Hopefully, your future self will be far wiser and have a far wider range of experiences than your current self. Your future self will have greater opportunities, deeper relationships, and a better self-view. Hopefully your future self will have greater agency and choice that your current self, with more knowledge, skills and connections.*
Ben Hardy

All holiness is about learning to hear the voice of your own soul. It is always there and the more deeply you learn to listen, the greater the surprises and discoveries that will unfold. To enter into the gentleness of your own soul changes the tone and quality of your life. … The soul dwells where beauty lives.**
Seth Godin

Holiness as set-apartness.

Purpose.

So we listen deeply to our soul.

Imagining a future self beyond the current.

We may have a problem, though.

Remembering the present self.

Too old, wrong background, failure … .

It’s time to forget:

It’s an attempt to open our minds to possibilities other than the ones we remember, and the ones we already know we like.  Something has to be done to get us free of our memories and choices.^

So we enter unfamiliar spaces.

We name our values.

Haven’t done that before.

We uncover our talents.

Where did those come from?

We get out of our heads and into our bodies.

Noticing the energies.

This is hard.

Futures aren’t easy.

Unless you download more of the same.

*From Ben Hardy’s Personality Isn’t Permanent;
**From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
^John Cage, quoted in Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting.

You’ll never run out of noticing … .*
Verlyn Klinkenborg

Noticing feeds choice.

We begin with reality.

Richard Sennett writes about how important resistance is to what we make:

We want to start with resistances, those facts that stand in the way of the will. Resistances themselves come in two forms: found and made.**

We will likely find some ideas nearby, like docks growing by nettles:

Ideas live in the world as we do. We discover certain ideas at certain times.^

Look around.

Avoiding reality and resistance may also mean missing ideas that offer a future we’d choose.

Not lifting it off some shelf.

Living it into existence.

*From Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several short sentences about writing;
**From Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman;
^From M. C. Richards’ Centering.

The Chur Qiu Fan Lu […], written sometime in the second century BC, describes yellow as “the colour of rulers.”
Kassia St. Clair

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.**
Marcel Proust

There’s an infinite game afoot.

A game to include as many as possible for as long as possible.

You can wear yellow if you want.

I recommend it.

More importantly, you have already learned to read and write.

Something confined to the privileged not very long ago.

The privileged will always find something new to display.

But most of the life-changing things are now available to our creativity.

Time to play.

*From Kassia St. Clair’s The Secret Lives of Colour;
**Marcel Proust, quoted in Ben Hardy’s Personality Isn’t Permanent.

One by one, each sentence takes the stage. It says the very thing it comes into existence to say. Then it leaves the stage.*
Verlyn Klinkenborg

whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave**
Jesus of Nazareth

Two counterintuitive things that came up this morning and have something in common.

Verlyn Klinkenborg encourages me to write in short sentences.

To allow them to say what they want to say and leave.

No celebrities here.

He tells me that I will use longer sentences in time.

These will basically be short sentences joined together.

It feels counterintuitive.

Surely complex things need long sentences?

Yet short sentences can deliver what is complex.

And servanthood can deliver life-in-all-its-fullness.

Humility enters through servanthood, sparking integrity and courage.

Gratitude also, growing wholeness and generosity.

And faithfulness, opening perseverance and wisdom.

No celebrities.

Do what we do and leave.

*From Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing;
**Matthew 20:27)

This is what creativity serves. It endeavours to bring some of our hidden life to expression in order that we might come to see who we are.**
John O’Donohue

The purposes in the human mind are like deep water, but the intelligent will draw them out.^

You are soul-full, a deep mine of wonder and possibility.

Make something, and more ideas and the urge to make something more emerge.

Keep making and you are also exploring the depths of who you are … and can be.

What’s the thing you’ve just gotta make?

*I had Singin’ in the Rain in my head when I thought of the title, seventy years old this year, Gotta Make resonated with Gene Kelly’s character singing Gotta Dance. Enjoy.
**From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
^Proverbs 20:5.

The craft of questions, the craft of stories, the craft of the hands – all these are the making of something, and that something is soul. Anytime we feed soul, it guarantees increase.*
Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Of the any callings in the world, the invitation to the adventure of an awakened and full life is the most exhilarating. This is the dream of every heart. Yet most of us are lost or caught in forms of life that exile us from the life we dream of. Most people long to step onto the path of creative change that would awaken their lives to beauty and passion, deepens their contentment and allow their lives to make a difference.**
John O’Donohue

I can be larger than this.

I can be a full person, capable of beauty.

Soul-full.

To bring this whole into the parts of my activity.

Those who are my examples awaken me:

Some people wake us up.^

Deep called from deep.

Maybe I can be an awakener?:

The trance-teller calls on El duende, the wind the blows soul into the faces of listeners.*

Perhaps you can, too?

*From Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run With the Wolves;
**From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
^From gapingvoid’s blog: Make your impossible dream future reality.

You can alter the story you are feeding your brain.*
Martin Amor and Alex Pellew

As an adult, I’ver come to realise that life isn’t about finding yourself. It’s about creating yourself. Books are clay for exactly that.**
Tim Ferriss

Finding yourself is a good place to begin, though.

By the time you are an adult you’ll have made hundreds of thousands of choices that have resulted in you being you.

Resulting in talents and values and creativity.

It’s worthwhile noticing these.

Noticing the contributions of others, attending to the significant moments and expereinces.

Helpful and unhelpful, good and bad, positive and negative.

You now have so many points for growing, it’s astonishing

And there’s an added bonus:

when you begin actively and intentionally moving forward in your life, not only does your future aget better but your past does as well. Your past increasingly becomes something happening for you, not to you. … Your past evolves as you evolve.^

It’s where our life-in-all-its-fullness is to be found.

*From Martin Amor and Alex Pellew’s The Idea In You;
**Tim Ferriss, from Maria Popova and Claudia Bedrick’s A Velocity of Being;
^From Ben Hardy’s Personality Isn’t Permanent.

People of faith and hope are often unrealistic, and the realists have little faith or hope. We shall find a way out of the present situation only if realism and faith become blended together as they were in some of the great teachers of mankind.*
Erich Fromm

Every idea and every pursuit of an idea inside us is life. … The lack of ideas is death.**
Thomas Bernhard

Don’t be too realistic, don’t be over-reasonable.

Realism need faith and faith realism.

Wallace Stevens wrote of reality needing imagination and imagination needing reality.^

John O’Donohue writes about how movement needs stillness and stillness need movement:

Stillness is the canvas against which movement can become beautiful.  We can only appreciate movement against the background of stillness.  Were everything kinetic, we would not know what movement is.  As sound is sistered to silence, movement is sistered to stillness.^^

I woke this morning to find within myself a desire to keep moving and to keep wrestling for the gift I want to bring to others.

So, I will add another tension within which a rhythm of life pulses:

Struggle is sistered to acceptance, that is to making a space for the cause of our discontent.

But our deepest pleasures as artists result not only from surmounting but from continuously engaging with the difficulties that represent our greatest ambition.*^

*From Erich Fromm’s The Revolution of Hope;
**From Thomas Bernhard’s Correction, quoted in Peter Turchi’s A Muse and A Maze;
^See Wallace Stevens’ The Necessary Angel;
^^From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
*^From Peter Turchi’s A Muse and A Maze.

many people believe a curving our indirect path best describes the stories of our lives*
Peter Turchi

There is a strange attitude and feeling that one is not yet in real life. For the time being one is doing this or that, by whether it is [relationship with] a woman or a job, it is not yet what is really wanted, and there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about … .**
Marie-Louise von Franz

What would it be like if our sense of an ongoing journey and having all that we require are one and the same thing?

On the one hand, we are making our way through a story handed to us that we forget to question:

The industry of distraction
Makes us forget
That we live in a universe
And we become converts
To the religion of stress
And adore its deity of progress,
… .^

On the other, there is a greater story waiting to be discovered within:

The source of all art is the human psyche’s primal need for the resolution of stress and discord through beauty and harmony. … Life on its own, without art to shape it, leaves you in confusion and chaos, but well-told stories have the power to harmonise what you know with what you feel.^^

Our “art” materialises when we bring our passions and competencies together:

When passion of feeling and technical brilliance come together, the beauty can be devastating and transfiguring.*^

A simple guide might be:

Low passion, love competence: leave it to someone else;
Low passion, high competence: teach others;
High passion, low competence: learn more;
High passion, high competence: do more and more.

Gapingvoid suggests:

doing what you love is the new wealth^*.

*From Peter Turchi’s A Muse and A Maze;
**Marie-Louise von Franz, from Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks;
^From John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: For Citizenship;
^^From Robert McKee‘s newsletter: What Makes a Story a Work of Art?;
*^From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
^*From gapingvoid’s clog: The Great Reassessment.

A tree is a light-catcher that grows life from air.*
Maria Popova

Keeping it simple in the twenty-first century involves another set of important tasks. These include decluttering our minds by switching off our devices and disconnecting from digital distractions.**
Anna Katharina Schaffner

There is much I love about civilisation in its many forms, measuring, as it does, the journeys of the Human over many thousands of years:

we are emergent beings, in the flow of life, part of evolution^.

Yet sometimes it can feel suffocating with its endless multiplicity of layers: making and thinking and achieving, laying down ground cover and emitting noise and light pollution.

There remains in each of us a primal, wildness needing to be nourished. I do not mean a lawless primality, but one that is in awe of nature and our place within it:

however much we might uncover, nature will never cease to be filled with surprise ripe for the reaping*.

We all have a season ticket.

The things you do not have to say make you rich.
Saying things you do not have to say weakens your talk.
Hearing things you do not need to hear dulls your hearing.
And things you know before you hear them – those are you,
Those are why you are in the world.^^

*From Maria Popova’s The Marginalian: Every Loss Reveals What We Are Made of: Blue Bananas, Why Leaves Change Color, and the Ongoing Mystery of Chlorophyll;
**From Anna Katharina Schaffner’s The Art of Self Development;
^From Paul Gilbert’s The Compassionate Mind;
^^William Stafford, from John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty.