Saint Francis said that after doing what is necessary, we move on to what is possible. We pay attention, listen, open our hearts.*
(Anne Lamott)

Things happen when we move from the necessary to the possible. Whilst we are used to seeing the necessary, our “sight” is not so good when it comes to spotting the possible.

In his introduction to Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, Robert MacFarlane tells of how Shepherd awakened him to noticing how the “Courvoisier whiff” of birch trees needed summer rain to bring it out.

Waiting for me were these words from Shepherd as she became my guide to seeing more:

‘This changing of focus in the eye, moving the eye itself when looking at things that do not move, deepens one’s sense of outer reality. The static things may be caught in the very act of becoming. By so simple a matter, too, as altering the position of one’s head, a different kind of world may be made to appear. Lay the head down, or better still, face away from what you look at, and bend with straddled legs till you see your world upside down, How new it has become!’**

Move from the necessary to the possible and you will guides to help you see more.

(*From Anne Lamott’s Hallelujah Anyway.)
(**From Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain.)

If you keep poking around the expected, it’s unlikely you’ll be surprised by what you find.*
(Seth Godin)

In other words, we meet unexpected problems with unexpected solutions.**
(Ed Catmull)

You’re just not ready for this, so you’re the ideal candidate … if you are willing to make the awkward journey, to learn en route. To learn to interact with all the journey brings, that cannot be known at the outset, that cannot be specifically prepared for.

Martin Buber says more about this in a passage I came to this morning. It’s a little long but what he’s covering is fascinating:

‘Free is the man that wills without caprice. He believes in the actual, which is to say: he believes in the real association of the real duality, I and You. He believes in destiny and also that it needs him. It does not lead him, it waits for him. He must go forth with his while being: that he knows. It will not turn out the way his resolve intended it; but what wants to come will come only if he resolves to do that which he can will. He must sacrifice his little will, which is unfree and ruled by things and drives, to his great will that moves away from being determined to find destiny. Now he no longer interferes, nor does he merely allow things to happen. He listens to that which grows, to the way of Being in the world, not in order to be carried along by it but rather in order to actualise it in the manner in which it, needing him, wants to be actualised by him – with human spirit and human deed, with human life and human death. He believes, I said; but this implies: he encounters.’^

I admit that I struggle to understand Buber as he explains It and I and Thou, but sometimes I hope I grasp his meaning, what he is picturing as it seizes my attention. Like here, as he talks about how we have a destiny but not one scripted out, but one wanting us to draw it out, to interpret it and give it life; how something must die in us for something larger to come into being, a bigger Self that will listen to and also bring into being that which can only be brought into being through the fullness and deepness of a human life.

None of us are ready for this. All we can do is to enter:

‘I am in charge of one dynamic: when a door is opened, I get to choose how I will respond.’^^

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: Unexpected yet totally plausible.)
(**From Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc..)
(^From Martin Buber’s I and Thou.)
(^^From John Ortberg’s All the Places to Go.)

Who is fit to judge originality?*
(Richard Sennett)

As we become older, our lives become more routine and less novel. […] Learn to recognise your own scripts . Play with them, poke at them, disrupt them.**
(Chip and Dan Heath)

How can you judge something that’s original. It’s possible to compare it with something that isn’t the same, but that’s different.

Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler remind us of three big things we’re looking for in our lives that may lead to originality:

‘Autonomy is the desire to steer our own ship. Mastery is the desire to steer well. And purpose is the need for the journey to mean something.’^

Find these and find your originality. Bring it on.

(*From Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman.)
(**From Chip and Dan Heath’s The Power of Moments.)
(^From Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler’s Bold.)

We are adventurers of who we are as we move to and fro between adventure and stillness.

Some want power and possessions but we have something better, to be most fully who we can be, carrying us into fresh adventures we cannot possibly imagine at the moment.

Towards this, we cannot underestimate the importance of solitude and silence:

‘Be quiet and stand still.’*

The more is sometimes elusive but will always yield to quietness and stillness, though seldomly to busyness and bluster and noise – only the right kinds of activity can be harnessed with quietness and stillness.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi uncovers for us the critical dynamic between the inner and outer worlds when he writes:

‘The bottom line is, rather, how we feel about ourselves and what happens to us. To improve life one must improve the quality of experience. […] There are two main strategies we can adopt to improve the quality of life. The first is to try making external conditions match our goals. The second is to change how we experience external conditions to make them fit our goals better.**

Within this dynamic, we experience our most important brushes with life.

(*From Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber’s The Slow Professor.)
(**From Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow.)

Story is metaphor for life.  You must transform day-to-day living into a work of art. This is not achieved by recounting events verbatim.*
(Robert McKee)

I had to invent the exchange between the researchers to say something true.**
(Annie Pirrie)

Stories are not about telling the truth so much as ways of portraying the truth. They are also how we create truth.

They can be full of truths but then are arranged in a way that is, perhaps, not chronologically true, or certain things weren’t said exactly that way, but what we’re trying to do is create a greater truth – something meaningful we want to bring into being, a story we want to live.

When I read these words from Joseph Campbell, I made a note about how perhaps stories are about eternity and facts are about time, and we are more than time:

‘The tick-tick-tick of times shuts out eternity. We live in this field of time. But what is reflected in this field is an eternal principle made manifest.’^

Story provides with a means of being more than the sum of our lives so far.

(*From Robert McKee’s blog: Fact Vs. Fiction: How to satisfy your audience.)
(**From Anne Pirrie’s Virtue and the Quiet Art of Scholarship.)
(^From Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth.)

What else changes a person’s life but the living of a story? And what is a story but the wanting of something difficult and the willingness to work for it.*
(Don Miller)

Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.**
(Tching-thang)

I have previously mentioned that I am using Keri Smith’s Wreck This Journal as my daily journal.

The page open today has two instructions:

“CHEW ON this.”

“WARNING: DO NOT SWALLOW.”^

I wonder if I swallow too quickly, when I really need to chew for longer.

(*From Donald Miller’s Scary Close)
(**Tching-thang, quoted in Henry David Thoreau’s Where I lived, and What I Lived For.)
(^From Keri Smith’s Wreck This Journal.)

But owning genius requires admitting that we can be exceptional or extraordinary in our own way and accepting that means we have a responsibility to do something with it.*
(Bernadette Jiwa)

We are what remains after everything we are not.**
(Maria Popova)

Bernadette Jiwa asks,

‘When did one day become never?’^

By genius, I’m not thinking big and dramatic, rather, something we love and have honed and no-one else has done.

We can only find out just what it might be if we take it on a journey.

Jiwa answers her own question:

‘One day becomes never when we fail to take the first step.’*

(*From Bernadette Jiwa’s Hunch.)
(**From Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Bear and Wolf.)
(^From The Story of Telling: When Did One Day Become Never?)

God against man. Man against God. Man against nature. Nature against Man. Nature against God. God against Nature. Very funny religion.*
(D. T. Suzuki)

the vast changes required by a regenerative society will not be achieved just by reacting to crises after they arrive. They will require inspiration, aspiration, imagination, patience, perseverance, and no small amount of humility**
(Peter Senge.)

Once upon a time “against” ensured we wouldn’t be eaten by the proverbial sabre-toothed tiger, but now it gets in the way of a world that could be bigger for everyone.

In the modern world “against” leads us into competition with one another, in small to big ways.

“With,” though, is an infinite game.

We can still bring the things that make us different but we get to use our different smarts against the things we really do need to be against: poverty, illiteracy, disease, conflict, injustice, and, definitely, climate change.

A question from Audre Lord invites us to explore a smarter with and against:

“Where does our power lie and how do we school ourselves to use it in the service of what we believe? […] How can we use our differences in or common battles for a lovable future?”^

(*D. T. Suzuki quoted in Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth.)
(**From Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution.)
(^Audre Lord, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: A Burst of Light.)

This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.*

There was a sudden tingling in my toes. It felt as though something tremendous might be going to happen.**
(Billy)

The Duke of Hampshire has just asked Billy a question:

“But what about you, my lad? I am wondering if you happen to have just one extra special little wish all for yourself. If you do, I’d love you to tell me about it.”^

Billy didn’t substitute the question for something smaller and easier:

‘”There is an old wooden house near where I live,” I said. “It’s called The Grubber and long ago it used to be sweet-shop. I have wished and wished that one day somebody might come along and make it into a marvellous new sweet-shop all over again.”‘**

I’m loving reading books at almost sixty that I never got to read when I was a child. There’re such simple but special things to come upon.

Billy was to be the one who re-opened the sweet-shop, and I can’t help but think there’s something you want to see happen, and maybe you’re the one to do it.

Maybe you’ve just swapped the difficult question for an easier one.

Maybe.

(*From Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.)
(**The character Billy in Roald Dahl’s The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me.)
(^The Duke of Hampshire in Roald Dahl’s The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me.)

Bernadette Jiwa asks, ‘Can you describe your company in three words?’*

How about your life? Three words to keep you on track, to open up a space of possibilities?

A word can convey a journey from something as well as to something. Where three words intersect is a powerful place within space and time.

When we stay focused through the story these words tell we bring something no-one else can:

‘No matter your chosen medium, remember this: it will take you ten years to master your art. Ten years of unforgiving, relentless and thankless work, dawn until dusk.’**

On the other side of this – though, really, it’s ongoing – is something quite remarkable.

The three words of the title are some I came across as I was reading this morning. They each describe the journey I mentioned from something to something. Imagine being not he receiving end of a life lived in this way; imagine what you want to bring into being and give as a result.

What are your three words?

(*From The Story of Telling: Tell Me About Your Company.)
(**From Robert McKee’s email: The Story of a Writer: Part 3