curiosity is one way that we know
our souls are functioning.
So is deep goodness.
So is presence.^

Curiosity,
Goodness,
Presence:
We can do these.

*Sam Radford’s blog: Guard the good treasure entrusted to you;
**William Seighart’s The Poetry Pharmacy;
^Anne Lamott’s Dusk Night Dawn;
^^From James Fenton‘s The Mistake, William Seighart’s The Poetry Pharmacy.

Now, looking through
the slanting light
of the morning
window toward
the mountain
presence
of everything
that can be,
what urgency
calls you to your
one love? What shape
waits in the seed
of you to grow
and spread
its branches
against a future sky?**
David Whyte

*David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea: from What to Remember When Waking.

The motivation to play in an infinite game is completely different – the goal is not to win, but to keep playing. It is to advance something bigger than ourselves or our organisations.*
James Carse

Life requires of man spiritual elasticity, so that he may temper his efforts to the chances that are offered.**
Viktor Frankl

You will keep on finding ways
to continue the game because you know that
if you or someone else brings
the game to an end, you will
never know what lies beyond
the particular winning line:
No two human beings ever experience two sensations,
experiences, feelings, or thoughts identically.
Everything changes.
Everything is always different.^

The game is never over, and you know that
you have the capacity to
to move beyond the winner/loser definitions
too hastily arrived at, to
adapt, shift, morph …

*James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games;
**Viktor Frankl’s The Doctor and the Soul;
^Keith Haring’s Keith Haring Journals.

Once you have crossed the threshold, if it really is your adventure – if it is a journey appropriate to your deep spiritual need or readiness – helpers will come along the way to provide magical aid.*
Joseph Campbell

*Joseph Campbell’s Pathways to Bliss.

None of these changes are failures. They’re simply steps in the journey. We change. That’s part of the deal. A well-lived life without calibration is unlikely.*
Seth Godin

Listening is its own reward.**
Aaron Copland

It’s not working,
You’ve grown older,
You’re being forced to move,
This isn’t your first choice …
It doesn’t have to be negative –
We’re very capable of re-orientating, re-organising, re-creating, re-inventing, re-calibrating,
And when we begin with listening –
(Let’s give that a capital L -)
When we begin with Listening –
To others, to the field, to the world, to our god,
To ourselves,
We can discover a melange of exhilarating possibilities
to re-invest ourselves in:
You choose your purpose
and then you give your soul to that purpose.
In due time,
you’ll transform.^

*Seth Godin’s blog: Re-calibrating;
**Rob Walker’s The Art of Listening blog: Heard Behaviour;
^Ben Hardy’s Personality Isn’t Permanent.