The way we store energy is through our desires, values, passions, hopes, dreams, aspirations, and ultimately our greatest capacity is through what we love. … I have come to realise that people do not bring the same level of energy with them.*
Erwin McManus

Satisfaction = What you have ÷ what you want**
Arthur Brooks

Arthur Brooks holds that
if our satisfaction depends on
money
power
pleasure
and honour
then we’re in trouble.

Perhaps take a moment to reflect on his formula for satisfaction:
I certainly feel its wisdom.
How true has this been in your own experience?

Anna Katharina Schaffner,
In reflecting on more than two thousand years of self improvement,
Notices a change:

In the self-improvement literature of the past, the emphasis was placed on the virtues. Yet reflections on goodness have all but disappeared from modern self-help. Our focus tends to be on personality rather than character and our effectiveness in achieving successful careers.^

You may have spotted the transition in this sentence,
How self improvement has become self-help,
How focus on the inward is replaced by a greater concentration
on the outward.
Brooks reflects on the negative impact for us, how

Self objectification lowers self-worth and life satisfaction.**

Erwin McManus offers us plenty of starting places
for noticing just how much we already have.
Even grabbing two minutes to ponder these today
will begin to make a difference:

May the Angel of Encouragement confirm you
In worth and self-respect,
That you may live with the dignity
That presides in your soul.^^

*Erwin McManus’ The Way of the Warrior;
**Arthur Brooks’ From Strength to Strength;
^Anna Katharina Schaffner’s The Art of Self Improvement;
^^John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: A Blessing of Angels.

What do Drawing Singing Dancing Music MAKING Handwriting Playing Storywriting Acting Remembering and even Dreaming all have in common? THEY COME ABOUT WHEN A CERTAIN PERSON IN A CERTAIN PLACE in a CERTAIN TIME arranges CERTAIN UNCERTAINTIES INTO A CERTAIN FORM*
Lynda Barry

May you have the wisdom to enter generously into your own unease.
To discover the new direction your longing wants to take.**
John O’Donohue

There are many things you do not know,
But what you do know that you are the person
who MUST do this …
And this is the time,
And this is the place.

*Lynda Barry’s What It Is;
**John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: For Longing.

I wish I could draw.
I wish I could write.
I wish I could dance.
I wish I could sing.
I wish I could act.
I wish I cold play music.
I wish I could be funny.
By the 5th Grade most of us knew it was already too late.*
Lynda Barry

May the Angel of Wildness disturb the places
Where your life is domesticated and safe,
Take you to the territories of true otherness
Where all that is awkward in you
Can fall into its own rhythm.**
John O’Donohue

Your head may be saying that
it’s too late,
But your heart is still hoping
to a different beat.

Just take a moment to listen.

*Lynda Barry’s What It Is;
**John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: A Blessing of Angels.

Devote the back half of your life to serving others with your wisdom. Get old sharing the things you believe are most important.*
Arthur Brooks

May the Angel of Awakening stir your heart
To come alive to the eternal within you,
To all the invitations that quietly surround you.**
John O’Donohue

Yesterday
I noted two intelligences at work in our lives:
The fluid KIND that wanes as we grow older,
And the crystallising sort that we are able to harness
fruitfully
Into the larger numbers of our years.

It could perhaps be said
that fluid intelligence leads to inventions
but crystallising intelligence leads to reinventions
beginning with ourselves.

The world is richer for it.

Brooks aligns fluid intelligence with a first curve of creativity
and the crystallising kind with a second,
But I’d even go as far as to suggest –
For those of us who strongly suspect we missed out on the first curve –
Here is another opportunity of a different kind.

*Arthur Brooks’ From Strength to Strength;
**John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: A Blessing of Angels.

I invented ideas early on; I synthesise ideas – mine and others – now.*
Arthur Brooks

God looks down from heaven on humankind to see if there are any who are wise … .**

After reading yesterday that I went
into decline a long time ago,
Arthur Brooks now informs me that
the reason for this is a decline in my fluid intelligence.
He continues with some good news;
There is also crystallising intelligence –
By which I use the knowledge I learned in the past.

This straightaway piques my interest for two reasons:
This sounds a lot like wisdom –
Living what we know into
life-in-all-its-fullness;
It also echoes Theory U’s^ discovering of our
crystallising intent –
What it is we ultimately want to bring into the world
through our lives.

I read on a little further
and there it is:

When you are young, you have raw smarts; when you are old, you have wisdom. When you are young, you can generate lots of facts; when you are old, you know what they mean and how to use them.*

And this kind of intelligence
need not decline.

*Arthur Brooks’ From Strength to Strength;
**Psalm 53:2;
^Otto Scharmer’s Theory U.

I’ve heard people say it takes 10,000 hours to master your style or your line or something, but to be honest I think it takes 10,000 hours to become boring and mediocre. The moment you master something is the moment you stop being creative.*
Gareth Brookes

When did you first notice you were bad at something? And then what happened?**
Lynda Barry

Dilettante, from the Italian dilettare, meaning “to delight.”

Amateur from the French aimer, meaning “to love.”

Arthur Brooks suggests our decline comes sooner than we think:^
For athletes it comes the soonest,
But even for scientists and musicians
it arrives in the mid-forties
or a little later at best.

This is not good news for me,
Tracing, as I do,
My starting point to forty five.

If you’ve read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers
you’ll be well-versed in how ten thousand hours works,
But it has never made sense to me as a destination;
Passion and competency and grit have brought us here for
WHAT NEXT?

To answer Lynda Barry’s question,
There were things I always thought I was bad at,
But it was only in my late forties to early fifties that I came to
admit
I wasn’t very good at the things my work included,
Or at least it felt like that.
Whatever the reality, it became a starting point
for what really matters to me
and is open-ended,
The things I love and delight in.

You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.^^

*From The Comics Journal: If the Marks are Perfect How Can You Relate to Them?;
**Lynda Barry’s What It Is;
^Arthur Brooks’ From Strength to Strength;
^^Annie Dillard, quoted in Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing blog; Olfactory work.

Being of any reasonable sort appears to require limitation. Perhaps this is because Being requires Becoming, as ell as mere static existence – and to become is to become something more, or at least something different.*
Jordan Peterson

True humility can be experienced only when we have come to know our power and use it for the good of others, and not for ourselves.**
Erwin McManus

We don’t get to feel better about ourselves by putting
down others.
The way of becoming is a better way,
And we can include helping others to become
and see what happens.

*Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life;
**Erwin McManus’ The Way of the Warrior.

It remains the dream of every life to realise itself, to reach out and lift oneself to greater heights. A life that continues to remain on the safe side of its own habits and repetitions, that never engages with the risk of its own possibility, remains an unlived life.*
John O’Donohue

To the warrior, greatness is not the product of ego but of service. If you live for yourself, you can settle for less. If you live for others, it require all of who you are.**
Erwin McManus

Better than fixing our weaknesses is developing our strengths.

We are told it is best to focus on what we’re not good at
and what we are good at will
take care of itself.

It is more likely that if we focus on what we are good at
then what we are not good at will take care of itself.

Because we’re pushing our limits,
From our heart outwards,
Always beyond ourselves:

May you have the grace of encouragement
To awaken the gift in the other’s heart,
Building in them the confidence
To follow the call of the gift.^

*John O’Donohue’s To Bless the Space Between Us;
**Erwin McManus’ The Way of the Warrior;
^John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: For a New Position.

When you live a life of obligation, it steals from you your strength. Wisdom allows you to harness your strength.*
Erwin McManus

the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control**
The Apostle Paul

In the Potawatomi language strawberries are “heart berries,”
Betraying the creation myth in which the berries grow from
the heart
of Skywoman’s deceased daughter.

A young Robin Wall Kimmerer would gather and consume these in great numbers,
An older Kimmerer ponders on more than a
berry-filled tummy, how

the gift of berries was from the fields themselves^.

It got me to thinking about the fruits of our lives,
How we produce these for others,
How we have to and we want to
because they are our heart-fruit.
And whilst people don’t always find their way to them,
Someone will.

*Erwin McManus’ The Way of the Warrior;
**Galatians 5:22-23a;
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass.

Dozens of scientific studies have found that people who are led to experience brief positive emotions are more creative, expansive, generative,, synthetic, and loosened up in their thought.*
Dacher Keltner

You’ll happily take the destination but the truth is, the journey is too arduous.**
Seth Godin

Will our thinking soar or crash today?
What we feed our minds and hearts may turn us into a
victim
or into an
agent.

One takes more preparation than the other –
Some hanging around,
Taking longer with new thoughts,
Reflecting on our response to these,
Not only in our heads, but in our hearts
at the beginning of a day –
We’re uncovering treasure.

*Dacher Kiltner’s Born to be Good;
**Seth Godin’s blog: Destination, risks and journeys.