The path forward is about curiosity, generosity and connection. These are the three foundations of [your] art.*
Seth Godin

Genuine self-knowledge has to be the starting point for any attempt to improve ourselves.**
Anna Katharina Schaffner

Forty seven years ago today, I started out on what
turned out to not only be a path of self discovery but also
the contribution I want to make for the sake of others.
At least this is the hope that keeps me
moving.
Seth Godin’s three path characteristics are useful intertwining elements for reflection and action:
Discover more,
Make and contribute more,
Find and collaborate with others along the way.
Robin Wall Kimmerer tells the story of “three sisters”:
Corn, bean and squash;
Planted together, the corn grows fastest, reaching upwards,
Providing the bean with support to grow vertically too,
The squash grows last putting our her leaves horizontally,
Retaining moisture in for all to grow.^
Just as organic are our three sisters of
curiosity, generosity and deeper connection.

*Seth Godin’s The Practice; my insertion;
**Anna Katharina Schaffner’s The Art of Self Improvement;
^Robin Wall Kimerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass.

If we do not seek variation, we end up dead in life, shutting out those new experiences that keep our hearts and minds active. Our horizons shrink, our learning will stagnate, and we will become nothing but creatures of habit.*
Anna Katharina Schaffner

A clear sense of self-directed meaning provides us with an essential inexhaustible supply of motivation.**
Steven Hayes

We are more powerful than we know.
We can endlessly alter ourselves,
Regrowing from the bountiful resources we carry within,
Season after season, following
death with life.
Of course, there are some who
seem powerful, pushing or
ordering others around,
But they are powerless to change themselves.

*Anna Katharina Schaffner’s The Art of Self Improvement;
**Steven Hayes’ A Liberated Mind.

The way to maintain one’s connection to the wild is to ask yourself what is it you want. … One of the most important discriminations we can make in this matter is the difference between things that beckon us and things that call from our souls.*
Clarissa Pinkola Estés

I am emboldened by the fact that surprise is the only constant. We are never really running the show, never really in control, and nothing will go quite as we imagined.**
Krista Tippet

A wild life is not some
do-anything-you-want chaos –
We are discovering just why we are attracted by
beauty and goodness and compassion.
Where civilisations separates,
This wildness is oneness: to our
mother earth, one another, ourselves, and, if we have a god, to
god.

*Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run With the Wolves;
**Krista Tippet’s Becoming Wise.

There is but one infinite game.*
James Carse

*James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.

My feelings of inadequacy were the environment form which my purpose in life would emerge.*
Erwin McManus

Play to keep playing.**
Seth Godin

Everyone can play and
all can keep on playing –
It’s an infinite game in which
everyone may flourish;
Don’t believe anyone who says otherwise.
I am grateful that Erwin McManus’ sense of inadequacy meant that
he created his own game,
A game he gifted and invited me into almost eighteen years ago now,
And which I now invite you into.
This is the wonder of the infinite game as gift,
Not only being the gift itself, but also
the spirit and the community of the gift:^
Play to keep playing.**

*Erwin McManus’ The Genius of Jesus;
**Seth Godin’s The Practice;
^Lewis Hyde’s The Gift.

We most often consider genius as an expression of talent, of “what you do.” We rarely think of genius as an expression of essence, or “what you are.”*
Erwin McManus

It is a criterion of love. In moments of decision, we are to try to make what seems to be the most loving, the most creative decision. We are not to play safe, to draw back out of fear. Love may well lead us into danger.**
Madeliene L’Engle

Back in 1970, Kim Grove began drawing her
Love is … characters for her soon to be husband Robert Casali.
They featured nude male and female characters depicting multitudinous expressions of Love is:
… taking on day at a time,
… a song in your heart,
… enduring,
… our story … .
I’ve shared before how many of these cards winged their way
from Scarborough to Southport, and Southport to Scarborough
back in the late 70s when Christine and I began dating.
But, beyond the schmalz, love is many things …
… giving people time,
… listening,
… not judging,
… helping,
… being compassionate,
… sharing kind words,
… gratitude,
… and, not forgetting, loving yourself …
The thrilling part is that there is a genius to love which looks
different in each of us, woven through our
talents, energies and values, making us capable of
imagining and actioning love in many ways.

*Erwin McManus’ The Genius of Jesus;
**Madeleine L’Engle’s Walking on Water.

We all begin with the question “What am I, really? What is my work here?”*
Clarissa Pinkola Estés

We feel most comfortable when things are certain; but we feel most alive when they’re not.**
Tania Luna

We are not, finally, who we are today,
Any more than we were, finally, who we were
a year ago on this day.
Each day provides us with a day of becoming, both
for our inner lives of development
as well as the alchemistic ways that we connect
with our outer worlds.
We get to guide and shape this journey;
It’s quite a marvellous thing:
Each new day is a path of wonder,
a different invitation. …
Each day is the field of brightness where
the invitation of our life unfolds.^
The past is past, only the future exists,
Available in today’s present.

*Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run With the Wolves;
**Chip and Dan Heath’s The Power of Moments;
^John O’Donohue’s Benedictus.

What counts is not so much whether a person actually achieves what they set out to do; rather it matters whether efforts has been expended to reach the goal, instead of being diffused or wasted.*
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

There’s something I must do.
I may tell myself that I can’t do this, or
I don’t have a choice, and
for a little while I’ve let myself off the hook and
I feel more comfortable, but
there are some things that won’t go away, and now
here it is again.

*Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow.

When one is at home in oneself, one is integrated and enjoys a sense of balance and poise. In a sense that is exactly what spirituality is: the art of homecoming.*
John O’Donohue

Living in accordance with ours values is never finished; it is a lifelong journey.**
Steven Hayes

Harry Potter knew that he could produce and maintain
a powerful Patronus charm to save himself
and his godfather Sirius Black from the dementors
because he’d already produced one.^
We may not be able to play with time
in the way Harry and Hermione Grainger were able to;
We have something better:
We can spend some time exploring our talents, energies and values –
Which are our home –
Producing a smorgasbord of experiences and expressions that
we can zoom with, which is
to produce even more of:
those who know hot to transform
a hopeless situation in to a new
flow activity that can be
controlled will be able too
enjoy themselves, and
emerge stronger from the ordeal.^

*John O”Donohue’s Benedictus;
**Steven Hayes’ A Liberated Mind (emphasis mine);
^Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkeban;
^^Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow.

tiffle to potter aimlessly in a landscape Suffolk*
Robert Macfarlane

A life sincerely followed is always surprising and always leads you into places you did not feel you could either enter or the you could deserve. And part of the ability to hold the science as we move and as we tiptoe, or walk or take our pilgrim path from one epoch of our lives to anther is our ability to not name things too early and to allow yourself to be surprised as to where you’ve arrived.**
David Whyte

When stuck, tiffle.
Wander through a larger landscape.
A story is larger than a day-to-day-life:
A novel examines not reality but existence.
And existence is not what has occurred,
existence is the realm of human possibilities,
everything that man can become,
everything he’s capable of.^
The confinements of a day-to-day-life don’t allow time or energy for exploration.
But listen, your story is calling you.

*Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks;
**Maria Popova‘s The Marginalian: source lost;
^Milan Kundera; Maria Popova’s The Marginalian: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Opaque to Ourselves: Milan Kundera on Writing and the Key to Great Storytelling.