It’s going to sound ugly before it sounds pretty, but it has to sound ugly.*
(Danielle Amedeo)

There’s no such thing as writer’s block. There’s simply a fear of bad writing. Do enough bad writing and some good writing is bound to show up. And along the way, you will clarify your thinking and strengthen your point of view. But it begins by simply writing something.**
(Seth Godin)

Singing, writing, beginning the day, or whatever we need to get to. We could sit here, waiting for some inspiration to come to us, or we could dive in, make a noise, take a pen for a journey across a page, be some sunshine to a grey, lifeless day, or the task we have to perform.

It doesn’t matter what it sounds like or reads like or looks like, we’ve made a start, and that provides you with a distinct advantage to not having done anything. Our minds and our hearts have something to work with.

In his latest book A Muse and a Maze, Peter Turchi includes how to complete the front and back hand palm illusion – a playing card that disappears. We could say, I can’t do that, or we can search for the playing cards and start practising.

*Danielle Amedeo, quoted in Tom Vanderbilt’s Beginners;
**From Seth Godin’s blog: Write something.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
    And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

(Gerard Manley Hopkins)

Children, in a very real sense, have beginners’ minds, open to wider possibilities. They see the world with fresh eyes, are less burdened with preconception and past experience, and are less guided by what they know to be true. They are likely to pick up details that adults might discard as irrelevant.*
(Tom Vanderbilt)

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)

So many things in this day are familiar, there are so many things on my mind, and I have so many things to do – and it isn’t 8am yet.

But this day is a wonderful thing, full of new delight and hope and possibility.

*From Tom Vanderbilt’s Beginners;
**From John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: A Blessing of Angels.

Ambition, competition, and greatness can, and in fact must, exist in the same universe as humility, selflessness, and servanthood.*
(Erwin McManus)

After each episode of flow a person becomes more of a unique individual, less predictable, possessed of rarer skills.
(Mihály Csikszentmihalyi)

Some are tempted, when they see the toxic nature of competition, to replace it outright with cooperation.

Cooperation is good, our goal, but misses the edge competition brings for everyone, those we work with and those we seek to deliver to.

Yet those who only pursue ambition, competition and greatness lose out on how much farther we can travel when we pursue humility and selflessness and servanthood, too.

By these means, in uncovering our individuality, we find our cooperation.

*From Erwin McManus’ The Way of the Warrior;
**From Mihály Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow.

You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.*
(Annie Dillard)

With the increasing specialisation of knowledge, and professionalisation of everyday life, suddenly being delighted by something, or loving something, was seen as vaguely disreputable.**
(Tom Vanderbilt)

Tom Vanderbilt is reflecting on how the meanings of dilettante (from the Italian dilettare – “to delight”) and amateur (from the French aimer – to love”) have changed over time.

The work I’ve been developing for more than twenty years is about helping people to develop their talents into strengths, to focus on what they are good at and passionate about, but as Vanderbilt ponders,

What new passions might there be out there that you’ve yet to discover?**

It’s a good question that provides me with both nuance for my work and a personal challenge.

Quoting Winston Churchill, he encourages me to turn to other things which I can both love and delight in. Not in order to become an expert but, as I would suggest, to wander through:

It may well be that those whose work is their pleasure are those who most need the means of banishing it at intervals from their minds.^

The other delightful and lovely part of this is that we have no idea as we begin just what will be added to to what we love and delight in most of all.

*Annie Dillard, quoted in Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing blog: Olfactory Work;
**From Tom Vanderbilt’s Beginners:
^Winston Churchill, quoted in Tom Vanderbilt’s Beginners.

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind there are few.*
(Shunryu Suzuki)

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

If we are to become more, we must become less.

To learn new things is to be one without knowledge and expertise, our place of limitation.

At first we are incompetent, clumsy, mistake-ridden, but a different you and a different me will emerge.

Until we begin again.

*Shunryu Suzuki, quoted in Tom Vanderbilt’s Beginners;
**From Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life.

a lot of people were raised to believe that they need needed to fix their weaknesses but their talents would take care of themselves*
(Mary Reckmeyer)

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)

We have the opportunity to be for others the space of encouragement they need to explore the height and depth and length of their possibility.

It is also the means by which we move into greater discovery because we realise we need to grow and become in order to be the place they need:

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 requires all of who you are.^

We don’t know all of who we are. At least I hope I don’t. This is a journey that may be never-ending, if we are prepared to make it:

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 if its own habits and repetitions, that never engages with the risk of its own possibility, remains an unlived life.^^

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

strengths are not the opposite of weaknesses, and you can’t turn weaknesses into strengths*
(Mary Reckmeyer)

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

For a long time, we’ve been on a journey into our strengths.

We’ve had to negotiate temptations to compromise, demands to go with the flow of what others or the culture demand.

Strengths are more than talents, a weaving together of our abilities and passions and most enriching experiences, laying where we find ourselves in the vitality of the present moment, forgetful of self, at home in our wildness:^

The poet wrote the poem no doubt, but he forgot himself while he wrote it, and we forget him while we read.^^

One of the sad things today is that so many are frightened by the wonder of their own presence. … This identity may be totally at variance with the wild energies that are rising inside their should. Many of us get very afraid and we eventually compromise. We settle for something safe, rather than engaging the danger and the wildness that is in our own hearts.*^

*From Mary Reckmeyer’s Strengths Based Parenting;
**From Erwin McManus’ The Way of the Warrior;
^This doesn’t mean that we cannot learn new things, nor learn from others who have completely different strengths to ours: indeed, these are signs that we are pursuing our strengths rather than our weaknesses;
^^E. M. Forster, quoted in Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting;
*^John O’Donohue, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: A Gentle Corrective for the Epidemic of Identity Politics Turning Us on Each Other and on Ourselves.

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

We all need some quiet place to go to uncover our questions: seek, ask, knock.

*From Seth Godin’s blog: Destinations, risks and journeys.

To forget its Creator is one of the function of a Creation.*
(E. M. Forster)

Forget me but, please, remember to be you:

Who is my True Self?

What is my Contribution?

*E. M. Forster, quoted in Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting.