All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills, we need guides to show us how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people.*
Ursula Le Guin

Reading a myth without a transforming ritual that goes with it is as incomplete as simply reading the lyrics of an opera without the music. Unless it is encompassed as part of a process of regeneration, of death and rebirth, mythology makes no sense.**
Karen Armstrong

Mythologist Joseph Campbell^ suggests that we require two myths
by which we might live our lives:
A personal myth and
a social myth.
Frederick Buechner urges us to find our purpose where
our deepest joy meets the world greatest need.
Otto Scharmer tables two important questions for us to explore:
Who is my True Self? and
What is my Work?
And so it stacks up that the best stories are about
who we are becoming and
what we are bringing to others.
Campbell believed that the old myths no longer serve us as
we need them to, but life is so fast, so busy, we are
unable to create new myths for ourselves.
He spoke about this in 1985, before the speed of life was
supercharged by the internet, something Oliver Burkeman would uncover
more than thirty years later:
once the attention economy has rendered you
sufficiently distracted,
or annoyed,
or on edge,
it becomes easy to assume that this is
just what life inevitably feels like.*^
But there’s never been a better resourced time for us
to mindfully and compassionately reflect upon our stories,
Question who’s writing them, and
reinvent them so that they become
transformative both for ourselves and for others.

*Ursula Le Guin’s Words Are My Matter;
**Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth;
^Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth;
^^Otto Scharmer’s Theory U;
*^Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks.

Generous listening is powered by curiosity, a virtue we can invite and nurture in ourselves to render it instinctive. It involves a kind of vulnerability – a willingness to be surprised, to let go of assumptions and take in ambiguity. The listener wants to understand the humanity behind the words of the other, and patiently summons one’s own best self and one’s own best words and questions.*
Krista Tippett

Krista Tippett’s words connect
in many directions: to
Theory U’s* movement from cynicism
to compassion; to
James Carse’s^ infinite player who
wants to be surprised: to
Erwin McManus’^^ questor’s search for honour beginning with
humility; and to
Brené Brown’s*^ embracing of vulnerability
in order to live fully.
Evidence that our curiosity and willingness to listen will
lead us into a richer world –
Good to know we can grow these.

*Krista Tippett’s Becoming Wise;
**Otto Scharmer’s Theory U;
^James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games;
^^Erwin McManus’ Uprising;
*^Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly.

You can’t just be you. You have to double yourself. You have to read books on subjects you know nothing about. You have to travel to places you never thought of travelling. You have to meet every kind of person and endlessly stretch what you know.*
Mary Wells

Attention … just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing more than the sum of everything to which you pay attention.**
Oliver Burkeman

Growing ourselves is most difficult and the most
important work we’ll ever do:
When we choose the work that will also stretch us to become more
rather than less.
As Clarissa Pinkola Estés helpfully contrasts:
Three things differentiate living from the soul
versus living from ego only. They are:
the ability to sense and learn new ways,
the tenacity to ride a rough road,
and the patience to learn deep love over time.^
May we avoid all imitations.

*gapingvoid’s blog: Always Open Self;
**Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks;
^Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run With the Wolves.

Our lives are a process of constant discovery and invention. Each os us lives a unique human life.*
Bill Sharpe

A job is made fun not by turning it into a game, but by deeply and deliberately pursuing it as a job.**
Ian Bogost

When you bring your talents, energies, and values
to play upon the work you do,
You not only get to sing your “song,”
Others also get to hear it.
This may not be where we feel yourself to be right now,
Madeleine L’Engle shares some words on writing to help
with your song, or story:
As with all my books,
Starfish was more rewritten than written,
and with each subsequent book
the need to rewrite becomes more
rather than less.^
May it become more than work,
May it be love and live to you and those you
share it with, and,
if it isn’t there yet,
Rewrite it.

*Bill Sharpe’s Three Horizons;
**Ian Bogost’s Play Anything;
^Madeleine L’Engle’s Walking on Water.

Can you have an experience you don’t experience?*
Oliver Burkeman

Perfect is overrated.
Perfect would have to know everything, and
we don’t;
Perfect would have to contain everything, and
we can’t.
I wonder whether imagining something in a perfect way
is how our brains have developed in order to get us started on stuff.
It’s unlikely we’d do anything if
we imagined something to be rubbish.
But perfect gets the blood pumping,
But then we need to know we can’t actually make that,
And who would want to?
Perfect can’t grow, develop and change into
something better, but
it can help us begin.

*Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks.

To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.*
James Carse

It’s a kind of sacred discontent, a holy dissatisfaction, and the holy desire for more life, love, and generosity.**
Richard Rohr

I sense a call to more from both
within and without, a summons to
surprise and the unfamiliar,
And, at my age,
I am thankful

*James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games;
**Richard Rohr’s The Divine Dance.

Every single moment contains thousands of possibilities – and I can only choose one of them to actualise it … . Everything I realise through them, or “bring into the world,” as we have said, I save into reality and thus protect from transience.*
Viktor Frankl

By being what only I can be I give humanity what only I can give. It is my uniqueness that allows me to contribute something unique to the universal heritage of humankind.**
Jonathan Sacks

As a blank piece of paper may be filled with
all manner of images, so
a moment
is full of possibilities, and
It is up to you and me to choose what we shall
bring into being, but
procrastination is our nemesis.
The best way you and me can decide upon
what this moment can be, is for you to be
fully you, and me to be
fully me;
As Dolly has wisely said:
Find out who you are and
do it on purpose.^
And, as
Oliver Wendell Holmes laments:
Alas, for those that never sing
But die with all their music in them.^^

*Viktor Frankl’s Yes to Life;
**Krista Tippett’s Becoming Wise;
Austin Kleon’s blog: On solitude and being who you are;
^^Martin Amor and Alex Pellew’s The Idea in You.

If you’re simply following [shortcuts] you probably won’t get anywhere interesting. It’s the detours that pay off.*
Seth Godin

you might prepare for your central mission in life by doing other things that may seem entirely unrelated, and how necessary this may be**
Rebecca Solnit

At a point in my working life, when my contemporaries
were stepping into yet another role of
great responsibility, or more,
I found myself stepping into a quieter role,
Less public.
I didn’t know it at the time,
But there a different future
would begin to emerge.

‘Homo non proprie humanus sedsuperhumanus est’ –
which means that to be properly human,
you must go beyond the merely human.^

*Seth Godin’s blog: Actual shortcuts often appear to be detours;
**Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses;
^Eugene Peterson’s Run With the Horses.

Man and society are resurrected every moment in the act of hope and of faith in the here and now; every act of love, of awareness, of compassion is resurrection; every act of sloth, of greed, of selfishness is death.*
Erich Fromm

[W]e are a limited amount of time. That’s how completely our limited time defines us.**
Oliver Burkeman

We may think that the time has passed,
But whilst we are here there are
hope and faith,
That is,
if we want to be creators of these,
As Eve Ensler offers:
We find our fulfilment
where we choose to find our fulfilment.^
We do not have to wait for our godot, but will
find with ourselves our world of possibility:
It is a constant effort and hard work –
and inexplicably life-affirming –
to honour who you are,
what you believe,
and why you are here.^^
There is only one proviso:
If we are to find ourselves, then
We must find each other:
Whether met or read,
People have changed me,
As Xavier Le Pichon has expressed so well:
My heart cannot be educated by myself.
It can only come out of a
relationship with others.^
In opening to the other we
open to ourselves.

*Erich Fromm’s The Revolution of Hope;
**Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks;
^Krista Tippett’s Becoming Wise;
^^Elle Luna’s The Crossroads of Should and Must.