‘Be quiet and stand still.’*
(Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber)

When we say thank you for something we’re noticing it and we will notice it again.  Gratitude matters for the future.

Instead of keeping moving, we pause, and in pausing we allow something not only to register in our head but also to move something to our heart.  This is important when it comes to its usefulness.  But I am not only thinking about usefulness and efficiency and functionality.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes about the experiences of life:

‘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 condition to make them fit our goals better.’**

This is an interesting note for how gratitude alters perspective and perception: gratitude in the basic things of life but also the more significant.  Csikszentmihalyi goes on to differentiate between those things that give us pleasure and enjoyment:

‘Pleasure is an important component of the quality of life, but by itself it does not bring happiness.  Sleep, rest, food, and sex produce restorative homeostatic experiences that return consciousness to order after the needs of the body intrude and cause psychic entropy to occur.  But they do not add complexity to the self.  pleasure helps to maintain order, but by itself cannot create new order in consciousness.’**

These things help us to feel restored but not to thrive.  On the other hand:

‘Enjoyment is characterised by this forward movement: by a sense of novelty, of accomplishment. […] After an enjoyable event we know we have changed, that our self has grown: in some respect, we have become more complex as a result of it.’**

The warning here, then, is not simply to focus on pleasure because it will never move us forward into personal complexity – no matter what the adverts tell us.

Chip and Dan Heath, in their exploration of the power of moments, write about how:

‘Peaks spice up our experience.’^

Peaks are the things that stand out for us and are memorable within an experience.  Their advice in this direction?:

‘Just by disrupting routines, we can create more peaks.’^

Ursula Le Guin writes about how our imaginations need disruption too – we’re thinking about how we can notice more, be grateful for this, and use these things to create our future:

‘The imagination, like any basic human capacity, needs exercise, discipline, training, in childhood and lifelong.’^^

We’re moving.  Notice, be grateful, store, use in the future.

(*From Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber’s The Slow Professor.)
(**From Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow.)
(^From Chip and Dan Heath’s The Power of Moments.)
(^^From Ursula Le Guin’s Words Are My Matter.)

Morning is when I awake and there is a dawn in me.*
(Henry David Thoreau)

It’s all a question of learning to see.  Squint your eyes, squint your eyes.’**
(Paul Ingbretson)

How can we see the dawn in one another?

Why bother?

Because being right and someone else wrong only gets us so far; often the finding of something new will require that we also find one another:

“What happens because of what happens next?”^

To see in this way requires effort.  It requires that we do not give up because of how someone may first appear to us or how we struggle to understand what they say.

We have to squint slowly.

‘I love what I see.  Life excites me.’^^

(*From Henry David Thoreau’s Where I Live, and What I Lived For.)
(**Paul Ingbretson, quoted in Alan Lightman’s Dance for Two.)
(^From Alex McManus’ Makers of Fire.)
(^^From Richard Rohr’s The Naked Now.)

at times, we accidentally tear a little hole in the fabric of reality so something on the other side shines through, exposing the darkness of our routine existence*
(Donald Miller)

We are perhaps the first generation in history, we postmodern folk, who have the freedom to know the rules and also critique the rules at the same time.**
(Richard Rohr)

If we were a lions or dolphin or perhaps an elephant. life would be quite different.  The question of how we live our lives would be nothing to concern us.  We may write fables about animal but the characters are really humans exploring how to live more humanly – or not, reflecting on how we have opportunities to bring more goodness into the world – or not.

It seems we’ve not finished exploring all that it is to be human.  More than ever before in history, we can look at life closely, ask whatever questions of it we want and then do something with it as we want to do.  Eckhart Tolle writes about what we now know, how what we think of as life is something we’ve made up, the proverbial  “cat is out of the bag” and won’t go back in.  We know we can make make up another story:

‘When you live in a world deadened by mental abstractions, you don’t sense the aliveness of the universe and more.  Most people don’t inhabit a living reality but conceptualised one.’^

It is our seeing this possibility to write different stories that provides us with the hope that we can do better:

‘What else changes a person but the living of a story?  And what is story but the wanting of something difficult and the willingness to work for it?’*

When I read this, I found myself thinking of a story I listened to yesterday.

Elizabeth Gowing was sharing the story of Hatemja and her young and large family, a story she tells in her book The Rubbish Picker’s Wife.  Hatejma is an Ashkali woman living in Kosovo and when Elizabeth met her, Hatejma’s children were unable to attend school because they didn’t have shoes.  Elizabeth, a teacher by background, began to tear holes in reality.  She worked to get shoes for her children, and when some were still excluded because the had missed out on too much time in school, Elizabeth taught them – together with around fifty other children in the same predicament.  When this meant the children couldn’t go rubbish picking and help their families raise a little money to live on, Elizabeth helped Hatejma and other women in the community to use other skills and make goods they could sell.  And when the original family were still living and suffering in their cobbled-together home, she helped them to secure a piece of land and build a own home.

We are all capable of tearing little holes in reality, according to our questions and our interests and our skills.

(*From Donald Miller’s Scary Close.)
(**From Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward.)
(^From Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth.)

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

What we are beneath the surface of our lives is the gift we bring to others.  In the moment of giving, we are making ourselves the most vulnerable.  As John O’Donohue suggests:

‘Vulnerability risks hurt, disappointment and failure.’^

Like the proverbial iceberg, more is hidden than visible in our lives, even to ourselves but especially to one another.  It takes to time and, yes vulnerability again, for it to be seen:

‘The visible world is an active doorway to the invisible world and the invisible world is much larger than the visible.’**

Until then, we are more misunderstood than understood.

Our risk is always to be understood.

(*From Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Bear and Wolf: A Tender Illustrated Fable of Walking Side by Side in Otherness.)
(**From Richard Rohr’s Eager to Love.)
(^From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)

‘Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.  Resistance and change often begin in art.  Very often in our art, the art of words.’*
(Ursula Le Guin)

Audre Lorde introduces me to the word moxie:

“I feel I still have enough moxie to do it all, on whatever terms I’m dealt, timely or not.  Enough moxie to chew the whole world up and spit it out in bite-sized pieces, useful and warm and wet and delectable because they came out of my mouth.”**

I look the word up:

“force of character, determination, or nerve.”

(*From Ursula Le Guin’s Words Are My Matter.)
(**Audre Lorde, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: A Burst of Light.)

When a diversity of ideas and perspectives come together, innovation is born. […] Keep yourself in a room with different people so that problems can be examined differently.*
(Hugh Macleod)

Migrants not only boost creativity through their own ideas but also through stimulating creativity amongst others […] those with more diverse networks solve problems very much more easily than those with less diverse networks.**
(Douglas McWilliams)

Douglas McWilliams is writing about the transformation a diverse workforce has made to the city of London, people from around the world working together, bringing their ideas and their perspectives.  After Brexit, the essential problems still remain, deep-seated, unquestioned.

It’s not about immigration, it’s about systems that do not value everyone, especially those who struggle within it … leaving educational and training systems unchanged.

Some things are easier to measure than others, however, and our unwillingness to look for other or more complex ways to measure and value will continue to be our trap because we become blinkered:

‘But measurement can cut both ways. […] The minute we choose to measure something, we are essentially choosing to aspire to it.’^

Nassim Taleb puts it in his own inimitable way:

‘The fastest way to become rich is to socialise with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialise with the rich.’^^

(*From gapingvoid’s blog: The new global power.)
(**From Douglas McWilliams’ The Flat White Economy.)
(^From Youngme Moon’s Different.)
(^From Nassim Taleb’s The Bed of Procrustes.)

THINK OF IT AS A CATALOGUE OF POSSIBILITIES

When it comes to life, you get to choose the colours

SLOW JOURNEYS IN THE SAME DIRECTION is available from Methodist Publishing for £4.99 plus postage and packing

We must remain attentive in order to be able to receive.*
(John O’Donohue)

If we stopped doing everything for which we do not know the reason or for which we cannot provide the justification … we would probably soon be dead.**
(Friedrich Hayek)

How can I grow?

We may not say it in just this way.  Perhaps we say, How can I improve my performance?, How can I enjoy my life?, How can I pursue my dreams?,  How can I deal with this challenge?, or in countless other ways.  In a universe where things that are alive, grow, it makes sense and is a healthy thing to ask the questions.

It begins with how much we’re prepared to see or, more precisely, to see what we see.

The cultivated life is one prepared for crops, for fruitfulness.

To be willing to see more is an action that breaks open our lives.  In this, we are saying, we don’t know everything – even about ourselves.  We’re inviting difficulty, pain, incompetence and vulnerability.

Difficult we’re taken outside our comfort zone.

Pain because all muscles (whether physical, mental, emotional or spiritual hurt when pushed further.

Incompetence because we are moving into doing unfamiliar, unpractised things.

Vulnerability because we are exposed by all of these

This isn’t a pleasant place but the positives outweigh the negatives.  Alan Lightman helps us to see what makes a good story:

‘A good novel gets under our skin, provokes us long after the first reading because we never full understand the characters.

[…]

We sweep through the narrative again and again, searching for meaning.  Good characters must retain a certain mystery and unfathomable depth, even for the author.  Once we see to the bottom of their hearts, a novel is dead to us.’^

There’s always more to see.

To keep looking moves us beyond present knowledge and behaviour, pushes us beyond our competency and our comfort zone.  Yet we’re proving to ourselves and those around us that not only are we alive but we’re capable of indefinite growth.  Lightman continues, now emphasising how important it is to hold things in tension if life is to be deeper and richer

‘I learned to appreciate both certainty and uncertainty.  Both are necessary in the world.  Both are part of being human.’^

This healthy life is, ultimately, an infinite game: we refuse to categorise something or someone prematurely or for ease; instead we remain open for as long as possible in order to see what might emerge.  We are made to look.

Seeing in this way is not something some have and others don’t have, it’s grown by making ourselves look for longer.

(*John O’Donohue, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(**Friedrich Hayek, quoted in Gerd Gigerenzer’s Gut Feelings.)
(^From Alan Lightman’s A Sense of the Mysterious.)

“The face of afraid keeps changing constantly, and I can count on that change.  I need to travel light and fast, and there’s a lot of baggage I’m going to have to leave behind me.  Jettison cargo.”*
(Audre Lorde)

Audre Lorde is reflecting on her decision not to have a biopsy for treatment for suspected liver cancer.  Instead she sets out from the United States on a teaching trip to Europe.  She also sets out to capture her feelings of fear in her diary.  Lorde catches my attention with her decision to travel light, to jettison cargo, at what was the most difficult point in her life.   She continues:

“I am saving my life by using my life in the service of what must be done.  Tonight as I listened to the ANC speakers from South Africa at the Third World People’s Centre here, I was filled with a sense of self-answering necessity, of commitment as a survival weapon.  Our battles are inseparable.  Every person I have ever been must be actively enlisted in those battles, as well as in the battle to save my life.”*

Lorde causes me to think about how we need to bring together the fullness of who we are and to live for a purpose greater than ourselves.  We save ourselves in saving others.  I cannot live someone else’s life, nor can they live mine.  I can go to the spring of my life, I can only walk with others in their discovery of the spring of theirs:

“Take me down to the spring of my life, and tell me my nature and my name. Give me freedom to grow, so that I may become that self, the seed of which You planted in me at my making.”**

Many things that obstruct the life that wants to flow from the springs of our lives – the things we must “jettison.”  They are different for each of us, but perhaps a common obstruction is the notion that others have a better chance than we do, they have what we do not have.  But it doesn’t matter what others have, only what you have.

I began this morning reading words on curiosity from Hugh Macleod.  Macleod describes a world available to us that was never available to other generations.  Once we have found our curiosity, we can find everything else we need:

‘With all of mankind’s information available at your fingertips, almost anything is knowable. It is something that we have quickly taken for granted. So, being that we are now able to feed our curiosity at any time and in any amount, what is it all for?’^

(*Audre Lorde, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: A Burst of Light.)
(**George Appleton, quote in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(^From gapingvoid’s blog: Curiosity is as important as intelligence.)

‘Decline starts with the replacement of dreams with memories and ends with the replacement of memories with more memories.’**

When it comes to our impossible dream, it’s sometimes about making something happen and sometimes it’s about being able to receive a possibility when it comes to us.  Either way, it’s about attending to identifiable small steps in the meantime.

Of achieving the impossible four minute mile, Seth Godin remarks on Roger Bannister‘s achievement:

‘He did something impossible, but he did it by creating a series of possible steps.”^

Robert Greene adds to this from the other side; if we’re not prepared to do the small things over a long time, we will never gain the mastery we desirer:

‘The very desire for shortcuts makes you eminently unsuitable for any kind of mastery.’^^

Slow down, spot the small steps and, as Nassim Taleb reminds us with today”s opening words, never stop moving towards your dreams.

(*Andy Williams sings The Impossible Dream.  An occasional dose of this in our dreaming diets is very worthwhile.)
(**From Nassim Taleb’s The Bed of Procrustes.)
(^From Seth Godin’s blog: The Bannister method.)
(^^From Robert Greene’s Mastery.)

‘In our interior experience as individuals, as in the public forum of our shared experience as a culture, our courage lives in the same room as our fear — it is in troubled times, in despairing times, that we find out who we are and what we are capable of.’*
(Maria Popova)

Feel for the person not able to change: unable to move from judgement to openness, from cynicism to compassion, from fear to courage.

Yet, if Maria Popova’s imagery is true for fear and courage, then so it is for all of these and I feel hope.

(*From Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: A Burst of Light.)