although it may appear paradoxical, in order to acquire a profound view of things, you must first of all move randomly*
Federico Castigliano

Where is your ifthen? We all have them. … Too often an ifthen is nothing but a stall.**
Seth Godin

We wander through the adjacent stuff of life and we come upon an emerging possibility, but also an ifbutmaybe: if this happens, but I can’t do this, maybe one day.

Behind the ifbutmaybe, almost obscured by it, is commitment.

*From Federico Castigliano’s Flâneur.
**From Seth Godin’s blog: Where is your ifthen?

When a firefighter is told to drop his firefighting tools, he is told to forget he is a firefighter.*
Norman Maclean

When you are looking for a vocation, you are looking for a daemon. … You are trying to find that tension or problem that arouses great waves of moral, spiritual, and relational energy.**
David Brooks

Firefighters who couldn’t let go of their tools to save themselves and engineers who couldn’t let go of their data and allowed Challenger to launch are some of the stories told by David Epstein as he considers how it is essential to drop our familiar tools when working in complexity, what he calls wicked problems.

They highlight for us how, if we are to take hold of an adjacent possibility for our lives, we will need to let go of the familiar.

By all means, give yourself the chance to mourn your loss, then move on.

*Norman Maclean, quoted in David Epstein’s Range;
**From David Brooks’ The Second Mountain.

Learning stuff was less important than learning about oneself. Exploration is not just a whimsical luxury of education; it is a central benefit.*
David Epstein

Free and alone in the city, the flâneur craves a revelation that might change his life and destiny.**
Federico Castigliano

There are moments in our lives when we sense a desire to be more awake, more alive.

This can be quickly followed by the pull of the necessary and the urgent into a forgetfulness.

When those moments appear, it’s best to throw ourselves into discovering the sound of our exploration.

*From David Epstein’s Range;
**From Federico Castigliano’s Flâneur.

Focusing narrowly on many fine details specific to a problem at hand feels like the exact right thing to do, when it is often exactly wrong.*
David Epstein

We reshape ourselves as we write.**
Ross MacDonald

We reshape ourselves as we wander, too.

Thank you to Federico Castigliano for the word traipse: another great word for wandering.

Every morning, I traipse through words and pictures in books and online, both intrigued and inspired by this growing partnership for understanding to activeness. Here’s one such purveyor of words and image, Edward Carey.

This is how I make a book: by hiding from writing by drawing, or the other way around.^^

So, I am out and about, traipsing, wandering, through words and pictures, in what feels to be far more infinite experience. All too soon, I will be called back “inside,” into the finite, into the various activities of the day, but carrying, I hope, some infinite in my heart and mind.

*From David Epstein’s Range;
**Ross MacDonald, quoted in Peter Turchi’s A Muse and a Maze;
^From Federico Castigliano’s Flâneur;
^^Edward Carey, quoted in Austin Kleon’s blog: My interview with writer and artist Edward Carey.

With only slight exaggeration I would say that we are not; we continually constitute ourselves anew and differently at the intersection of all this influences that reach into the sphere of our being.*
Rainer Maria Rilke

The sense of wonder can also help you to recognise and appreciate the mystery of your own life.**
John O’Donohue

Monozukuri is Japanese for “thing making” – tinkering.

Gunpei Yokoi was a tinkerer. I’ve just been reading about how Nintendo’s designer enabled the card game manufacturer become a leading games producer, not by leading the technology but with lateral thinking and withered technology, that is, using ideas from other areas of life and dated technology.

When the Game Boy was released,^ one of Yokoi’s colleagues glumly told him that a competitor was also launching a handheld device. Yokoi asked whether it had a colour screen and, when confirmed, replied “Then we’re fine.”^^ Yokoi knew that who the Game Boy lacked human imagination would fill in. He was right.

This got me thinking about how we each get to tinker with our lives every day. We are infinite beings, inasmuch as there’s always another way to invent ourselves. It doesn’t matter if we think everyone else has left us behind with some shinier, trendier, teched-up lifestyle. That there’s more past than future means we have a wellspring of “withered technology.” With imagination, we can bring something innovative and generous and satisfying into being.

*From Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters on Life;
**From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes;
^Yokoi noticed someone playing on his calculator in order to pass the time on a train journey home and wondered if a game could be made small enough for a businessman to play with it on his journey home;
^^Gunpei Yokoi, quoted in David Epstein’s Range.

Sometimes the home field can be so constrained that a curious outsider is truly the only one who can see the solution.*
David Epstein

We know the situation better than anyone else. The knowledge we can call upon is voluminous. Our position is well thought through and tested. And yet the solution evades us.

The outsider who deeply listens and then reframes the problem from a perspective that seems to have nothing to do with the issue- or situation-at hand may be the one who helps us to our solution.

May we be open to the outsider and also be the outsider to others, not underestimating what it is we bring when we are prepared to deeply listen.

*From David Epstein’s Range.

You have to carry a big basket to bring something home.*
Frances Hesselbein

Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience.**
Robert McKee

Frances Hesselbein is now 106 years old and possibly still working – she certainly was at 100.

Making herself through volunteering, she moved into her first paid employ in her mid-50s, transforming the organisations she worked with, including the Girl Scouts in the United States. She had no plan as she set out on this epic journey, feeling ill-prepared for each role and learning as she went, a favourite beginning to her story being “I never envisaged … .”

Frances carries a big basket.

And we all have our basket.

Even if we haven’t been intentional, we’ll have gathered plenty along the way and it will be worth our while to take a look at just what’s in there.

And knowing it’s there, we can make it bigger: widening it to gather more, deepening it to hold more.

To borrow, Robert McKee’s words, what we are then doing is creating a story to take what we have and make a difference, as Lewis Hyde exhorts us:

The only essential is this: the gift must always move.^

David Brooks offers the following as the stages of intimacy: a glance, curiosity, dialogue, pushing open the gates.^^ They provide us with our own stages for peering into our basket: take a look, ask questions, begin exploring, commit to finding out more. There are more stages to follow – the leap, crisis, forgiveness, fusion (try out ensuing ideas, fail, start again, commit) – but for now I just want you to take a peek at what’s in your basket.

*Frances Hesselbein, after a girl scout leader, quoted in David Epstein’s Range;
**From Robert McKee’s newsletter: Why Audiences Love Action;
^From Lewis Hyde’s The Gift;
^^From David Brooks’ The Second Mountain.

Writing in your journal is more powerful than simple meditation for the same reason that writing your goals down is more powerful than leaving them in your head.*
Ben Hardy

It’s the same inward journey we’ve seen before: the plunge inward and then the expansion outward.**
David Brooks

Writing is an incredible gift: when we write something out then we are more likely to be consistent.

Try it: think of something you want to accomplish this week.

Now try writing it out: spot the difference?

*From Benjamin Hardy’s Willpower Doesn’t Work;
**From David Brooks’ The Second Mountain.

[A man] doesn’t always know himself what he would do, but he feels by instinct, I’m good for something, even so! … I know that I could be quite a different man! … There’s something within me, so what is it!*
Vincent van Gogh

Take me down to the spring of my life, and tell me my nature and my name.**
George Appleton

Vincent van Gogh attempted one venture after another in order to plumb the depths of his being including art dealer, teacher, missionary, but none of these reached the depths of who he was and what he could do.

Even when he returned to art, his drawings and watercolours didn’t take him there.

Out in a storm, he was to discover it was to work quickly with oils that took him there where he found his crystallising intent and he began his art-altering work.

Anything less would have been a lie, as it is for each of us.

*Vincent van Gogh, quoted in David Epstein’s Range;
**George Appleton, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.

Thou shalt create complex characters rather than merely complicated story.*
Robert McKee

If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success your life has probably been wasted.**
Thomas Merton

The culture offers many attractive stories to step into, but the best stories are those we’ll only be able to imagine and live as we develop the complexity of our character.

*From Robert McKee’s newsletter: Building a Character;
**Thomas Merton, quoted in Richard Rohr’s Immortal Diamond.