Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.*
(John Wooden)

The man of action … forgets a great deal to do one thing.**
(Friedrich Nietzsche)

Strength isn’t invincibility, peace isn’t serene calmness.

They never have been.

They are about continuing and overcoming through failure and doubt, difficulty and anxiety, challenge and complexity, against the odds to prosper and flourish.

So we keep going with what it is we must do.

Maybe if we’re feeling invincible and serenely calm then we’re not doing what we must.

*John Wooden, quoted in Mary Reckmeyer’s Strengths Based Parenting;
**Friedrich Nietzsche, quoted in Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting.

Here is my secret. It’s quite simple: One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is inevitable to the eyes.*
(The Little Prince)

Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.**
(Jesus of Nazerath)

We can only see so much with our minds.

There is much more to be seen with our hearts.

More still only within our activeness.

*The Little Prince, quoted in Austin Kleon’s blog: How to draw what is invisible;
**Matthew 7:7-8.

My heart is steadfast, O God, my heart is steadfast. I will sing and make melody. Awake, my soul! Awake, O harp and lyre! I will awake the dawn.*

The adjacent possibilities are plenty but can dissipate when met by our plans.

A friend introduced me yesterday to David Whyte’s A Morning Poem:

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.**

I didn’t know it when I arose this morning that I would be reading a very similar thought from John O’Donohue:

May morning be astir with the harvest of night:
Your mind quickening to the eros of a new question,
Your eyes seduced by some unintended glimpse
That cut right through a surface to a source.
…
A morning when you become a pure vessel
For what wants to ascend from silence
…
To reach beyond silence
And the wheel of repetition.
…
In order to come to birth
In a clean line of form,
That claims from time
A rhythm not yet heard
That calls space to
A different shape.^

I’d already read these words and passed on when I re-read Whyte’s. I almost missed the significance of them, moving on to read other lines in other books.

That’s the problem, we can so easily miss that moment of possibility, of imagining a different day: it led to an idea for a piece of art.

In this moment Whyte mentions, there’s the possibility of forgetting what we were going to do, and re-membering what we could do.

Bring the unplanned possibilities to birth.

Here is Whyte’s poem for morning in its entirety:

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.

To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.
You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?
Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?^^

*Psalm 57:7-8;
**From David Whyte’s A Morning Poem;
^From John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: For the Artist at the Start of the Day;
^^A Morning Poem.

Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield.  It’s the void between depression and flourishing – the absence of well-being. You don’t have symptoms of mental illness, but you’re not the picture of mental health either. You’re not functioning at full capacity.*
(Adam Grant)

The secret to diagnosing the problem with a broken scene lies in its subtext.**
(Robert McKee)

Whether as a result of the pandemic or because the doldrums are where you’ve increasingly found yourself recently, there are ways to get moving again.

One basic way is to introduce more physical movement to the day.

Then move your thinking and feeling with reading, watching and listening to new things, feeding your imagination and spirit.

Capture all of this in journaling and then look for the smallest iterations of ideas that come to you to try out: moving your doing.

As Robert McKee suggests, the brokenness lies in the subtext, Peter Senge would concur: it’s not the reinforcing system/behaviour that we see on the surface where the issueless, it’s the balancing system/stuff beneath the surface we need to tackle.^

Keep pushing the reinforcing behaviour and things will likely become worse. Slow down, go deeper, and explore the balancing world and something new will appear.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm
For your soul sense the world that awaits you.^^

*Adam Grant, quoted in Sam Radford’s blog: Languishing, the neglected middle child of mental health;
**From Robert McKee‘s newsletter: The Secret to Fixing Broken Scenes;
^See Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline;
^^From John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: For a New Beginning.

Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.*
(John O’Donohue)

By choosing form, he’d be setting up to become an explorer. His goal to discover all that the form is capable of.**
(Scott McCloud)

What is “it”?

How has it been done before?

How will you do it?

Or perhaps you will do something completely different?

As species after species passes on their genes, what we’d notice – if we could hang around a mighty long time – is that each generation basically does what the last generation did.

Then we come to humans, able to change direction in an instant and do something differently or even to pursue something that’s never been done before.

Here’s how John O’Donohue’s blessing begins:

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you are ready to emerge.*

*From John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: For a New Beginning;
**From Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics.

As short as the time
From spark to flame,
So brief may the distance be
Between heart and being.
…
May courage
Cause our hearts to flame,
In the name of the Fire,
And of the Flame
And the Light.*
(John O’ Donohue)

In her book Strengths Based Parenting, Mary Reckmeyer tells the stories of fashion designer Jason Wu and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, examples of pursuing passions from an early age – both supported by their parents from before the age of 10 in what they were becoming interested in.

Whilst these stories show us how it is possible for someone’s curiosity can become an interest and turn into a flaming passion, they may leave us believing we are too late when it comes to pursuing passion.

This is just not so.

John O’Donohue offers us the image of spark to a flame to illustrate how things can so quickly alter.

We need only start by noticing what we notice and lean into this.

I was reminded of the Jesuit steps** that allowed them to pursue what they most wanted to pursue in life, these being self-awareness, innovation, love, and courage:

It takes courage to specialise and build a small great thing.^

Courage is the product of our pursuit of interest: we will be most courageous about those things that matter most to us.

Onwards!, because it is not too late:

Knowledge allows us to get our bearings, but it’s imagination and action that give us the forward motion we need to start and finish.^^

*From John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: In Praise of Fire;
**Check out Chris Lowney’s Heroic Leadership;
^From Bernadette Jiwa’s The Story of Telling blog: A Small Great Thing;
^^From Bernadette Jiwa’s The Story of Telling blog: Start to Finish.

Society wants us to I’ve a planned existence, following paths that have been travelled by others. Tried and true. The known, the expected, the controlled, the safe. The path of the wanderer is not this. The path of the wanderer is an experiment with the unknown. To idle. To daydream.*
(Keri Smith)

I bring the concept of Shabbat to all the artists I work with. … On this day, I instruct them, they can tend to their bodies, relationships, homes rest, leisure, and all else that becomes neglected through the week of living in late capitalism.**
(Beth Pickens)

For more than thirty years every weekend was taken up with work.

I always struggled to make up the time with family and self.

I am learning.

*From Keri Smith’s The Wander Society;
**From Beth Pickens’ Make Your Art No Matter What.

When something is forgotten, the heart/mind no longer sees it. You could there translate [Dogen Zenji’s] “self-forgetting” this way: “When we study the self it disappears.”*
(Lewis Hyde)

Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisite for growth?: the openness to experience events, and the willingness to be changed by them.**
(Warren Berger)

The 13th century Zen master Dogen Zenji taught:

to study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be verified by all things.*

These words caught my attention because of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s discoveries about flow, that we are the least aware of self when we are involved in something that takes us out of ourselves and into the activity:

flow – the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it … “Flow” is the way people describe their state of mind when consciousness is harmoniously ordered, and they want to pursue whatever they are doing for its own sake … Flow avoids both selfishness and conformity^.

This description can cover all kinds of activities, but, for me, the highest pursuit is the understanding of our True Self and the contribution we can male that result in both flow and the experience of opening the mind, heart and will to the other, finding ourselves in wonder and possibility and creation.

Towards losing the self in the flow of your life try writing out your values. Not just as a list of words, but dig deeply into them, drawing out more and more nuance: you may wish to ask the question Why does this matter to me? five times to help with this. Also, to ask how do you want to include more people in this value.

May I live this day

Compassionate of heart,
Clear in word,
Gracious in awareness,
Courageous in thought,
Generous in love.^^

*From Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting;
**From Warren Berger’s Glimmer;
^From Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow;
^^From John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: Matins.

Most innovative projects … tend to begin with someone venturing out into the world, looking around, and noticing a problem or need.*
(Warren Berger)

What is the new horizon in you that wants to be seen?**
(John O’Donohue)

The way we describe our gods may well be the way we want to be ourselves, inquisitive and flabbergasted by human potential:

Gracious is the Lord, and righteous; our God is merciful. The Lord protects the simple; when I was brought low, he saved me. Return, O my soul, to your rest, for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you.^

How do we become more gracious, righteous, merciful, protecting, saving, bountiful?

Hannah Arendt wrote about how:

Forgiving is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly.^^

Arendt is pointing to something new that didn’t exist before, the product of a generative being: which we all are.

Those we remember and honour most are most likely to have expressed the qualities and characteristics found in the psalm. We hear and read and see their stories of goodness and are reminded that we all have the potential to be better than we are in this moment.

Warren Berger encourages us to step outside of our world and take a look around.

Our curiosity will lead us to something new that we can begin, and beginnings are the gateways to becoming, as John O’Donohue proffers:

Through the innocence of beginning we are often seduced into growth.**

May we take a look around today, notice what is emerging for us, and step into a beginning.

*From Warren Berger’s Glimmer;
**From John O’Donohue’s Benedictus;
^Psalm 116:5-7
^^Hannah Arendt, quoted in Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting.

The Greeks believed that time had secret structure There was the time of ‘epiphany’ when time suddenly opened and something was revealed in luminous clarity. There was the moment of ‘krisis’ when time got entangled and directions became confused and contradictory. There was also the moment of ‘kairos’; this was the propitious moment.*
(Lewis Hyde)

To live a conscious life, we need to constantly refine our listening.**
(John O’Donohue)

What time is it?

Not the time of day, but where you find yourself in what you must do?

There’s a time to work and a time to rest.

There’s a time to wait and be open and receive.

And there’s a time to wrestle with what’s important to you when it’s not going right.

There’s a time to continue working at something because it’s not finished.

And there’s a time to stop what you’re doing and deliver.

All of these are legitimate times and accepting this allows us to listen to the times and use them well in service to what we must do:

We must face the fact that we have a responsibility to own what’s possible. Opportunity abounds And that’s both a comforting and a scary thought.^

*From Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting;
**From John O’Donohue’s Benedictus;
^From Bernadette Jiwa’s The Story of Telling blog: The Bounds of Possibility.