I had made a significant change in my relation to the place: before, it had been mine by coincidence or accident; now it was mine by choice. My return, which at first had been hesitant and tentative, grew wholehearted and sure. I had come back to stay.*
(Wendell Berry)

The very desire for shortcuts makes you eminently unsuitable for any kind of mastery.**
(Robert Greene)

First of all there is the exploring.

Something inside gets us up and out from what we know in order to explore what we do not know, where we find little that is familiar.

It can mean all kinds of things. Ursula Le Guin encourages us to learn how to read new genres of books:

If you don’t know what kind of book you’re reading and it’s not a kind you’re used to, you probably need to learn how to read it.^

Thomas Kuhn wrote about how those who wanted to come up with new scientific paradigms firstly having to learn their domain:

Everything that grows has to succumb to the darkness first.^^

There’re no shortcuts.

Which means there’ll be voluminous time and energy involved.

Which brings us to what we need to find, namely our motivation:

In fact, one of the most fascinating things about motivation is that it often drives us to achievements that are difficult, challenging, and even painful.^^

Your motivation won’t be of much use to me, nor mine to you. We each have to find our own to be able to grow. Only then may we discover that the unfamiliar we have been visiting is a place we want to return to and stay.

(*Wendell Berry, quoted in Austin Kleon’s blog: My relation to the place.)
(**From Robert Greene’s Mastery.)
(^From Ursula Le Guin’s Words Are My Matter.)
(^^From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)

You are what you eat.*
(Count Dracula)

I’m not sure if there’s caffeine in Dandelion and Burdock but my wife Christine and I were wondering what we’d had that kept us awake last night after sharing a bottle.

Foods and drinks have so many different effects on us.

Count Dracula is reminds us that we also think of our interactions with others being food and drink experiences!

Which made me wonder about who feeds me?

There are plenty of snack-people who do more harm than good in the long run, but who are my starter-people, my dessert-people, and, most of all, my main-course-people?

And me, how can I avoid being a snack person, instead offering something substantive, satisfying and energising?

(*From the BBC’s Dracula.)

Specialisation, as I will keep insisting, comes with side effects, one of which is separating labour from the fruits of labour.*
(Nassim Taleb)

When we are talking about emergence, disruption, discontinuous storylines, and points of divergence and convergence, I light up.)**
(Anthony Weeks)

Because we are not different to nature but we are nature then we have a lot to learn from our natural environments. One is that a plant is a plant from beginning to end: first the seed, then the shoot, then the sapling, then the tree, then the seed … .

It’s how oneness flows.

Modern life doesn’t feel like this. We often find ourselves doing one small thing within something far larger, often through separation.

Each of us is capable of beginning something, nurturing it into something sustainable and watching the fruits grow.

Being involved in something from beginning to end gets us to where the unexpected and interesting things emerge.

What’s your thing?

(*From Nassim Taleb’s Skin in the Game.)
(**Anthony Weeks from Drawn Together by Visual Practice.)

You may not know in your mind where you are going, but you know it by doing*
(Nassim Taleb)

These are the two questions that lie at the heart of the work I am involved in with people, and they belong together:

Who am I?
What is my contribution?

Without these two questions most of the books ever published would vanish – and those about their subsequent states of identity: clubs, parties, team, nations … .

Out of these questions form the myths or stories we live by when we are alone and when we are with others.

One question without the other is unhelpful. We cannot do something that matters unless it is intrinsically part of who we are, and we cannot know who we can be unless we do something that puts soul in the game.

When we do something and reflect, do something and reflect …, things begin to happen.

(*From Nassim Taleb’s Skin in the Game.)

The reason it’s difficult to learn something new is that it will change you into someone who disagrees with the person you used to be. And we’re not organised for that. […] The alternative is to sign up for a lifetime of challenging what the self believes. A journey to find more effectiveness, not more stability.*
(*Seth Godin)

Most of us then default to one of a handful of templates and filters for all their experiences; everything gets pulled inside of what my little mind already agrees with.**
(Richard Rohr)

The important thing is not what you’re passionate about but that you own and explore your passion.

Passion is your key to opening new rooms and worlds and universes. Connect with it and you’ll find within it what you must do next, though many miss this:

I walked away remembering passion was a rare commodity.^

The remarkable thing about all of this is that when we live our passion large, we find ourselves transported into places and spaces we never imagined going before, into the rooms and worlds and universes of others.

Welcome to a year of everything getting bigger.

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: Defending myself.)
(**From Richard Rohr’s The Divine Dance.)
(^From Erwin McManus’ Uprising.)

Just in case you have some unfinished business with the future.

Today is where your past and future meet.

Maybe leaving regrets, errors and failures behind …

to do something new ..

to freshen something up …

to explore the fullness … .

Happy New Year!

I am the reason the birds are missing… I am made of dirt and grit and stars and river, skin, bone, leaf, whiskers and claws. I am a part of you, of this, nothing more or less. I am mycelium, petal pistil and stamen… I am energy and I am dust. I am wave and I am wonder. I am an impulse and an order.*
(Eve Ensler)

Consumption is an activity so different from gainful labour that it showed itself in the mode of leisure, even indolence. We display the success of what we have done by not having to do anything. The more we use up, therefore, the more we show ourselves to be winners of past contests.**
(James Carse)

At the same time as struggling with the cause and affect dynamic, we have been able to exponentially increase the magnitude of the cause.

Eve Ensler comes to terms with 2.9 billion birds begin lost in only fifty years in North America and writes an apology to the Earth taking her share of the responsibility:

Mother, I am the reason the birds are missing. I am the cause of salmon who cannot spawn and the butterflies unable to take their journey home. I am the coral reef bleached death white and the sea boiling with methane. I am the millions running from lands that have dried, forests that are burning or islands drowned in water.*

If we are to be the solution then we must first see that we are the problem, not someone else only, not the system only, not big business only, not governments only – governments would be far happier leading green change if they thoughts people would vote for them:

The art of solving problems often involves spending time and energy on what you’ll do when you don’t actually solve the problem.^

(*Eve Ensler, quote in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Losing the Birds, Finding the Words … .)
(**From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)
(^From Seth Godin’s blog: “I don’t know how it could fail.”)

[Freedom] evolves once man is a complete being, when both of his basic impulses [of change and immutability] have developed, and it will therefore be absent so long as man is incomplete and excluded from one of his two impulses; and should be capable of restoration by all that returns him to completeness.*
(Friedrich Schiller)

One never reaches a horizon. It is not a line; it has no place; it encloses no field; its location is always relative to the view.*
(James Carse)

The important thing about being lost is to admit when you are.

Don’t pretend you still know where you are or where you are headed.

Then you begin to see the benefits.

One of the problems with our lives as we have come to find them is that we can be too found, which would be too much of Friedrich Schiller’s immutability impulse and not enough of the change impulse, and too much of James Carse’s boundaries and not enough horizons.

Lost is good sometimes.

We pay more attention.

We are open to more possibilities.

Sometimes we find ourselves lost and when we notice this, wondering how we got to where we find ourselves, the contents of our days and the contents of our life, then we can use this towards something more, different, better … .

We can also get lost on purpose; it’s where we find who we really are and what we have to gift:^

My Lord God,
I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.^^

(*From Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man.)
(**From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)
(^Check out Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost and Keri Smith’s The Wander Society.)
(^^Thomas Merton, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer: Day 23.)

Nothing is one thing […] If you’re focusing on the part of your day that was “fine,” then you’re ignoring the parts that were a miracle, or disappointing, or thrilling.*
(Seth Godin)

The only problem is that when you are different, people can laugh at you, or even worse. Sometimes people don’t like what’s different.**
(Bertolt)

We’re tempted to summarise in order to know, or to explain and even to be.

Everything is so much more than a summary, including you.

Going beyond the summary would be a brilliant way of spending 2020, not. Not only would you come up with many more words to describe yourself, but you’ll also find more words to describe others.

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: Nothing is one thing.)
(**From Jacques Goldstyn’s Bertolt.)