Intentional change is emotionally rigorous – it doesn’t exactly feel good and can even be shockingly painful. If you’re unwilling to put yourself through emotional experiences, shift your perspectives, and make purposeful changes to your behaviour and environment, then don’t expect huge changes (at least in the sort run).*
(Ben Hardy)

First of all there’s the idea and excitement.

This is followed by the realisation that this isn’t going to be easy.

So we need to figure out a plan to make the idea reality.

It’s not impossible.

It’s just difficult.

But then the worthwhile things in life always are.

*From Benjamin Hardy’s Personality Isn’t Permanent.

Walt Disney’s childhood would become a hard place as his father’s attempts to make a living failed.

He would find refuge in drawing and grew a determination to use his art and imagination to fuel a cause.

He would make it possible for others to escape the pressures of their circumstances.

When his brother Roy convinced Walt to take their company public, he increasingly felt his original purpose was being lost as the culture of the company changed and animation was being lost to live-action movies.

So he left and started over.

But his new stories wouldn’t be movies but a never-ending one captured in a theme park:

Disneyland will never be finished. It’s something we can keep developing and adding to. […] I’ve always wanted to work on something alive, something that keeps growing.*

Simon Sinek refers to this as existential flexibility.

Existential because it’s uncertain and unknown, beyond present knowledge and experience:

Existential flexibility is the capacity to initiate an extreme disruption to a business model or strategic course in order to more effectively advance a just cause.**

Whilst Sinek is thinking of business, I’m thinking of a person’s personal story.

When we feel ourselves to be moving along a trajectory towards an uninspiring future, we need to create an extreme disruption.

Take a different look at things. Head south instead of east.

Reconnect with values. Assess talents. Listen to the whispers from our lives.

Create a new story.

*Walt Disney, quoted in Simon Sinek’s The Infinite Game;
**From Simon Sinek’s The Infinite Game.

In nature, we never repeat the same motion; in captivity (office, gym, commute, sports) life is just repetitive – stress injury. No randomness.*
(Nassim Taleb)

I’ll frame this weakness [of modern times being ill-equipped to cooperate] in away which may seem initially odd: Modern society is ‘de-skilling’ people in practising cooperation. […] We are losing the sills of cooperation needed to make a complex society.**
(Richard Sennett)

I could play your game.

Or you could play mine.

Or we could create a new game together.

Just a thought.

A great thought is a sense-spirit object. It takes on a life of its own.^

*From Nassim Taleb’s The Bed of Procrustes;
**From Richard Sennett’s Together;
^From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty.

Often, without knowing it, we are waiting for a new idea to come and cut us free from our entanglement. When the idea is true and the space is ready for it, the idea overtakes everything*
(John O’Donohue)

Secret #2 is more important: Generosity.  It is much easier and more effective to come up with good ideas for someone else, much easier to bring a posture of insight and care on behalf of someone else.**
(Seth Godin)

We will have many good ideas in our lifetimes, some may be outstanding, others may not be be for us but for someone else.

Most of all, we hope that one will be transcendent, defining who we can be and what we can do.

It will most likely be something that benefits others, as Seth Godin puts his finger on, above.

John O’Donohue offers five transcendentals that make it possible for a thought to appear as something tangible in our world, claiming:

If the One, the True, Being, the Good and the Beautiful were to vanish, the thought in the mind would have not pathway out to the world.*

Here are five means of identifying that one transcending idea that we most want to give expression to whilst we draw breath, and also keeping us on track:

Being is the deepest reality, the substance of our world and all the things in it; the opposite would be Nothingness, the things that are not.*

Does my idea connect with the reality of how things are in the world: my deepest joy with the world’s greatest need, the power of imagination setting the pressure of reality, as Wallace Stevens puts it?

The One claims that all things are somehow bound together in an all embracing unity: despite all the differences in us, around us and within us, everything ultimately holds together as one; chaos does not have the final world.*

Is it inclusive, embracing and speaking to others, the world and to ourselves?

The Truth claims that reality is true and our experience is real and our actions endeavour to come into alignment with the truth.*

In our openness of mind and discovery of more truth, is our idea threatened or able to flourish?

The Good suggests that in practising goodness we participate in the soul of the world.*

Are we bringing more goodness into a world that holds the good to be one of the most wonderful things we can do for one another?

Beauty brings warmth, elegance and grandeur. Something in our should longs deeply for that graciousness and delight.*

More than being grey and functional, does the idea hold Being, the One, the Truth and Goodness in a way that is also Beautiful, awakening depth, complexity and presence?

*From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
**From Seth Godin’s blog: The two simple secrets to good ideas.

Any work environment in which people feel like they need to lie, hide and fake their anxieties, mistakes or gaps in training for her of getting in trouble, humiliated or losing their job undermines the very things that allow people to build trust.*
(Simon Sinek)

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.**
(Jesus of Nazareth)

Peace is not only meant to be a lack of anxiety and trouble and conflict, but also the presence of prospering and growth.

A field of possibility.

Who wouldn’t want to prosper and grow?

But where does peace come from?

How do we develop it?

What are the qualities for a person of peace?

I’ve got a vested interest: my name Geoffrey means “peace of God.”

So I’m wondering how I can live into my name.

Concerned with long-term rather than short- or near-term possibilities, peace is an expression of an infinite game.

Here are a few things that came to mind when I considered the person of peace.

We can sit a while with the five elemental truths and consider how:

Life is hard
We are not as special as you think
Our lives are not about us
We are not in control
We are going to die.

We may also reflect on what these words mean to us and what we’d have to do to align ourselves with them:

Humility
Gratitude
Faithfulness.

How have we been developing our:

Physical flexibility
Emotional flexibility
Mental flexibility
Spiritual flexibility?

Are we becoming more:

Open-minded
Open-hearted
Open-willed?

Towards all of these, how are we developing our:

Solitude
Reflection
Input
Practise?

A person of peace opens a field of possibility in which they and others may flourish.

It doesn’t happen without intention expressed in time and effort and perseverance.

A person of peace is not unquestioning, rather the opposite, knowing which form of inquiry to use of themselves or of another, whether:

Humble inquiry: maximum curiosity and openness
Diagnostic inquiry: trying to understand something
Confrontational inquiry: trying out an opposing thought
Process-orientated inquiry: what is the best way to work with questions.

All the time, the person of peace is trying to figure out an be someone who provides a place for another to flourish or to be the kind of space to another to flourish, or to help create a larger space for more to thrive.

*From Simon Sinek’s The Infinite Game;
**John 14:27.

Rather than looking at personality as a “type” you fit into, view it as a continuum of behaviours and attitudes that is flexible, malleable, and based on context.*
(Ben Hardy)

Those I dreamwhisper with explore their talents and energies and values, full of detail and nuance.

Noticing who they are and what they are able to do is not explored as some fixed ending.

It is about the future.

Not only a future to explore, but a future they want to shape.

*From Benjamin Hardy’s Personality isn’t Permanent.

The imagination gives to everything it touches a peculiarity, and it seems to me that the peculiarity of the imagination is nobility, of which there are many degrees. […]   I mean that nobility which is our spiritual height and depth … But there it is.*
(Wallace Stevens)

Wallace Stevens’ contention is that imagination is as powerful a thing as reality.

Are you encouraged to use your imagination at work?

Imagination training?

Imagination problem-solving?

It’s crazy when you think about it, that one of the most amazing and powerful faculties we have is underused and under-developed.

We have to use it somewhere, though, or we’ll burst.

Stevens appears to intimate that if we are not being encouraged to use your imagination, we’re more likely being seen as a commodity than as a person.

*Wallace Stevens, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Wallace Stevens on Reality, Creativity and the Greatest Self-Protection from the Pressure of the New.

An overnight success almost never is. Might as well plan for the journey.*
(Seth Godin)

The idea is simple: You have a purpose so big and inspiring it transforms your entire life.**
(Ben Hardy)

I have been journeying for more than sixty years to be able to tell you something:

It’s not about who you are but who you can become.

What would you go on a long journey to be able to tell someone?

*From Seth Godin’s blog: All at once and quite suddenly;
**From Benjamin Hardy’s Personality Isn’t Permanent.

Here lies the connection between beauty and truth. Beauty is not the opposite of ugly, but of the false”; is is the sensory statement of the suchness of a thing or a person.*
(Erich Fromm)

*From Erich Fromm’s The Revolution of Hope.

Every aphorism here is about a Procrustean bed of sorts – we humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditised ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies, and pre-packaged narratives, which, on the occasion, have explosive consequences.*
(Nassim Taleb)

Source. Life force. Aliveness. Around us, in us, a wellspring of energy to tap into at any minute.**
(Kelvy Bird)

Finite worlds are able to exist within infinite worlds, but infinite worlds may not be contained within finite ones.

They must be quashed or they will spill out.

There are no fullstops to life.

It was here before we arrived and it will be here after we are gone.

And for a while, for a span, through our own openness, we will taste of its limitlessness.

The world outside and the world inside.

Life endlessly unfolding.

Remaining open is hard for us, though.

A willingness to constantly bring our attention and openness to the unfolding-more-and-more requires a lot of energy., means we are not able to completely

We want to arrive: to know, to understand to judge.

We want to declare, This is it!

We know all we need to know about things.

And we know all we need to know about people.

And then life breaks out again.

*From Nassim Taleb’s The Bed of Procrustes;
**From Kelvy Bird’s Generative Scribing.