Editing takes time, It’s focused work on our own that takes our vital energy with the door closed.
And the great thing about being tired of our story is that stories can be edited. Stories can be fixed. Stories can go from dull to exciting, from rambling to focused, and from drudgery to read to exhilarating to live.**
Each society and each individual usually explores only a tiny fraction of their horizon of possibility.* Yuval Noah Harari
What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to new adventure, you are called to new horizons.** Joseph Campbell
The realisation that our lives are stories comprising a number of significant elements that we may arrange in a number of different ways, makes it possible for our experience of life to significantly alter: Whether we like it or not, the lives we live are stories. Our lives have a beginning, middle, and end, and inside those three acts we play many roles.^
We may have tried to alter our lives before, and this has not been our experience – A different role, a different place – But what is needed is to look beneath the surface of this story: The secret to diagnosing a problem with a broken scene lies in its subtext.^^
To find our deepest joy meets the world’s greatest need, wrapped in talents, environments and values, is to open new horizons: Being more vulnerable, we reach out, we extend our hands and your hearts to others who are wounded. It is only at such a pass that we grow into a larger sense of what life is about and act, therefore, out of a deeper and nobler nature.*^
If the story doesn’t work, We can go to the subtext again, rewrite it, begin over; There are no rules as to how many time we can do this, and eventually our new horizon will open: Pathfinding is at the core of creating with significance, and finding the path is largely the work of finding non-paths until the path is evident.^*
Awaken your spirit to adventure; Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk; Soon you will be home in a new rhythm For your soul sense the world that awaits you.⁺
Not known, because not looked for But heard, half heard, in the stillness Between two waves of the sea. Quick now, here, now, always – A condition of complete simplicity (Costing no less than everything) …* T. S. Eliot
Knowledge allows us to get our bearings, but it’s imagination and action that give its the forward motion we need to start and finish.** Bernadette Jiwa
Knowing how stuff gets in the way of life-in-all-its-fullness, Jesus of Nazerath encouraged his disciples instead to seek the kingdom – And it’s remains true that there’s more than the latest fashion and quirky restaurant; they’re fun but they don’t deed our sense of destiny, Our greater story: The basic story of the hero journey Involves giving up where you are, going into the realm of adventure, coming to some kind of symbolically rendered realisation, and then returning to the field of normal life.^
But to know our destiny is not enough, We must put it into action, and this is not easy at all; Joseph Campbell identifies three outcomes to the returning to the normal life with the realisation we have discovered: There will be no reception for it, and so we give up and return to the “fashion and food,” the “bread and circus” life; We only give the world what it wants (serving food and fashion with our discovery); or, We slowly teach the world what it is that we are returning with – It is in the actioning that we’ll figure this out.
Society wants us to live a planned existence, following paths that have been travelled by others. Tried and true. The known, the expected, the controlled, the safe. The path of the wanderer is not this. The path of the wanderer is an experiment with the unknown. To idle. To daydream.* Keri Smith
Life had gotten too busy. It seemed as if my existence had become just one long to-do list. I had forgotten about my dreams, my goals, my what-ifs, my what-if-I-coulds.** Amy Haines
Humans are at their best when living within a larger story, Becoming lost or diminished or both in the ordinary and everyday; A myth provides wellbeing, provides the nurture we need to keep developing throughout our lives as we are capable of; Joseph Campbell likens this to a joey growing in their mother’s pouch: Now, in order to aid personal development, mythology does not have to be reasonable, it doesn’t have to be rational, it doesn’t have to be true; it has to be comfortable, like a pouch.^
The psalmist reflects this in declaring: I have calmed and quieted my soul, … my soul is like the weaned child that is with me. O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time on and for evermore.^^
Joseph Campbell outlines how a myth must function on four levels: Providing consciousness with a sense of meaning; Presenting an image of the Cosmos to maintain mystical awe; Validating and maintaining a certain sociological system; Psychologically and pedagogically carrying a person through life.
He argues that the second and third of these have been taken over by secular orders and so our traditional myths no longer serve us as we need them to; We need new myths or to rethink the old, or a combination of the two if we are to move into stories of wellbeing, To a calm and quiet soul: In contrast to the Western reliance on drugs and verbal therapies, other traditions around the world rely on mindfulness, movement, rhythms and action.*^
The psychiatrist Carl Jung decided that he needed to find and enact his own myth, Discovering it in building, Describing it as his “task of tasks,” it led to him creating his retreat home in Ascona, A place where many more thoughts and ideas were to emerge and grow his work.
Jung had returned to his childhood for the symbols that most spoke to him, And he found memories of building with small stones that led him to build with big stones; Campbell proffers: The way to find your own myth is to determine those traditional symbols that speak to you and use them, you might say, as bases for meditation. Let the work for you.^
Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisite for growth?: the openness to experience events, and willingness to be changed by them.* Warren Berger
Clues that you might not be trying hard enough. You usually succeed. You rarely feel like an imposter. You already know what you need to know. You’re confident it’s going to work.** Seth Godin
All of this focus on the Self – Isn’t it unhealthy?
The thing is, When we focus on who we are then we notice what we can do, And that means what we can do for others: The more we explore who we are, the more we become invisible. “When we study the self it disappears.”^
A true personal myth will lead us to a truly social myth: And it is the myth we live for others that satisfies most of all.
May I live this day Compassionate of heart, Clear in word, Gracious in awareness, Courageous in thought, Generous in love.^^
What is the new horizon in you that wants to be seen? John O’Donohue
Most innovative projects … tend to begin with someone venturing out into the world, looking around, and noticing a problem. Warren Berger
It’s likely that you and I will need a problem in order to unwrap or break open More of who we are: This is what Jung calls individuation, to see people and yourself in terms of what you indeed are, not in terms of all those archetypes that your are projecting around and that have been projected on you.^
There’s always more, and easy just won’t do it.
Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.^^
Scientists have … found that to achieve a state of flow, a task must be roughly 4 percent beyond our current ability.* James Clear
Whether it’s splitting the [bill], getting a project done or making an impact on the culture or a cause, if you want things to get better, the only way is to be prepared to do more than your fair share.** Seth Godin
We don’t need the conference speaker to ask us to raise our hands as high as we can in an experiment, Only to ask us then to raise them higher – We all know that we hold back.
What if, instead of working out ways of holding back, We experimented with ways of bringing 4% more effort in a smarter way – Just 4% out of our comfort zones?
We’d be zooming.^
Let us begin to learn how to bless each other. Whenever you give a blessing, a blessing returns to enfold you.^^
I believe a KID WHO IS PLAYING IS NOT ALONE. THERE IS SOMETHING BROUGHT ALIVE DURING PLAY AND THIS SOMETHING, WHEN PLAYED WITH, SEEMS TO PLAY BACK.* Lynda Barry
So the psychological problem, the way to keep from becoming blocked, is to make yourself – and here is the phrase – transparent to the transcendent.** Joseph Campbell
We need to play more; It’s good for us – We must beware the urgent life that leaves us alone with seriousness.
Play is transcendent, And there are as many ways to play as there are people – That’s the fascinating and exhilarating thing.
Now, it’s a basic mythological principle, I would say, that what is referred to in mythology as “the other world” is really (in psychological terms) “the inner world.” And what is spoken of as “future” is “now.”* Joseph Campbell
We are not made wise by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.** George Bernard Shaw
What many think of as the present is the past, whilst others know that what is too quickly dismissed as the future is now; The latter form a space or ritual to slow down their thinking, their speaking, their actioning, to be able to hear what-can-be before filling the moment to overflowing: In their intense meditation the hidden sound of things approaching reaches them and they listen reverently while in the street outside the people hear nothing at all.^
Today we don’t have the stasis that is required for the formation of a mythic tradition. The rolling stone gathers no moss. Myth is moss. So now you’ve got to do it yourself, ad lib. … We’re all without dependable guides.* Joseph Campbell
We are all haunted by something deep inside of us, and often a lot of our best work is the result of us trying to come to terms with that.**
Our existence lies within two worlds: The ordinary world of everyday things, And the special world of meaning and significance.
This is far too simple a way of describing our worlds, for which I apologise, It is a starting place only.
Who am I? is an ordinary world question that has an inkling there is more to life than meets the everyday eye; When asked in the special world, this question becomes Who is my True Self?
What can I do with my life? is another ordinary world question that is altered when asked in the special world, becoming What is my Contribution?
These questions arrive with us from Theory U, but I have connected them for some time with Joseph Campbell’s diagnosis that we each are in need of two myths: One that is personal and the other social.
The problem is that we struggle to shape our necessary stories in our fast-moving, noisy busy ordinary worlds, And we are constantly frustrated that this is so (How many of us have wanted to find the answer by the close of the podcast we have been listening to, Or the final pages of the self-help book?); We must enter our special worlds that very much feel to be interruptions.
Peter Senge wrote of systems-thinking that many problems do not lie in the obvious or reinforcing loop of the system, But rather in the hidden or background balancing loop; Attending to this takes more time and attention, And so it is often put off or ignored.
What Senge’s systems-thinking highlights is that our most important questions cannot be properly dealt with in our ordinary worlds, rather we must find and journey into our special worlds; I mention their plurality because these are different for each of us, though they contain similar questions and challenges.
THIN|SILENCE 
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