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. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been.**
Oliver Burkeman

We like being found – when we have something to do, a journey has to be made, someone asks a question – but allowing ourselves to be lost is how life becomes, well, more alive.

And as soon as we feel found, it’s time to get lost again.

*Mary Wells, quoted in gapingvoid’s blog: Always open self;
**From OlIver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks.

People go out to their work and to their labour until the evening.*

A job is made fun not by turning it into a game, but by deeply and deliberately pursuing it as a job. … We don’t play to distract ourselves from the world, but in order to partake in it.**
Ian Bogost

When the experience is painful, boring, or difficult, we’re tempted to distract ourselves, but, as Seth Godin helpfully identifies,

You can discover overlooked value by measuring things that are difficult to measure.^

All things are playable.

Turning towards the pain may provide personal insight, growth and transformation, turning towards the boring may result into previously unimagined possibilities, turning towards the difficult may lead us into collaborations and breakthroughs.

*Psalm 104:23;
**From Ian Bogost’s Play Anything;
^From Seth Godin’s blog: The easy measurements.

Oliver Burkeman warns against ‘the flawless standards of the imagination’.*

Our problem is that we can imagine multiple perfects.

At first these delight us but soon they tyrannise.

We don’t know where to begin to give expression to what is so wonderfully imagined.

And if we do start, we struggle to finish.

Good enough is a great place to begin, and it may even be more than enough to finish.

And good enough can always get better.

*From Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks.

When you cannot longer turn back, anxiety falls away, because now there’s only one direction to travel: forward into the consequences of your choice.*
Oliver Burkeman

We have unlearned the patience and attention of lingering at the thresholds where the unknown awaits us.**
John O’Donohue

Get the tension right between settling and exploring, and a greater life emerges.

When the tension goes awry, we are left with humdrum as one undesired possibility, or fantasising on unrealised possibilities as another.

Richard Rohr writes about the desire for more is not only good but holy:

It’s a kind of sacred discontent, a holy dissatisfaction, and a holy desire for more life, love, and generativity.^

What this requires of us is for us to give some expression to what matters most while ignoring not what does not matter to us, but what is important to us:

Figure out what it means
to put flesh and blood on it.
In your place,
at your time,
in your world,
figure it out.
…
You’ll do greater things than these.
Keep engaging,
keep arguing,
keep wrestling,
keep interpreting
keep dancing with it –
never stop turning the gem.^^

*From Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks;
**From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty:
^From Richard Rohr’s The Divine Dance;
^^From Rob Bell’s What is the Bible?

Alas, for those what never sing
But die with all their music in them.*
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Find out who you are and do it on purpose.**
Dolly Parton

Why wouldn’t we want to take a little time out, look inside, connect with what’s important to us and then get imaginative in how we express this?

*Oliver Wendell Holmes, quoted in Martin Amor and Alex Pellew’s The Idea in You;
**Dolly Parton, quoted in Austin Kleon’s blog: On solitude and being who you are.

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

There’ve have been a lot of roadworks on routes I’ve been travelling recently, but no matter how much I wanted to ignore the detour and continue on my anticipated road, the detours turned out to be the most straightforward way for keeping moving.

Somehow these words from Eugene Peterson are connecting here:

As the scholastics used to say: ‘Homo non proprie humanus sed superhumanus est – which means that to be properly human, you must go beyond the merely human.**

*From Seth Godin’s blog: Actual shortcuts often appear to be detours;
**From Eugene Peterson’s Run with the Horses.

One finger, one thumb, one hand, one arm, one leg, 
One nod of the head, then turn around, keep moving. 
One finger, one thumb, one hand, one arm, one leg, 
One nod of the head, then turn around, keep moving. 
One finger, one thumb, one hand, one arm, one leg, 
One nod of the head, then turn around, keep moving. 

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

*From Erich Fromm’s The Revolution of Hope.

First, pay close, foolish, even absurd attention to things. Then allow their structure, form, and nature to set the limits for the experiences you derive from them. By refusing to ask what could be different, and instead allowing what is present to guide us, we create a new space.*
Ian Bogost

*From Ian Bogost’s Play Anything.

If you keep telling people who they are, who their best selves are, if you keep reminding them of their true identify, there’s a good chance they’ll figure out what to do.*

*From Rob Bell’s What is the Bible?

And when okaying a game, the question is not how to overcome that structure, but how to subject oneself to it … the play is in the thing, not in us.*
Ian Bogost

*From Ian Bogost’s Play Anything.