Forty years ago when Christine and I were dating, Love is by Kim was the thing. We all have a Love is expression, found where we understand our deepest joy meets the world’s deepest need.

It’s worth remembering how the original stories of St Valentine are about heroic acts, bringing light into the darkness for which he gave everything.

The conversation had moved on to the matter of authenticity or integrity?

The former being true to who you are, the latter about connection to self, to others and to the world.

Someone contributed, we are not just one person but many people.*

I remarked, this was only a story they were telling themselves, meaning, we use stories to connect all of the complexity – the people we have been in different times, different places with different people – working in the same direction a life worth living.

(*For me, integrity is about connecting to all of these Geoffreys.)

I just had to smile when I originally read Annie Dillard’s telling of how as a child she would hide pennies in the cracks of the pavement.

She’d then hide and watch to see people’s faces when they spotted the coins.

I’ve just been looking for the story but can’t find it – I suspect it’s in An American Childhood.

Never mind, I know Dillard had hidden a “penny” in my mind that I cannot lose, hence the doodle.

There is a risk here of supposing that because we know our lives to have the character of a narrative, we also know what that narrative is. If I were to know the full story of my life I would then have translated it back into explanation.*
(James Carse)

we fall in love with what we already have […] we focus on what we may lose rather than what we may gain**
(Dan Ariely)

The future cannot be measured by what we already know – that would be to try and reverse time.

The future will weigh the present and the past.

We have, then, to try and be open.

Our lives are stories we tell ourselves.

They can be theatrical: scripted and “ready to shoot” – they can also be lost, so be careful.

Other stories are dramatic: unscripted and to be explored – they cannot be lost because we cannot lost what we do not yet have.

The former trap us in our ego – the false self – usually less than we can be.

The latter lead us into eco – our true Self with others and the world.

(*From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)
(**From Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational.)

A god can create a world only by listening.*
(James Carse)

To be a moral human being is to pay, be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention.**
(Susan Sontag)

Whilst offering examples of people with “skin in the game,” Nassim Taleb tells of an encounter with Susan Sontag in 2001, in which her initial interest in meeting someone who “studies randomness.” On finding out that Taleb was a trader Sontag then announced being “against the market system,” and turned her back on Taleb whilst he was in mid-sentence.^

It turns out we all struggle to listen to people who are not like us.

It’s hard but it’s worth it for the kind of worlds we are able to create together.

(*From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)
(**Susan Sontag, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Existential Therapy from the Universe.)
(^Nassim Taleb hopes waiting fifteen or so years after the death of Susan Sontag before telling this story is more respectful.)

One of our greatest freedoms is how we react to things.*
(The mole)

A great being stays with what she loves; she’s patient, she forgives, and she allows what she loves to develop. She overlooks its mistakes, and in this sense she suffers for and with reality. This is the deepest meaning of passion: patior is the Latin verb meaning to suffer or to undergo reality (as opposed to controlling it).**
(Richard Rohr)

It’s not only what you want to do.

It’s about what you’ve been preparing yourself throughout your lifetime to do.

All of those choices which left more behind than you continued to carry with you.

Not only the skills you have developed into talents and talents into strengths, but your values and your curiosities and the things you see and others don’t

It’s just as well you can’t do anything you want because it means you will do something and that something will matter.

And for you it will be the best thing in the world.

(*From Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse.)
(**From Richard Rohr’s The Divine Dance.)

It should be obvious that those who live enlightenment lives have demonstrated a unique ability to learn from everyone and everything around them.*
(Erwin McManus)

We can only explain what has happened.

Even then we may summarise because everything in life is way more complex than we acknowledge.

It is not possible to explain what has not yet happened, although we try in the form of predictions, recognising that sometimes we have to do this in order to plan and prepare.

Wisdom, though, encourages openness and a seeking of enlightenment from everyone and everything that we have yet to meet and that is yet to happen.

The world is bigger than explanation, as are our lives through enlightenment.

(*From Erwin McManus’ Uprising.)

Mingle the starlight with your lives and you won’t be fretted by trifles.*
(Maria Mitchell)

I am constantly struck dumb by this mystery [just atoms and molecules].**
(Alan Lightman)

If you want to explain yourself, you’ll need the right words.

In her describing of a children’s book What Miss Mitchell Saw, which tells the story of the 19th century astronomer‘s early life, Maria Popova observes:

Names become a central trope in the book – the dignifying, truth-affirming act of calling all realities by their true names.^

This includes you and me.

Before we find our true names we must find the words that are important to us:

finding the words is another step in learning to see^^.

We each are made up of many wonderful and extraordinary words.

Then may we find our true name, the one that is an adventure and not a prison.

(*Maria Mitchell, quoted in Maria Popova’s brain Pickings: Favourite Children’s Books of 2019.)
(**From Alan Lightman’s Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine.)
(^From Maria Popova’s brain Pickings: Favourite Children’s Books of 2019.)
(^^Robin Wall Kimmerer, quoted in Maria Popova’s brain Pickings: Favourite Children’s Books of 2019.)

Time and again I am surprised by the richness and diversity of their responses. The random images seem to stimulate their meaning making and encourage them to break out of familiar ways of thinking. […] In the words of Bateson […], Without the random there can be no new thing.*
(Daphne Loads)

I thought to read even more randomly as I journaled this morning.

I’d read Daphne Loads’ words on randomness yesterday and made sure to include them.

A dozen or so sources later, I’d reflected on the behaviour of a particular crowd story that had perplexed me for many years …

pondered reconstituting a creative community I have missed since its final event some years ago …

wondered about how the different experiences we go through temper or “voice,” and how to bring this into my work …

thought about how to connect mindful doodling more with this …

considered how the mundane things in our days may be transformed into meaningful games of possibility, allowing us to stay in our flow …

topped off with how the random meetings with people and what’s important to them can create spaces of possibility, and a universe of abundance rather than a world of scarcity.

Would it have mattered if I had not got anything from my random wanderings? I don’t think so.

As long as I trust openness and unhurriedness to provide more:

The least strained and most natural ways of the soul are the most beautiful, the best occupations are the least forced.**

This for all of us; why not find your randomness.

(*From Daphne Loads’ Rich Pickings, quoting Gregory Bateson.)
(**Michel de Montaigne, quoted in Gretchen Ruben’s The Happiness Project.)

It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.*
(Kahlil Gibran)

Or you can be an agent of change, someone who creates tension and then relieves it.**
(Seth Godin)

We tend to take to excess what we care about most.

It’s why we do it and others don’t, hence the word is used as the measurement: “too far.”

Not for us, but for others.

Excessive just feels like normal to those who MUST.

(*From Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet.)
(**From Seth Godin’s This is Marketing.)