Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.*
(Mohandas Gandhi)

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

Hungry?

Beyond everyday appetites, do you find yourself discontented and dissatisfied, but not sure what it will take to sate these feelings?

We’re often find ourselves in a rush, and rush blurs much of what is happening both around and within us. We’re possibly unable to articulate exactly what we feel, we only know something is amiss.

Richard Rohr, identifies these feelings as good things, perhaps a little unexpected coming from a Franciscan friar:

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

Rohr intimates this more is not only about receiving, but also giving – giving I believe to be bespoke to each of us.

We can try and satisfy these felt needs with all kinds of things, only to be disappointed.

We need bigger stories.

James Carse writes of myths:

 Myth provokes explanation but accepts none of it.  Where explanation absorbs the unspeakable into the speakable, myth reintroduces the silence that makes original discourse possible.^^

I understand Carse to be saying, whilst myth provokes understanding and meaning, it will not allow us to declare “this is it,” but holds us before the oh-so-large wonder and mystery of unknown depths until something new and unexpected arises.

I came across some words from my friend Dan concerning a venture we were engaged in together some years ago – a bigger story that, in truth, we had no idea where it was leading:

VOX is scary, and we have to keep doing the scary stuff, else we’ll just keep doing the same stuff and not very well.*^

How do we enter more?

The way in is as close as our lives. In attending to what they’re whispering to us, the will be shown the way.

*Mohandas Gandhi, quoted in Jay Cross’ Informal Learning
**From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty
^From Richard Rohr’s The Divine Dance
**From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games
*^Dan Arnold about VOXedinburgh back in 2013

Why is it possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,000 light years away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you’ve been stuck with yourself all your life?*
(Walker Percy)

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

I’m good at some things but there are many things I’m not very good at. One way in which I can understand my developed talents is as limitation, but it is from my limitation that creativity emerges – through accepting and working with these limitations I am able to manipulate the limitations in the world around me when I accept them for what they are.

It is the same for each of us.

When we embrace this, we stop wishing we could do this or that, or only had this or that, we are able to begin:

[Johan Huizinga is] suggesting that anything whatsoever can be constrained as a ground for play, where play becomes possible once the materials at hand are taken seriously and manipulated with deliberateness.^

Between the limitations within and the limitations without there emerges creativity.

We have to keep finding out who we are, though, if we are to do it on purpose – we’re ongoing explorations.

This involves me in a journey from the middle of my life (I-in-me) to the edge where I can see a bigger world including a bigger way of seeing myself (I-in-it); this world includes people who are different to me in their thinking, feeling and acting, who help me see who they are and who I am differently (I-in-us).

When we combine our different limitations the world changes – or perhaps can be seen for what it has always been:

Life is always a configuration of abundance, even as individual lives might experience scarcity.^^

What an adventure to be involved in; let me know ifI can help.

Alas for those that never sing
But die with all their music in them.^*

*From Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos;
**Dolly Parton, quoted in Austin Kleon’s blog: On solitude, and being who you are;
^From Ian Bogost’s Play Anything;
^^From Graham Leicester’s Transformative Innovation;
*^Oliver Wendell Holmes, quoted in Martin Amor and Alex Pellew’s The Idea in You.

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

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

Good choices open up possibilities, bad choices close them down.

Great choices make it possible for us to take the detour from being merely human to be properly human – something that will look different for each of us whilst being something we have in common.

Some of the very involve choosing humility, gratitude and faithfulness.

These open up integrity, (connectedness), wholeness (enoughness) and perseverance.

The real shortcuts are those that take a while to get to somewhere significant.

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

I was looking for a piece of paper to doodle on and this was on the other side from quite a few years ago – happenstance.

It is a constant effort and hard work – an inexplicably life-affirming – to honour who you are what you believe, and why you are here.*
(Elle Luna)

Erich Fromm redefines resurrection so that we might also experience it in the everyday:

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.^

I don’t know about you, but there are many things that don’t quite go as I imagined or planned, so the thought that today comes with the possibility of something being moved from death to resurrection is one that I want to grasp, understanding that it will also take effort and hard work.

There’s plenty to go around, too.

*From Elle Luna’s The Crossroads of Should and Must;
**From Erich Fromm’s The Revolution of Hope.

Fun will require his to see the hidden potential in ordinary things so that we can put them to new uses. The defamiliarisation common to art offers another example of distinction between use and potential.*
(Ian Bogost)

The future is already here, just unevenly distributed.**
(Graham Leicester)

We hear a lot of about abundance from our schools and businesses, from our politicians, and yet the industrial system they maintain appears, on closer observation, looks to be more about scarcity.

All those children who struggle with the education system as it is, ending up in jobs that are more about turning up and functioning than celebrating and developing skills.

We all have more to be and give than we know.

I don’t bring anything revolutionary, only that we all have a must we can find, which we can live out in some way. Perhaps as an amateur or a side-job, if not a career or vocation. All I know is, if we find what it is, it will lead us to somewhere else and then to somewhere else again.

How do we become people who must? Keri Smith’s description of wanderers helps us to see how we can begin the journey to finding and developing our must:

Qualities of great wanderers: curious, inquisitive, nonconformist, rebellious, daring, revolutionary, inventive, visionary, self-sufficient.^

May we follow our curiosity, ask questions, be transformative, identify other paths, experiment, find a tribe, keep iterating, look ahead, and not wait to be called.

*From Ian Bogost’s Play Anything;
**From Graham Leicester’s Transformative Innovation;
^From Keri Smith’s The Wander Society.

Play is not an alternative to or a respite from work, but the process through which work is done – including the work of play in the sense of leisure and release. […] Thinking worldfully, it is better to think of play as a condition of the universe rather than a human activity – everything is “at play.”*
(Ian Bogost)

Those who experience do not participate in the world. For the experience is “in them” and not between then and the world.**
(Martin Buber)

If we’re charged with playing at something the insinuation is that we are not working, that we’re not committing.

Yet play is how we must describe what we enter into when we take our engagement with something or someone to a deeper, more invested place.

Play is how we must engage with the world if we are not to demean or disrespect it by attempting to take it into our knowing rather than allowing it to be what it is.

From I-in-me, I move to I-in-it, opening the possibility of I-in-us and even I-in-now when something new is generated:^

The revolutionary force in this century is the awakening of a deep generative human capacity – the I-in-now.^

*From Ian Bogost’s Play Anything;
**From Martin Buber’s I and Thou;
^From Otto Scharmer’s Theory U.

To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.*
(James Carse)

And when playing 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)

If play is a way of entering into the reality of things rather than avoiding them, perhaps we are most alive when we are surprised.

If we try to bring the game into ourselves, we are seeking to overpower the unknown with the known, we are mitigating surprise.

If Ian Bogost is correct in saying play is in the thing and not in us, we must step out of our familiar world into the unfamiliar and unknown.

One way we can approach this play is through reverence: to see something for what it is, someone for who they are, requiring us to step out of world and into theirs:

In order to become attentive to Beauty, we need to discover the art of reverence. […] Ultimately, reverence is respect before mystery. […] Playfulness, humoured even a sense of the anarchic are companions of reverence because they insist on the proper proportion of the human presence in the light of the eternal. Reverence is also the companion of humility. […] The earth is full of thresholds where beauty awaits the wonder of our gaze.^

*From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games;
**From Ian Bogost’s Play Anything;
^John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty.

The hunger will give you everything. And it will take from you everything. It will cost your life and there’s now a damn thing you can do about it. But knowing this, of course, is what set us free.*
(Hugh Macleod)

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

The sun gives everything to be the sun, but to do its most amazing work, it needs a context. Earth.

A necessary reminder to us that while conviction is critical, context is essential:

Context is what gives meaning.  When you change the context, you change yourself.  This is where freedom lies.  You aren’t fixed, but incredibly fluid and flexible.  You can change and be transformed in incredible ways if you open yourself to new experiences, new situations, and new relationships.^

Such contexts of mutuality – in which both us and the context are developed – also make it possible for us to explore other contexts.

Seth Godin named this zooming, long before Zoom was a thing. You take a journey through continually growing or developing who you are and what you do. You may even frame these as what Joseph Campbell named mythological vision quests:

You leave the world that you’re in and go into a depth, or into a distance or up to a height. There you come to what is missing in your consciousness in the world you formerly inhabited.^^

Explore where your zooming takes you, whilst understanding it to be a story you are telling and growing:

Story is a powerful way of making wholes from disparate parts, weaving elements together to provide an instinctively satisfying sense of coherence.*^

*From Hugh Macleod’s Evil Plans;
**From Rob Bell’s What is the Bible?;
^From Ben Hardy’s These 20 Pictures Will Teach You More than Reading 100 Books;
^^From Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth;
*^From Graham Leicester’s Transformative Innovation.

The life-journey can be a journey of ascent to beauty. The longing at the heart of attraction is the union with the Beautiful. Not everything in us is beautiful. We need to undertake the meticulous work of clearance and clarification in order that our inner beauty may shine.*
(John O’Donohue)

Humans are slow animals […] and what we excel at is distances.  Sustaining a pace for hours our days. 
**
(Rebecca Solnit)

Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa is in the news as he looks for eight people to join him in a trip to the Moon in 2023 without cost.

There are two qualifications. Potential crew members must advance whatever they do to help people and greater society in some way, and to support fellow crew-members with similar aspirations.

It is a good and beautiful sentiment, and whether we travel to the Moon or not, we all get to make a journey, often slowly, from ugliness to beauty, and that beauty becomes light to others:

Bring light to all that is overcast^.

A transformative journey comprises many things, perhaps three to explore and play with today being to see, appreciate and respect. To do so is to allow more light in as well as being able to shed more on others and other things.

Spring is a great time to engage in a simple exercise. Wander outside until you see something that is speaking to you of Spring’s approach. Spend some time simply paying attention to it and take a picture. Open the picture and do a little reflective journaling for about five minutes, describing what you have taken a picture of without using metaphors, so you can’t describe “leaves like blades” or similar. Simply describe what you see and perhaps add some simple illustrations. The aim is to see something for what it truly is without comparing it with something else, to be open to its real value and to respect it. Enjoy.

*From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
**From Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust;
^Plotinus, quoted in John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty.

Our life experiences will equal what we have paid attention to.*
(William James)

What some see as boundaries, others see as borders.

The grass doesn’t have to be greener on the other side to be interesting, it only needs to be different.

And someone may be on the other side of the line thinking the same thing.

Enjoy.

*William James, quoted in Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing.