We often choose to do what feels good above what makes sense.  The ideas that spread, the products that sell and the services that get used, appeal to the thinking, feeling customer.  And so should you.*
(Bernadette Jiwa)

Measure and comparison have fled.  It is up to you how much of the immeasurable becomes reality for you.**
(Martin Buber.)

No one made you do it.  It was your choice.

Knowing ourselves better allows us to make necessary change and, subsequently, better choices.

Taking responsibility for who we are and what we want to make happen are keys to opening a more hopeful future.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi introduced his book on flow in this way:

‘Flow will examine the process of taking control over one’s inner life. […] “Flow” is the way people describe their state of mind when consciousness is harmoniously ordered, and they want to pursue whatever they are doing for its own sake.’^

This ability to know and to participate fully in what we want to do changes everything.

The next time you feel as though someone or some thing has made you think or behave in a particular way, why not step back, turn your attention to your choice and decide what you really want to do?

(*From The Story of telling blog: The Thinking, Feeling Customer.)
(**From Martin Buber’s I and Thou.)
(^From Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow.)

The path of least resistance is a poor teacher.*
(Ryan Holliday)

It is important to believe that the visible is the equivalent of the invisible; and once we believe it, we have destroyed the imagination; that is to say, the false imagination, the false conception of the imagination as some incalculable vates within us, unhappy Rodomontade.**
(Wallace Stevens)

It’s not only our thinking that needs to be trained.

At some point we have to move our imagining into making something happen.

Our bodies have to be trained to get in the game, to make them move from here to there, to do this or that.

To take the notebook and open it up to begin writing and drawing out what is in the mind, to write the proposal, to pick up the phone, to schedule some time with the colleague to forward what we have in mind.

Every time we do this we learn something about who we are and what we want to do.

Johan Huizinga would probably tell us that our goals and the necessary moves are all part of a game.

Any imagination that doesn’t move us into the game is false imagination.

(*From Ryan Holliday’s The Obstacle is the Way.)
(**From Wallace Stevens’ The Necessary Angel.)

Imagining possible futures is also where we must face both our deepest fears and greatest hopes.*
(Alex McManus)

There is that in me … I do not know what it is ,, but I know it is in me.^
(Walt Whitman)

We become more who we are by leaning into our challenges and the difficulty rather than trying to avoid these.

Beyond these lie possibilities that will never appear through avoidance.

We are also changed, and the imagination is where all of this begins, as Alan Lightman alludes to:

‘One thing I have learned: the mind is its own place.  Regardless of natural conditions and circumstances, even of biological imperatives, the mind can contrive its reality.  The mind can make hot out of cold and cold out of hot, beauty from ugliness and ugliness from beauty.  The mind makes its own rules.’^^

Perhaps the most powerful things we can work upon in our imaginations are our values, what we want the world to be and begin to see the little iterations and steps forward.

In reflective journaling, we have a powerful tool to help us and when we add illustrations to our writing, we stay with the important somethings even longer, as Tom Hart opens for us:

‘Through the process of writing and drawing our story, we can understand ourselves, communicate with parts of ourselves, and sometimes find ourselves face-to-face with our own complexity.  With our own largeness.  Through sharing, we assert our individuality, our expansiveness, and our humanity.’*^

Furthermore, when we become more adept at using writing, and even illustrations, we become more truly what artists essentially.  I use Wallace Stevens words to embrace artists in the widest sense –  meaning, when we find what we love and make this available to others.  By the way, Stevens believed we must bring the power of our imaginations to challenge the pressures of reality:

‘[The artist’s] function is to make his imagination … become the light in the minds of others.  His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives.’^*

(*The first of Richard Rohr’s elemental truths learned in ancient societies by boys moving into manhood, but true for us all.  I think it is needing to be completed: ” Life is hard but …”.  How would you complete this?)
(**From Alex McManus’ Makers of Fire.)
(^From Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.)
(^^From Alan Lightman’s Mr g.)
(*^From Tom Hart’s The Art of the Graphic Memoir.)
(^*Wallace Stevens, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Wallace Stevens on Reality, Creativity and our Greatest Protection Against the  Pressure of the News.)

And the point is to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps then, someday far in the future,
you will gradually,
without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.*
(Rainer Maria Rilke)

So what don’t we have enough of?  It’s not stuff!  Short answer: Mattering.  Making a difference.  Doing something important.**
(Hugh Macleod)

There’s a lot of talk about whether we ought to pursue our passions and dreams.  A lot of it is polarised.  Hugh Macleod helpfully distils the issue down:

‘the thing you don’t want to do is work at a job that you hate and not prosper in the process.  That is purgatory’.^

He’s right.  It has to be the worst of all scenarios.  Play this out against what Johan Huizinga extracts from his studying of ancient agonistic play.  By the time I read the following words about an earlier age, he’s already pointed out that play preceded civilisation, not only being a part of human life but also that of other species:

‘Our point of departure must be the conception of an almost childlike play-sense expressing itself in various form, some serious, some playful, but all rooted in ritual and productive of culture by allowing the innate human need of rhythm, harmony, change alternation, contrast and climax, etc., to unfold in all richness.’^^

There’re some important words here for our understanding of work and passion, sharpening the focus on whether there is playfulness in what we do.  Playfulness seen in the forms and iterations of rhythm, harmony, change alternation, contrast and climax.  There are more words to add to these.  Huizinga continues to describe this earlier time:

‘Coupled with this play-sense is a spirit that strives for honour, dignity, superiority and beauty.  Magic and mystery, heroic longings, the foreshadowing of music, sculpture and logic all seek form and expression in noble play.  A later generation will call the age that knew such aspirations “heroic.”‘**

Playfulness is how we become more human, if such means we’re exploring honour, dignity, superiority (mastery),beauty, magic, mystery and heroic longings.

Macleod suggests we’re not searching for more stuff but more mattering.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi would probably include success as simply being more stuff:

‘Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it your target, the more you are going to miss it.  For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue … as the intended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.’*^

If you’ve ever seen the Peanuts cartoon in which Charlie Brown paints targets around the arrows he’s already fired into the fence – so he hits the bulls-eye every time – then maybe you’re thinking Charlie didn’t have it all wrong.

What matters to you more than anything else?  What are your questions?  What have you been up to all these years and maybe not noticed everything it comprises?

The inductive life wins over the deductive.  What’s important to you is likely to be already inside you, a story wanting to get out.  Perhaps passion is just the name we give to this when it breaks out.

It’s hard, though.

Humans have returned to explore this in one way or other throughout the millennia – I’ve not blogged about it once or twice but for more than five years with over 1,800 articles.  It takes time and effort – forget anything that promises easy steps:

‘The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.  Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen.’*^

Don’t give up on passion.  Grab your biggest questions and go with them.

(*Rainer Maria Rilke, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(**From gapingvoid’s blog: Our infinite need to be meaningful.)
(^From gapingvoid’s blog: For the love of work.)
(^^From Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens.)
(*^From Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow.)

(Sources: Anne Lamott’s Hallelujah Anyway; Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: A Gentle Corrective for the Epidemic of Identity Politics; Brené Brown’s Braving the Wilderness; Erich Fromm’s The Art of Listening)

human motivation is actually based on a timescale that is long, sometimes even longer than our lifetimes*
(Dan Ariely)

The hero or heroine is by definition a “generative” person.**
(Richard Rohr)

The generative person knows that something must die for something to begin.  The classic hero and heroine know they cannot return the way they came, they can only go forward.

We hold on to all kinds of things that we think define us but few things do – we’re just going through the contents of the loft, so many things we haven’t thought of, never mind touched, in the last four years.  We can hold on to an old life in a similar way, instead of letting go, letting some things die, like seed falling into the ground, dying as a seed but growing something new and flourishing.

In his book The Art of the Graphic Memoir, Tom Hart shares something of his own harrowing story of the loss of his two year old daughter Rosalie, his writing and drawing becomes transformative for him:

‘the act of making your book or project or story shouldn’t merely be one of “telIing a story.”  It should change you. […] I had to create a new relationship with my dead daughter.’^

If we overlay James Carse’s “template” of finite and infinite games some powerful things come into focus more.  Remembering that a finite game includes a selected or elected group of people towards a goal with a deadline and who always play by the rules, Carse offers:

‘If the prize for winning finite play is life, then the players are not properly alive.  They are competing for life.  Life, then, is not play, but the outcome of play.  =Finite players ply to live; they do not live their playing.’^^

We may think of ourselves when we just want to get through the day for the evening, or the week for the weekend escape, or work for retirement when we’ll be able to do the things we want to do.

An infinite game, though, includes as many as possible for as long as possible and when the rules threaten either of these, they are changed.  Of the infinite payer, Carse writes:

‘Infinite players die.  Since the boundaries of death are always part of the play, the infinite player does not die at the end of play, but in the course of play.’^^

The infinite player or generative person knows they give of themselves, when they let go in order to let come, something will happen.  Every life is valuable in this way, every person generative.

(*From Dan Ariely’s Payoff.)
(**From Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward.)
(^From Tom Hart’s The Art of the Graphic Memoir.)
(^^From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)

There, there, he said.  The universe is not all suffering and sadness.  There is much happiness in the thing.  Isn’t there, Nephew.  There is joy, and there is music, and there is spirit.  Yes, I said, all these things.  It is a beautiful universe.*
(Alan Lightman)

When you remove your meaningless words, the power of your words go up.**
(Seth Godin)

We know the power of words, able to break or make, to close doors or open possibilities.

(Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens makes for fascinating reading about how we play with words, for example, ‘Greek tradition has numerous traces  of ceremonial and festal slanging matches.^)

What words want to come into being?

As you listen to the other person speaking words you may have heard so many times before, perhaps playing out the same old same old, or, sharing their pain or hope, what words do you want to bring into being?  Words that may make it possible for the other to hear new words wanting to be birthed?

In this moment, you have the power to change everything.

(*The characters Uncle Deva and Nephew in Alan Lightman’s Mr g.)
(**From Seth Godin’s blog: Meaningless.)
(^From Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens.)

People overvalue their knowledge and underestimate the probability of their being wrong.*
(Nassim Taleb)

Take me down to the spring of my life, and tell me my nature and my name.**
(George Appleton)

Better to ask a question than give an answer or advice:

‘the unquestioned confines us to smaller and smaller compartments of ourselves’.^

It’s not that we’ll ever run out of wondering, whether about things “out there” or “in here”:

“One of the reasons that we wonder is because we are limited, and that limitation is one of the greatest gateways to wonder.”^^

May we awake each new day wondering.

(*From Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness.)
(**George Appleton, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(^From Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: A Gentle Corrective for the Epidemic of Identity Politics … .)
(^^John O’Donohue, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: A Gentle Corrective for the Epidemic of Identity Politics … .)

Traveller, there is no path, the path must be forged as you walk.*
(Antonio Machado)

the process of living itself, if you please, is a work of art, as a masterpiece of anybody’s life holds the optimal strength and growth, and which in his life is the most important thing**
(Erich Fromm)

Your life is powerful.

Listen to what it is saying.

There is no path waiting for you.

Only the path you will make.

(*Antonio Machado, quoted in Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly.)
(**From Erich Fromm’s The Art of Listening.)

Think small and act small and we will get bigger, think big and act big and we’ll get smaller.*
(Herb Kelleher)

true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves too the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance**
(Brené Brown)

Seth Godin asks the question, ‘Does an orchestra need an oboe?’^

Which instrument wouldn’t be missed next?

‘The little fillips, the extraneous extras, the indispensable nice bits – they count for more than we know.’^

Herb Kelleher built an airline on looking after its employees, telling them they mattered.  He, and those around him, knew that if you look after your employees then you could trust them to look after the customers.  And that’s what happened, year after year after year, until SouthWest Airlines were transporting more passengers than any other airline.

Each of us matters.  The things we’re curious about and get interested in, they things we pursue with a passion and get to making, they all matter.

True competition is found in complementariness.

Think small and act small and the world gets bigger.

(*Herb Kelleher, quoted in gapingvoid’s blog: The way we fly – a tribute to Kelleher, co-founder of SouthWest Airlines.)
(**From Brené Brown’s Braving the Wilderness.)
(^From Seth Godin’s blog: Does an orchestra need an oboe?)