Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.*
(Albert Szent-Györgi)

Paths run through people as surely as they run through places.**
(Robert Mcintyre)

We can doubt how much we’re capable of.

Perhaps others don’t value what we value. We don’t see a place in the market for what we bring. So we drop it and fit in.

The reality is more likely to be that if we uncover, curate and describe (that is, give shape to) what we notice, we will see even more and have even more ideas.

We have to travel the path.

We find our path to walk within us, one that provides us with a unique perspective on the world around us.

For those who do not give up, but bring their whole of life attention (talents, energies/passion, values) to bear, there is the possibility of a state of knowing and understanding they had not imagined, as Nancy Kline suggests:

Ease emerges and dips and saunters, draping itself around Attention’s focus, allowing it dimensions greater than focus alone can produce.^

From which emerge new possibilities to bring to others.

When the way is flat and dull in times of grey endurance,
May your imagination continue to evoke horizons.^^

*Albert Szent-Györgi, quoted in Rohit Bhargava’s Non Obvious 2019;
**From Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways;
^From Nancy Kline’s More Time to Think;
^^From John O’Donohue’s To Bless the Space Between Us: For Those Who Hold Power.

Some people as they grow up become less … . Other people as they grow up become more.*
(Eugene Peterson)

The birth of a person is the aim of pedagogy.**
(M. C. Richards)

Today is my 62nd birthday, so I guess I’m sensitive to anything referring to birth and to growing up.

As I read Rohit Bhargava’s non obvious trend of Overwealthy – a name he provides for those who struggle with being wealthy – I did consider juxtaposing his words with those of Eugene Peterson:

the Gläce Luxury Ice Company sells tasteless ice that had been “hand-carved” from large purified blocks … . At just over $300 for a bag of 50 ice cubes, it promises customers “minimum dilution and maximum cooling,” … .^

This felt like a variation of the folktale The Emperor’s New Clothes.

I also came upon words describing what coming alive means for the Trobriand Islanders:

the Trobriand universe is a vast disembodied space filled with both minds and energy. Cosmic minds are all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-powerful, able to manipulate the energy of the universe toward whatever end they desire.^^

The problem is, if you can do whatever you want and you know everything there is to know, the result is cosmic boredom:

They have power to do whatever they wish, but because they have no needs, that power has no purpose, and because of that, no sense of life. So these cosmic minds have created a game for the relief of their boredom:

To play, you must be born into a human body, and to be born as such, you must forget the fullness of what you knew and work only with what can be known through the body.^^

Welcome to life!

Perhaps you are one of these cosmic minds, escaping boredom but finding purpose, the possibility of growing up to become more.

I think my greatest fear, as I continue to grow up, is not to have less but to be less.

The wanderer becomes one with himself or herself and the universe. We connect with the energy of all living things. We live according to our inner nature.*^

*From Eugene Peterson’s Run With the Horses;
**From M. C. Richards’ Centering;
^From Rohit Bhargava’s Non Obvious 2019;
^^From Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting;
*^From Keri Smith’s The Wander Society.

Created in beauty and secretly sustained all the while by beauty, you surrender now to ultimate awakening.*
(John O’Donohue)

Oh no!

I didn’t set the alarm on my fitbit.

I was trying to get back to sleep, lingering in bed because I thought it was five, but it had gone seven and I needed to be up at six.

When I discovered this, I was fully awake.

There’s an equivalent here with beauty.

For a start, none of know know quite what we’re capable of: unexplored continents of possibility.

We’re waiting for an alarm to go off, for something to happen that will be significant, life-transcending, and all the time we could have been up to the adventure of exploring more beauty.

The reason we’re really positioned is because we are who we are.

*From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty.

The pot, the poem, the lesson – the universe speaks in forms that tell us of our own.  A vast theatre whose architecture, whose movement and sound, whose episodes have us billed in cosmic roles, speaking lines we cannot memorise for we know them for the first time consciously only when we utter them, developing character and destiny amid what scenery.*
(M. C. Richards)

There is so much to be learned of Divine Beauty from the silence of God.**
(John O’Donohue)

May there be some thin silence in your day.

*From M. C. Richards’ Centering;
**From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty.

I would rather wonder than know. It makes it more and more difficult to be alive on earth in these times, when your inclination is to wonder rather than to know. … I think wondering is a way of inhabiting and lingering. There seems to be more dwelling. To dwell, inhabit, and linger. I’m interested in those things. And you can do that when you don’t know. … I would rather inhabit the question, or dwell. For me, that is the place I want to live in.*
(Mary Ruefle)

Here’s something you may like to try this weekend … or do a little each day through the week.

Take an A4 sheet of plain paper and divide it into square. I’ve darkened my incomplete doodle here so you can see the pencil and how you don’t have to do this with a ruler.

The temptation is to draw a picture on a big sheet of paper and that can be intimidating. The idea here is to get abstract and work small. So take a square at a time and fill it in with abstract shapes from the visual alphabet. Jump around a little, rather than starting in the top left corner, and when sales touch “stitch” them together with some more abstract shapes.

As I mentioned, you can this is one last a week, setting it out and taking a few minutes here and there to dawdle and chill, or as it says – I like the Mary Ruefle quote a lot – dwell, inhabit, linger.

*Mary Ruefle, quoted in Austin Kleon’s blog: To wonder rather than know.

I would rather wonder than know. It makes it more and more difficult to be alive on earth in these times, when your inclination is to wonder rather than to know. … I think wondering is a way of inhabiting and lingering. There seems to be more dwelling. To dwell, inhabit, and linger. I’m interested in those things. And you can do that when you don’t know. … I would rather inhabit the question, or dwell. For me, that is the place I want to live in.*
(Mary Ruefle)

Whatever house you enter, first say, “Peace to this house!”**
(Jesus of Nazareth)

To understand or to wonder?

I choose the flexibility of wonder rather than the rigidity of understanding:

We do not need understanding, we do not want understanding, we want to love. Understanding already separates the observer from the observed. It is faintly condescending, faintly superior.^

It is not that I do not want to understand and to understand as much as possible, it is that I want my wondering always to outmeasure it.

Jesus’ words are a blessing for prosperity, for more: bless yourself by dwelling, inhabiting, lingering in wonder and then bless others through more dwelling, inhabiting and lingering.

Indeed wonder is how we dwell, inhabit and linger.

*Mary Ruefle, quoted in Austin Kleon’s blog: To wonder rather than know;
**Luke 10:5;
^From M. C. Richards’ Centering.

[W]e do not win our depth and our inner form and our texture and our truth of being without the fire. Ordeal by fire. There is not substitute for transformation of the body.*
(M. C. Richards)

Read, look into other areas, use different learning mediums, ask better questions, reflect, be open to ideas, be surrounded by learners, and prioritise learning.**
(Michael Heppell)

So you’re saying that the best place to begin is by looking inside of myself, to see who I am and what I have, which is more than I know and more than enough?

Yes.

But you’re also saying, I need to be open to more and more of more, learn every day, meet new people, try new things, experiment and explore and fail and try again?

Yes.

Okay, just checking.

*From M. C. Richards’ Centering;
**From Michael Heppell’s The Edge.

I am bigger than this. And may I be helped to grow to my full size.*
(M. C. Richards)

Each year, Rohit Bhargava compiles a list of non-obvious trends.

For 2019 he includes what he carefully describes as the trend of extreme uncluttering.

This not only includes possessions, but also venues and experiences, digital distractions and brands.

On the one hand, he encourages me to tidy up the bedroom cum study I use for working in and I will engage in some uncluttering today.

Before I get to the other hand, I was also reading M. C. Richards remark with which we begin, this emerging from a conversation she has with a four year old. She continues:

a good teacher is taught by his students. For he is not to teach them merely what he knows but to help to bring to maturity what is already in them. It takes, of course a very good ear, to hear what is present in a child, or an adult.*

So, on the other hand, the question presented itself, while I could do with clearing out things that fill my study, would I clear out any of the things I have learnt over all the years?

I don’t think so, for one way or another they are the very things that have grown me bigger, and I don’t know how big I can grow.

The same is true for you.

Richards names some critical superpowers we are all capable of developing and possessing:

I am not concerned with what we like. I am concerned with our power to grasp, to comprehend, to penetrate, and to embrace.*

I also happened to be reading Maria Popova’s post this morning on Derek Jarman’s retreat from London to a seaside home and garden, a place he came to terms with AIDs, reconnecting with one of the most important urges towards noticing – without which it is difficult to learn:

I have re-discovered my boredom here… where I can fight “what next” with nothing.**

Popova reflects on Jarman’s discovery of boredom:

His boredom, like all of our boredom, becomes a laboratory for presence — a nursery in which to grow the capacity for paying attention, a studio in which to master the vital art of noticing, out of which our contact with beauty and gladness arises — the wellspring of all that makes life livable.^

I feel as if I have come upon some important uncluttering: of busyness and rush, of noise and distraction, of avoidance and denial, of answers and the final word, but not of everything I have learnt.

May you keep learning bigger.

*From M. C. Richards’ Centering;
**Derek Jarman, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Growing Through Grief: Derek Jarman on Gardening as Creative Redemption, Consecration of Time, and Training Ground for Presence;
^From Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Growing Through Grief: Derek Jarman on Gardening as Creative Redemption, Consecration of Time, and Training Ground for Presence.

I think copying someone’s work is the fastest way to learn certain things about drawing and line.  It’s funny how there is such a taboo against it. I learned everything from just copying other people’s work.*
(Lynda Barry)

True worth for such a person inheres in the creative spirit, and the objects of the world move accordingly, not to see other illusory value.**
(Lewis Hyde)

This article in Futurity encourages leaders to spend time reflecting at the beginning of the day on the kind of leader they want to be, if they want to be more effective.

You don’t have to be a leader to benefit from this practice.

Whatever we do, we can spend time the beginning of your day pondering and playing with how others have done similar things to what we want to do, imagining ways to innovate, and then to use the day to make something original.

We might call it our stylistic cave where we listen to others and come to hone your own voice:

Ars tua vocem tuam: your voice is your art.

*Lynda Barry, quoted in Austin Kleon’s blog: Copying is how we learn;
**From Lewis Hyde’s The Gift;
^A term borrowed from George Saunders: Austin Kleon’s blog: Getting out from under the influence.

We have to have some way of giving priority to different potentials within us. This is where a sense of self and self-identity come in.*
(Paul Gilbert)

If we find our story isn’t helping us, if it’s inaccurate or distracting or enervating, we can work to change it.**
(Seth Godin)

Personal stories are like maps.

Maps are not the real thing, but they help us record and navigate what is real.

The wise person, then, continually update their maps, which is to say, they work on their stories.

They know it’s foolish to deny their encounters with reality and instead hold firmly to their maps as they are; they know the resulting experiences can be painful.

The wise open their minds whilst the foolish close theirs.

They open their hearts rather than close and secure them.

They open their willingness to act, to grow rather than become fixed.

Every day’s a map-making day.

*From Paul Gilbert’s The Compassionate Mind;
**From Seth Godin’s blog: Inventing narratives.