In short, the human being of the future, Homo techno, will be part animate and part inanimate, a hybrid of living animal and machine, a heart and soul fused to a computer chip. Everything will be changed. Everything is already changing.*
(Alan Lightman)

In play we may move below the level of the serious, as the child does; but we can also move above it – in the realm of the beautiful and the sacred.**
(Johan Huizinga)

Our journey as humans is not simply into complexity but always towards the simplicity possible on the far side of complexity, endeavouring never to lose ourselves in the machine, resisting becoming technology’s slave, but to be explorers of the beautiful and the sacred in which we feel ourselves most alive.

In the universe’s eyes, you are already the most amazing of “technologies.”

(*From Alan Lightman’s Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine.)
(**From Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens.)

There are a hundred billion neurons in the average human brain, and each neuron is connected by long filaments to between a thousand and ten thousand other neurons.*
(Alan Lightman)

Those filaments are where we find our individuality and our connection with a bigger world. All the choices we’ve made, the things we’ve been curious about and endeavoured to find out more about, and then getting creative over some things and not over others.

They’re not a fixed number, new ones getting thrown out by neurons and connecting to others all the time.

It’s absolutely amazing and it’s why I keep telling people there’s never ever been anyone else like them in all of human history.

And it all means that thing you feel you must do, that’s unique, too; I just hope you bring it. Perhaps today?

(*From Alan Lightman’s Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine.)

A sacred space is not a place to hide out. It is a place where we recognise ourselves and our commitments.*
(Sherry Turkle)

[Scenius:] a whole scene of people who are supporting each other, looking at each other’s work, copying from each other, stealing ideas and contributing ideas**
(Brian Eno)

Not to be confused for one another.

Askesis is the inner place where we identify and embrace who we are and what we must do.

A scenius is that one person to many with whom we’ll make a ruckus, as Seth Godin would put it.

Something common to both is listening, not only with ears and eyes but also with hearts. Listening is an art I’m still trying to learn; it involves putting ourselves “one down,” effectively saying to one another “this is about you, not me.”

(*From Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together.)
(**Brian Eno, quoted in Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work.)

The essential thing “in heaven and earth” is […] that there should be a long obiedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living.*
Frederick Nietzche)

There is a higher truth to all of this. Admitting it will get you laughed at.**
(Hugh Macleod)

Funny how the thing we most want to do is the same thing that gets us into the most trouble, but we know, keeping going along this path is the only way to make sense of life.

(*Frederik Nietzche, quote in Eugene Peterson’s A Long Obedience in the Same Direction.)
(**From gapingvoid’s blog: Why the messenger gets shot.)

The ancient myths were designed to harmonise the mind and the body. The mind can ramble off in strange ways and want things that the body does not want.*
(Joseph Campbell)

So much of this happens beneath the level of logic and reason. It’s all gut, instinct, memory, sensory information, and fantastically subtle cues. In networked spaces – online, in apps, in games – this all goes to hell. The body is missing.**
(Kio Stark)

Kio Stark is describing what happens when strangers meet.

We can widen this to include connecting with ourselves, with our world and with our god. At the heart of which is listening and generous inquiry.

Listening helps us to find our stories, our myths.

When these are in place, technology may help, but when not, it only get in the way. Jonah Lehrer offers some interesting thoughts about how interaction with our environment changes our DNA:

Our human DNA is defined by its multiplicity of possible meanings, it’s a code that requires context. […] What makes us human and what makes each of us his or her human is […] how our cells, in dialogue with our own environment, feed back to our DNA, changing the way we read ourselves.^

Listening reduces and even removes the barriers between us and our stories, making it possible to hear and capture these more richly:

Intentional silence: Pick a practice that helps you connect to your source.^^

Here are a couple of things to help aid listening: doodling is about listening, slowing down – dawdling to hear more: journaling is a means of curating our story.

(*From Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth.)
(**From Kio Stark’s When Strangers Meet.)
(^From Jonah Lehrer’s Proust was a Neuroscientist.)
(^^From Otto Scaharmer’s Theory U.)

Either by the trials themselves or by illuminating revelations. Trials and revelations are what it’s all about.**
(Joseph Campbell)

Whatever the reasons change comes, when it does, there seems to be three Events that instigate change: Contact with outsiders, Significant events, and Epiphanies.^
(Alex McManus)

The Teacher announces:

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away […].^^

The list is a much longer one, recognising life is often experienced most fully between apparent opposites. The largest of these may well be doing and being, the inner world and the outer.

What we find between the apparent opposites is the life of the protagonist, here described by Robert McKee:

We give ultimate value to those things that demand ultimate risk – our freedom, our lives, our souls. This is far more than an aesthetic principle, it’s rooted at the deepest source of our art. We not only create stories as metaphors for life, we create them as metaphors for a meaningful life. To live meaningfully is to be at perpetual risk. […] If, should the protagonist fail, life would go back to normal, the story is not worth telling.*^

I make no attempt to tell you what this protagonist life means for you. It is profoundly unique to every person; I only know it’s there to be discovered and expressed:

That’s why they always have blank pages at the back of the atlas. They’re for new countries. You’re meant to fill them in yourself.^*

(*I had Limahl’s Never Ending Story playing in my mind as I wrote.)
(**From Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth.)
(^From Alex McManus’ Makers of Fire.)
(^^Ecclesiastes 3:1, 6.)
(*^From Robert McKee’s blog: A Little Risk Goes a Long Way.)
(^*The BFG in Roald Dahl’s The BFG.)

Protopia is a state of becoming, rather than a destination. It is a process. […] This subtle progress is not dramatic, not exciting. It is easy to miss because a protozoa generates almost as many new problems as new benefits. […] It is a process that is constantly changing how other things change, and, changing itself, is mutating and growing. It’s difficult to cheer for a soft process that is shape-shifting. But it is important to see. […] We are constantly surprised by things that have been happening for 20 years or longer.*
(Kevin Kelly)

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

For me, a dreamwhisperer, protopia as a state of becoming is rich with possibilities for what we can expect throughout our lives:

Lifelong learning is the mindset of possibility. It is built on the idea that we can grow if we simply show up, ready to learn.^

It’s simply the best place to reinvent ourselves as we must – the world constantly changing around us.

I have met those who hope for some change in their lives, change that is both dramatic and fast, but the process must be slow. As Kevin Kelly points out, it brings new problems as well as solutions.

These problems are important, though, because they often are where we can grow the most.

(*From Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable.)
(**From Jonah Lehrer’s Proust was a Neuroscientist.)
(^From Seth Godin’s blog: Lifelong connection.)

Sharing is something we teach to little kids, but in real life, we’re much busier keeping track of who’s up and who’s down in an endless status game.*
(Seth Godin)

Collaboration is a competition – of us against ourselves. Us being the group – versus ourselves alone. To get the best results, we need to push ourselves past the point of ourselves.**
(Hugh Macleod)

By definition, one path must narrow until only one can walk it, the other path must widen so that many are able to walk together.

In another place Seth Godin writes:

But the effective, just and important thing to do is to help the back of the line catch up.^

I imagine Karen Armstrong adding to the argument:

I was at once impressed by the phrase ‘make place for the other.”^^

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: Toward abundant systems.)
(**From gapingvoid’s blog: How to leverage the laws of nature to build better outcomes.)
(^From Seth Godin’s blog: The real law of averages.)
(^^From Karen Armstrong’s Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life.)

When these skilled and energetic young people from all around the world started to work together, another virtue of the migrant economy became apparent. Not only did migrants provide skills but they also stimulated creativity. People with different backgrounds and ways of thinking spurred each other on to produce ideas.*
(Douglas McWilliams)

Look Look Look Look Look Look Look! I’m running away with my imagination.**
(Ruth Krauss)

Douglas McWilliams published his book The Flat White Economy a year before the UK’s European Referendum. He suspected but didn’t know how arguing over immigration would play out a year later. He did know that all figures suggested the cost to the UK economy over ten years if immigration were restricted would be far more than £200 billion, the kind of loss that will leave us all 6% worse off.

Something more from what he writes is how you can’t cherry pick when it comes to immigration because, whilst you may know what already exists and needs filling job-wise, you have no idea what will happen when determined, bright, imaginative people find each other and create new things you hadn’t thought of.

Thousands of years earlier the “Teacher” had written of his hope that people would enjoy their food and their work, even if they couldn’t fully understand the past or know the future:

He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover, he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; moreover, it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil.^

All these years later no one fully understand the past or knows what will happen in the future, but we do know that people can imagine some incredible things and, make just a little part of the future more visible, making a difference for others on the way:

Creating the future does not begin with a plan. It begins with a dream. And when someone acts on a dream it creates a spark.^^

(*From Douglas McWilliams’ The Flat White Economy.)
(**From Ruth Krauss and Michael Sendak’s Open House for Butterflies.)
(^Ecclesiastes 3:11-13)
(^^From Alex McManus’ Makers of Fire.)

Successful brands have a great story long before they have a grand plan.*
(Bernadette Jiwa)

We can have all kinds of fancy plans for the day but before we get anywhere near them it’s not a bad idea to reconnect with our personal story: connecting to who we are (and so, who others are) and to what is our contribution (and recognising the contribution of others), to our world and perhaps our god.

Build on.

(*From The Story of Telling: Good Stories Drive Great Strategy.)