To be close to another person who holds opposing views while being a deep, committed friend can be a wonderful, shaping influence*
(Rainer Maria Rilke)

The question then is how to get lost. Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognito in between lies a life of discovery.**
(Rebecca Solnit)

On the other side of the coronavirus, we will need a great effort to reach out to one another in person. We have found it possible to Zoom (other video call providers are available) one another for so many tasks and reasons, and we’ll likely carry on in this vein for many of these into the future.

While such ways and means for staying connected have been quite marvellous in lockdown, the big picture is likely to be one of relational contraction. While I believe the future is connection, this needs to be increasingly conversational connection.

Sherry Turkle shares from her research on the use and effects of social technology:

A twenty-four yearly woman who works at a start-up tells me she is no longer able to focus on one thing or one person at a time. And that’s the problem with conversation; it asks for skill she can no longer summon.^

Conversation makes it possible to enter each other’s world and become lost in what can be quite alien to us. Part of this, according to Rainer Maria Rilke involves admitting that these other worlds exist – this world isn’t just as I see it but it includes:

I and the one who is most different from me. And only when such a complete world is admitted to and considered possible will one succeed in arranging one’s own interiority with its internal contrasts and contradictions generously, spaciously, and with sufficient air to breathe.*

Interestingly, Rilke connects this allowing for different world’s outside of our own being necessary for the ordering of different worlds inside our life. The person who is at war with others is at war within themselves.

There are many ways for getting lost in order to discover worlds unknown to us, but the simplest and most available to us is conversation. Here are three things to try next time the possibility of a conversation is available between you and a stranger:

Seek to discover what they know, to understand what they feel about these things, and then imagine something that it may be possible for you to collaborate on together.

(*From Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters on Life.)
(**From Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost.)
(^From Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation.)

“A life of ease is not the pathway to growth and happiness. On the contrary, a life of ease is how you get stuck and confused in life.” […] But if you look closely at joyful people, you notice that very often the people who have the most incandescent souls have taken on the heaviest burdens.**
(Ben Hardy and David Brooks)

Every weekday morning I have my constitutional walk. It gets me out of the house when I would otherwise be working inside all day. Because it’s the same walk each time, it makes things easier for getting out for exercise and fresh air – no umming and ahing. The changing scenery is a delight, no two days are alike, but I wouldn’t want this to be the only path I ever walk.

I have found that the more I understand about what I must do with my life, the more difficult the path becomes.

You would think it would be the other way around, but finding my way brings me to many crossroads and forks. A pathway equivalent of the Ship of Theseus, through the choices I have made it is now quite a different path than the one I first set out on, although it looks like one.

When I look more closely, I see these crossroads and forks are really possibilities into richness, of creativity, community and commission – as in, purpose.

There has always been the easier option, which may be to continue on the way I have been travelling awhile, or even to select something easier than this, but there are often multiple better ways, too.

A more difficult path tends to do that, multiplying possibility, reflecting the complexity life is.

(*Ben Hardy and David Brooks from Brooks’ The Second Mountain.)

I believe in old age: to work and to grow old: this is what life expects of us. And then one day to be old and still be quite far from understanding everything – no, but to begin, but to love, but to suspect, but to be connected to what is remote and inexpressible, all the way up into the stars.*
(Rainer Maria Rilke)

At the age of twenty four, I found myself with hundreds of people to care for, many fifty or more years older than me. I am grateful for this experience. In their presence, I believe I determined many things about how I wanted to be when older and how I did not want to be.

One of the problems, though, was to try and still be young; I would be described as “a breath of fresh air,” but many didn’t want to leave the windows open for too long.

The wonder of life I hope I was discovering is that, in each other’s company, the young can be old and the old can be young – we learn from those who are ahead of us and we never forget to be explorers.

(*From Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters on Life.)

In a word: one ought to turn the most extreme possibility inside oneself into the measure for one’s life, for our life is vast and can accommodate as much future as we are able to carry.*
(Rainer Maria Rilke)

Designing story tests the maturity and insight of the writer, his knowledge of society, nature, and the human heart. It demands both vivid imagination and powerful analytical thought.  But above all, it requires a mastery of craft.**
(Robert McKee)

It seemed like a good idea to the small group of us who didn’t enjoy the idea of a cross-country. We saw the opportunity to take a shortcut down a slope, cutting of a loop of the circuit.

Out of the bushes at the bottom of the hill appeared our P.E. teacher. My recollection is that that he was smiling as he told us that we would be running cross country again the following week when everyone was playing football.

We had cheated but the only ones cheated were ourselves.

A shortcut to our goals or to get ahead may seem like a good idea at the time, but in the end we may only be cheating ourselves out of who we can be and what we can do.

Anyway, in the exploring of the fullness of things the goal we’ve been so intent on gaining may change completely.

(*From Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters on Life.)
(**From Robert McKee‘s newsletter: Why Writers Study.)

We lead our lives so poorly because we arrive in the present always unprepared, incapable, and too distracted for everything.*
(Rainer Maria Rilke)

It is […] an unavoidable challenge: how to contain the serious within the truly playful; that is, how to keep all our finite games in infinite play.**
(James Carse)

What are you doing when you turn up to life most capable, prepared and focused?

Does this seem to be in any way hard work, or does it feel more like play?

Rainer Maria Rilke pens this interesting thought:

We have to mix our work with ourselves at such a deep level that workdays turn into holidays all by themselves, into our actual holidays.*

What is the work that feels like a holiday for you, that is, you are refreshed and renewed by it, and is perhaps playful, too?

Do you think such a thing is possible?

What is it that all of your life seems to have been preparing you for?

(*From Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters on Life.)
(**From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)

I need to be here
for a while;
there is no
other place I need
to be.

I’m not wanting to add to the growing levels of FOMO in our world, but just maybe, the fear of missing out will mean we’ll miss what will only come to us when we are away from the crowd and on our own.

ROMO = the rewards of missing out.

How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?*
(Meno)

Most endangered [conversation]: the kind in which you listen intently to another person and expect that he or she is listening to you; where a discussion can go off on an tangent and circle back; where something unexpected can be discovered about a person or an idea.**
(Sherry Turkle)

I love the conversations in which someone see something new. The only thing better is when there are surprises for everyone.

The world deserves risky and adventurous conversations.

(*Meno, quoted in Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost.)
(**From Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation.)

Grant yourself the superpower of making “art” wherever you go and see how that changes what you perceive. Art is everywhere if you say so.*
(Rob Walker)

In a word: one ought to turn the most extreme possibility inside oneself into the measure for one’s life, for our life is vast and can accommodate as much future as we are able to carry.**
(Rainer Maria Rilke)

Each day comes to us requiring effort on our part to make it complete.

I don’t mean as far as the universe is concerned, but from our perspective, as conscious beings creating meaning.

The day can be what we want it to be.

I found myself wondering whether joy is another word for what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identified as flow, when we lose awareness of self and are one with what it is we are doing, with the thing that brings our talents, values and energies together in the gift we want to bring into the world.

I think what this day needs is some of your joy.

(*From Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing.)
(**From Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters on Life.)

Getting hit by lightning, finding the perfect job, having a djinni grant three wishes – these are all lotteries. […] The problem with lottery thinking is that it takes us away from thinking about the chronic stuff instead. The pervasive, consistent challenge that will respond to committed effort.*
(Seth Godin)

Afraid of being alone, we struggle to pay attention to ourselves. And what suffers is our ability to pay attention to each other, we lose confidence in what we have to offer others.**
(Sherry Turkle)

Before each of us there exists three futures: expected, possible and preferred.

The most developed of these is the expected: because of previously experienced trends, we have the data to extrapolate and put together our plans. The problem is, the world can change around us.

When we popularly talk about dreams we probably positing possible futures: led by events we can imagine happening and telling ourselves stories of what will be if we meet the right person or win the lottery, so we play with “what if”scenarios. The problem is, such events are few and far between and can be malevolent as well as benevolent.

The least explored future is the preferred and is what I’m thinking about when I mention dreams: this future calls for vision, creativity and courage as we both vision-cast from the present into the future and back-cast from the future into the present in order to make it happen.

These three exist together for us, so the future is complex requiring that we build our own capacity for complexity so we might navigate what is thrown up by all three. It’s why Sherry Turkle’s words caught my attention this morning; we’re not paying attention to ourselves in the best ways for developing our complexity.

Ahead of the neuroscientists, George Eliot noticed a critical human characteristic:

[George Eliot] believed that the most essential element of human nature was its malleability, the way each of us can “will ourselves to change.”^

To open our preferred futures, we need to pay attention to ourselves but not be willing to accept the first answer that comes, this in relation to our values, talents and energies.

Our values are our truest goals in life.

Name at least three. Where have they come from? How do they connect with your own experiences in life? How do they join with each other? How do they shape a good world for others?

Our talents are our naturally occurring ways and means of connecting with our world.

Name at least five. Talents are what lie behind our surface actitivities, be they piano-player, boutique owner or writer (so you wouldn’t name these). For each, identify if they help you get things done, build relationships, produce ways of thinking, or influencing others. Then identify examples for each – at least five.

Our energies are physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.

We want all of these to be working together in a state of flow. Often we think about what we are doing. Noticing our energy turns this around to notice what our whole life is showing us first and, when we feel the energy, we stop to notice what we’re doing, because we are wanting to make more of these times happen.

There are also de-energising things our lives are trying to show to us. Again, we need to notice this and turn our attention to what we are doing, because we want to stop these things happen or figure out a way of managing them better.

There are four things you can spot for both the positive and negative experiences: what you are doing, why you doing it, who you are doing it with or for, and when you are doing it (as in, beginning or finishing something, or perhaps the time of day).

Now you’re beginning to really pay attention to yourself. Work out ways of practising these things each day for the next year and you will find yourself in quite a different future – one that you want to shape.

These are the things I will be exploring in a special provision of my dreamwhispering work for those who find themselves unemployed as a result of the coronavirus lockdown. Please pass on to those you think may be interested; those interested can message me at geoffrey@thinsilence.org.

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: Lottery thinking.)
(**From Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation.)
(^From Jonah Lehrer’s Proust was a Neuroscientist.)

Lift is created by the onwards rush of life over the curved wing of the soul.*
(Robert Macfarlane)

We were living the process as we created it.**
(Joseph Jaworski)

Perhaps abundance is not what we have but
a path we walk,
begun by noticing
what we have,
moving us
into flow,
becoming lost
in complexity,
until we emerge,
grown into
abundance –
scarcity being
not to take the path.

Following a flow experience, the organisation of the self is more complex than it had been before. It is by becoming increasingly complex,that the self might be said to grow.^

[Edward] Thomas taught [his wife Helen] to walk differently: “with [her] body, not only with [her] legs,” feeling the landscape as she moved over it.*

(*From Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways.)
(**From Joseph Jaworski’s Source.)
(^^From Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow.)