Other than death, there is no finish line or retirement for the creative person.*
Austin Kleon

The first glow of retirement is appearing on the horizon whilst I’m just coming upon what it is I want to be about.

Our reality is that we are able to learn through all the days of our lives, our illusion is retirement.

*From Austin Kleon’s blog: There is no finish line.

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.*
Pema Chödrön

The royal road to self-improvement is … a form of perseverance that, far from bring put off by failure, accepts it as essential.**
Anna Katharina Schaffner

What I am enjoying about Anna Katharina Schaffner’s book on self-improvement is the long view she provides of different themes considered necessary over millennia for our development.

I’ll be mentioning all ten of these soon as I think that each is important for growth.

A number of these have been promulgated as the only important thing to pursue. It’s also noticeable that different times bring different emphases.

In a time when we are struggling with resilience, one of these has popped up in the form of Angela Duckworth’s Grit^ – now on my reading wishlist. Duckworth names grit’s attributes as being purpose beyond ourselves, resilience, learning from failure, having a growth mindset, and valuing success. (Watch this space.)

I list them here as points to reflect upon (perhaps think smaller rather than bigger):

What do you want to bring into the world that will improve the lives of others?
Which difficult experiences have you gone through that have made you stronger?
Which failures stand out as being pivotal for learning and growth?
How do you define your possibility for growth?
What are some of the important finishing lines you have crossed?

Some people get lucky and do what they want to do without being tested, for everyone else there’s a demanding path of inner growth.

*Pema Chödrön, from Sam Radford’s blog: Killing the moment by controlling the experience;
**From Anna Katharina Schaffner’s The Art of Self-Improvement;
^I’d also recommend Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile.

Passion: Middle English: from Old French, from late Latin passio(n- ) (chiefly a term in Christian theology), from Latin pati ‘suffer’.

The artist rarely says, “I’d like to do less.” Instead she wonders how to contribute more, because the very act of creativity is the point of the work.*
Seth Godin

We speak of our passion when describing what it is that moves us and energises us into activeness.

What if the thing that propels us in this modern sense is also the thing of suffering and sacrifice of the original meaning?

Such a thing would be the deepest passion of all.

*From Seth Godin’s blog: But what could you learn instead?

We have a choice whether wish to continue evolution on this planet or not. I vote “yes.”*
Keith Haring

People evolve before organisations do.**

We’re all adding our little bit of evolving to the human species.

This ongoing exploration of what we might be as Human unfolds through our desire to self-improve – something that has been happening for millennia, as Anna Katharina Schaffner identifies through her very insightful book The Art of Self-Improvement: Ten Timeless Truths.

There are some who believe our evolution will only come through technology, but I am more intrigued by our naked, or un-enhanced, humanness: in how we relate to each other, yes, but also how we embrace our world and all of its fauna and flora, as well as how we relate to ourselves – an area in which it seems we’re having a lot of problems of late.

As Keith Haring noted, this choice to encourage evolution is critically ours.

I was taken by John O’Donohue’s five Transcendentals when I first came upon them and am finding myself revisiting them. I offer them here as something you may enjoy reflecting upon – Being, the One, the True, the Good and the Beautiful:

Being is the deepest reality, the substance of our world and all things in it; the opposite would be Nothingness, the things that are not.  The One claims that all things are somehow bound together in an all-embracing unity: despite all the differences in us, around us and between us, everything ultimately holds together as one; chaos does not have the final word.  The True claims that reality is true and our experience is real and our actions endeavour to come into alignment with the truth.  The Good suggests that in practising goodness we participate in the soul of the world. … Beauty brings warmth, elegance and grandeur.  Something in our souls longs deeply for that graciousness and delight.^

Enjoy.

*From Keith Haring’s Keith Haring’s Journals;
**A gapingvoid doodle for Zappos;
^From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty.

Often, without knowing it, we are waiting for a new idea to come along and cut us free from our entanglement.*
John O’Donohue

Our crisis, if we can get through it, is an attempt to dislodge us from a toxic status quo and constitutes an insistent call to rebuild our lives on a more authentic and sincere basis. It belongs, in the most acute and panicked way, to the search for self-knowledge.**
Alain de Botton

Pain and awe cover most of the ways new ideas get into us.

We do not have to wait for these to come to us, they can be a part of our daily openness.

We then need the means to get new ideas out of us.

John O’Donohue offers five Transcendentals: Being, the One, the True, the Good and the Beautiful. I offer them here in a larger quote to help our reflecting on where our ideas may be leading us:

Being is the deepest reality, the substance of our world and all things in it; the opposite would be Nothingness, the things that are not.  The One claims that all things are somehow bound together in an all-embracing unity: despite all the differences in us, around us and between us, everything ultimately holds together as one; chaos does not have the final word.  The True claims that reality is true and our experience is real and our actions endeavour to come into alignment with the truth.  The Good suggests that in practising goodness we participate in the soul of the world. […] Beauty brings warmth, elegance and grandeur.  Something in our souls longs deeply for that graciousness and delight.*

*From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
**Alain de Botton, from Maria Popova’s The Marginalian: Alain de Botton on the Myth of Normalcy and the Importance of Breakdowns.

In practical terms, three rules of thumb are especially useful for harnessing the power of patience as a creative force. The first is to develop a taste for having problems. … The second principle is to embrace radical incrementalism. … The final principle is that, more often than not, originality lies on the far side of unoriginality.*
Oliver Burkeman.

Holiness as in set apart for a purpose.

What are you set apart for?

Oliver Burkeman encourages me to make room in my life for problems, to keep moving, small step by small step, and to learn from and to copy others, if I am to be led into my holiness.

Does it matter if others see something as original? I strongly suspect not. It’s our choice. What matters is that we see something emerging that we had not expected, marked by selflessness, generosity and wisdom.

*From Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks.

This extremely high option of oneself is justified, since this generation will be remembered as the best ever … we are special. There is nothing wrong with knowing this. It is not vanity that this generation exhibits – it’s pride.*

Self-actualisation is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.**
Viktor Frankl

If we’re experiencing a narcissism epidemic, and there are those who believe we are, then it’s both a difficult and a dangerous place to be:

You can’t write — or live — if you imagine the whole world watching over your shoulder, waiting for you to screw up, ready to mock or vilify you. Which, thanks to the internet, it now is.^

One obvious danger is that you have to protect your brand, your self as product, and that means you are both making yourself fragile whilst also imprisoning the possibility of becoming:

Rather than thinking of personality as a “type” you fit into, view it as a continuum of behaviours and attitudes that is flexible, malleable, and based on context.^^

Viktor Frankl believed we have to find our purpose beyond ourselves, towards whom or which we live our lives.

There are many “skills” we might develop in this direction, but two in particular that are helpful are humility – having a true sense of self, but also, and more importantly, others – and towards this, disappearing, so that we can are able to notice more.*^

*Two student participants remarking on results from Jean Twenge‘s research on a narcissism epidemic, from Anna Katharina Schaffner’s The Art of Self-Improvement;
**Viktor Frankl, from Anna Katharina Schaffner’s The Art of Self-Improvement;
^Tim Kreider, from Austin Kleon’s blog: You can’t create under surveillance;
^^From Ben Hardy’s Personality Isn’t Permanent;
*^The hidden place is also where we can ponder the five elemental truths: Life is hard: You are to as special as you think; Your life is not about you; You are to in control; You are going to die.

I’ve previously mentioned an initiative to support the people of Ukraine from the University of Edinburgh and its Chaplaincy that you may be interested in.

This has been inspired by Tatiana, a Ukrainian woman interviewed by the BBC who made the following plea:

We need the world to light up your hearts for Ukraine and for God.

The website has now been published and there is a vigil to take place on Thursday (7th April) in Edinburgh.

One of the things to be encouraged is the growing of sunflowers in as many places around the globe as possible (there’s a map to populate on the website):

We can gather, we can recklessly sow seeds of hope, literally doing so with sunflowers that will bloom with audacity as they salute the sun and sky in freedom.**

*From the guerrillapeaceukraine.org website.

Wrap whatever you must do into a ritual and keep going. If there’s any way I can help, let me know.

On the 1st January 2014, I set out to blog every day for a year as long as I could include a doodle.

At the end of this year, I didn’t want to stop and have continued with only a few planned breaks to blog and doodle every day.

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

We’re told it’s possible to put a dent in the universe.

This is highly unlikely.

The only one I can think of is the collaborative dent we’re presently working on by messing up your only home.

That being said, it doesn’t mean we can’t live a meaningful life: human consciousness asks of us that we do.

We may search for meaning in ourselves but we’ll be disappointed:

An ethnographer studies others; a flâneur searches for self in others.^

meaning has to be located outside ourselves – discovered in the world rather than in our own psyches … the more we forget ourselves, by dedicating ourselves to an external cause or to people we love the more we actualise ourselves. “Self actualisation,” [Viktor Frankl] sums up, “is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.”^^

So we look around –

Look with all your eyes, look.*^

and we begin to notice we are more curious and interested in some things over others, with echoes of these turning up in our values, our talents and our energies, and so we choose to begin living in these directions.

*From Ben Hardy’s Personality Isn’t Permanent;
**From Seth Godin’s blog: All at once and quite suddenly;
^From Richard Sennett’s Building and Dwelling;
^^From Anna Katharina Schaffner’s The Art of Self Improvement, quoting Viktor Frankl.
*^Jules Verne, from Georges Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris.