“People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”*
(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

‘Creating the future does not begin with a plan, it begins with a dream.  And when someone actions a dream, it begins with a spark.’**
(Alex McManus)

Yuval Noah Harari writes about how we have settled into something dangerous both for us as humans and for our planet.  Harari charts how the industrial revolution made it possible to produce more after cheaper, which has left us with a problem.  Who will buy everything that’s being produced?  We’ve taken on board the naturalness of consumerism and believe frugality to be unnatural as a solution:

‘Our green and blue planet is becoming a concrete and plastic shopping centre.’^

If were possible to weigh all seven billion humans we would top the scales at 300 million tons.  If we were able to weigh all the animals needed to feed this population they would weigh in at an incredible 700 million tons.  Compared with this, the combined weight of all existing larger wild animals would come to only 100 million tons.  A 10:1 ratio to our species and its needs.  The planet is becoming more and more human, and as we see, that isn’t necessarily good.

Hope is often found when we we begin to join the inside and outside of life, creating a field of what wants to be.  As William James articulated this unsettlement:

“It was deep calling unto deep – the deep that my own struggle had opened up within being answered by the unfathomable deep without.”^^

Settlement is endangering our planet and, with it, our existence.  Time to be unsettled by imagination. All are welcome to bring theirs:

‘Hardly anything does this for us more powerfully than art — it unsettles us awake, disrupts our deadening routines, enlarges our reservoir of hope by enlarging our perspective, our grasp of truth, our capacity for beauty.’*^

(*Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Ursula K. Le Guin on Art, Storytelling, and the Power of language to Transform and Redeem.)
(**From Alex McManus’ Makers of Fire – eBook version.)
(^From Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.)
(^^William James, quoted in Alan Lightman’s The Accidental Universe.)
(*^From Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Ursula K. Le Guin on Art, Storytelling, and the Power of language to Transform and Redeem.)

We each carry a story within.

Wherever we are, whatever we are doing, whoever we are with.

We encounter or avoid, we connect or disconnect through this story – whether we carry it consciously or unconsciously.

The story is not fixed, though.  Three ways in which we can significantly alter it are through developing our character, being open to diversity and identifying a purpose greater than ourselves with which to wrestle and overcome.

The best stories have deep character, are diverse and varied, and involve conflict – there is something to overcome.

All three together make for a story that makes fire and brings change.

‘In real life, true empathy drills down into unhappiness.’*
(Hugh Macleod)

‘It is fashionable to espouse the latest cynicism.  If we live in hope, we go against the tide.’**
(Eugene Peterson)

What if you’re not the victim, what if you’re meant to be the protagonist?

This is a story shift, to move from powerlessness to power, defined by Martin Luther King Jr. as:

“the ability to achieve our purpose and to effect change”.^

It involves creating a different kind of story to live in, about power being able to be fully present, not a half-person.  Whilst we all need help to get there, to differing degrees, only we can author the new story from within own lives and it best be today, just some small steps will begin it:

‘Despair is a spiritual condition.  It’s the belief that tomorrow will be just the same as today.

[…]

Hope happens when we can set goals, have the tenacity and perseverance to pursue those goals, and believe in our own abilities to act.’^^

To imagine the future, to have the grit to reach for them and to know we have abilities that will help us, is a powerful thing.

When we begin to break it down, we see how hope isn’t something floating in the ether and some catch it and others don’t, rather it is something we can learn.

We know there’s power in literacy, but there’s a new literacy for those understanding the greater possibilities:

‘The illiterate of the 21st Century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot LEARN, UNLEARN,and RELEARN.’*^

I’m just beginning an online story writing course and have read that there are five practical elements that have to be accomplished first of all: planning, setting, viewpoint, plotting and characterisation.  If we are to write a better story that makes it possible for us to move from being a victim to protagonist, we have to do the behind the scenes work.  Why not work on:

PLANNING: What small thing will you change today?
SETTING: Where will you accomplish this, who with?
VIEWPOINT: Who do you trust to be able to help you, including reflect on this
PLOTTING: Where will it lead you next; how does it connect with your story?
CHARACTERISATION: How will it help you grow as a person?

‘Storytelling allows us to get perspective on what we can create in the long term instead of always being limited to just seeing there to six months ahead.’

(*From gapingvoid’s blog: Let people in on the secret.)
(**From Eugene Peterson’s Run with the Horses.)
(^Martin Luther King Jr., quoted in Brené Brown’s Rising Strong.)
(^^From Brené Brown’s Rising Strong.)
(*^Alvin Toffler, quoted in Sunni Brown’s The Doodle Revolution.)
(^*From Patrick Dodson’s Psychotic Inertia.)

HEARTFULNESS

Put up a print to encourage your people to bring their full self to work.  Your team is even more amazing than you know

A square canvas from £40 (25x25cm) to £100 (61x61cm)

‘Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families and simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sting when they are engaged.’
(Henry David Thoreau)

What is most important?  What we do?  Or who we do it for?

I want to bring these more and more together into a synchronicity.

The essayist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau impresses me as he builds his own home, digging the cellar, setting in place the chimney’s foundations, raising the major structure with the aid of others, and as he does, ponders life:

”It would be worth the while to build still more deliberately than I did, considering, for instance, what foundation a door, a window, a cellar, a garret, have in the nature of man, and perchance never raising any superstructure until we found a better reason for it then our temporal necessities even.’*

I didn’t build the house I live in.  This was erected by people I will never be able to name, back in 1950.  A solid council house, my wife and I had the luxury of slowly getting it ready to move into – slowly because of our skills-level, but we got there and it was a close as we might get to building our own home.

It was the garden where I was able to introduce more novelty, losing myself in thought as I took a year or more to move tons of stones so I could work on what what beneath, and then moving them back, washing them by hand on the way.  This followed by creating beds and planting shrubs.  I enjoyed this time, finding myself thinking about all kinds of things to do with life, work and health.  I think this is a little of what Thoreau was imagining.

In our complicated society, though, others build, make or grow things for us, and we are separated from this natural synchronising of activity and thought.

Reading Thoreau, I’d come to wonder about how this building of a home offers itself as an analogy for lends itself for building our own lives.

We have a home we probably have not built, but we also have opinions we have come to without direct contact with others and we live within stories we have not written.

It seems the same thing was running through Thoreau’s mind:

‘Where is this division of labour to end? and what object does it finally serve?  No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of me thinking for myself.’*

Life is about removing the separations and creating the synchronicities.  To take back the responsibility of writing our own stories, of identifying choosing and living out our talents and passions.  Joseph Jaworski might say we have given up so much for:

‘We are partners in the unfolding of the universe.’**

And Alex McManus sees that we are more than enough to meet the challenge:

‘We are a mystery wrapped in a question.’^

Life may certainly be simpler when we outsource it but, as Nassim Taleb reminds us, it is ‘simplification that is dangerous’.^^

(*From Henry David Thoreau’s Where I Lived, and What I  Lived For.)
(**From Joseph Jaworski’s Source.)
(^From Alex McManus’ Makers of Fire – eBook version.)
(^^From Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness.)

OWN THIS PRINT

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Get in touch at geoffrey@thinsilence.org to find out more

‘Society must be organised in such a way that man’s social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it.’*
(Erich Fromm)

I can’t recall anyone arguing for the United Kingdom to leave or remain in the European Union in order to generate more love amongst European countries and around the world.  I’m imagining I’d have to trawl long and hard through the words defining the 2016 United States Presidential Election to find such a concern.  When I go back in time to my schooldays, I can’t remember being taught about love and its importance to history or geography or the sciences.

It doesn’t have to be the word love per se; it might be various dimensions or aspects of love; compassion, forgiveness, care, kindness, openness … .

Erich Fromm wrote about how we’re caught in a comfortable system but are not really free:

‘All activities are subordinated to economic goals, means have become ends, man is an automaton – well-fed, well-clad, but without any ultimate concern for that which is his peculiarly human quality and function.  If man is to love, he must be put in his supreme place.  The economic machine must serve him, rather than he serve it.  He must be enabled to share experience, to share work, rather than, at best, share profits.’*

Perhaps in the future it will be different:

‘Humanity is an aspiration we must pursue.’**

For what it means to be human, we need to look forwards rather than backwards and will include growing our capacity to appreciate and develop the art of loving, with imagination, creativity and fun.  It often doesn’t feel appropriate to talk about love in politics, in education and in business but why not?  I imagine another growth spurt for the human race, a spurt that will benefit the whole planet.

Maybe these words from the Buddha imagine something of our future:

“When your mind is filled with love, send it in one direction, then a second, a third, and a fourth, then above, then below.  Identify with everything without hatred, resentment, anger or enmity.  The mind of love is very wide.  It grows immeasurably and eventually is able to embrace the whole world.”^

Peter Senge draws out how flourishing human society benefits the whole world:

‘A regenerative society is about life flourishing, not just human life.’^^

(*From Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving.)
(**Alex McManus: source lost.)
(^The Buddha, quoted in Karen Armstrong’s Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life.)
(^^From Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution.)

THE LOVE SERIES

These Heart Series canvases are available for your places of work and community.  Get in touch to find out more.

“The opposite of spare time is, I guess, occupied time.  In my case I still don’t know what spare time is because all my time is occupied.  It always has been and it is now.  It’s occupied by living.”*
(Ursula Le Guin)

Time ought not only to be functional but beautiful too.  I’m not thinking of time out, or relaxed time – these kinds of time can be important but they don’t necessarily become beautiful time.

In her essay Living in a Work of Art, Ursula Le Guin describes her childhood home, how it came to be built and how it was lived in by her family.  As a writer, she comes to wonder what kind of novel it might be compared with:

‘I don’t know what novel our Maybeck house could be compared with, but it would contain darkness and radiant light; its beauty would arise from honest, bold, inventive construction, from geniality and generosity of spirit and mind, and would have all the elements of fantasy and strangeness.’**

In describing the beauty of this house and home, Le Guin could be describing the beauty of a life; indeed, she concludes her reflections upon her childhood home:

‘perhaps all my life I have been trying to rebuild it around me out of words’.**

This sense of beauty in a life, created in time – for Le Guin being constructed in words and for us in a multiplicity of ways – is added to by some thoughts on the art of loving from Erich Fromm who is thinking about the need to use time to encourage inner activity:

‘One attitude indispensable for the practice of the art of loving […]: activity. […] To be active in thought, feeling, with ones eyes and ears, throughout the day, to avoid inner laziness, be it in the form of being receptive, hoarding, or plain wasting one’s time, is an indispensable condition for the practice of the art of loving.’^

I note the thought that even wasted time is useful time here.  When we struggle with our time alone and see no purpose to it we have a problem.  Rebecca Solnit reflects:

‘One force is the filling up of what I think of as “the time in-between,’ the time of walking to or from a place, of meandering, or running errands.  That time has been deplored as a waste, reduced, and its remainder filled with earphones playing music and mobile phones relaying conversations.’^^

Perhaps noticing Fromm’s inner activity with time, John O’Donohue sees how all time can be made beautiful, replete with possibility:

‘When you come into the rhythm of your nature, things happen of themselves.’*^

(*Ursula Le Guin, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Ursula K. Le Guin on Spare Time.)
(**From Ursula Le Guin’s Words Are My Matter.)
(^From Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving.)
(^^From Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust.)
(*^From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)

I see potential in her.

This is faith.

It’s how we live at our highest and finest as humans.  Erich Fromm writes about how to be human is to have faith:

‘Faith is a character trait pervading the whole personality, rather than a specific belief.’*

To see potential in the one holds out the hope off potential in the many:

‘The faith in others has its culmination in faith in mankind.’*

There’s realistic faith and unrealistic faith, that is, realised and unrealised faith.  Faith is like seeing in the dark.  The person we think we see with potential has to see this themselves and then move.  Fromm reminds me that this is what we mean by education, a pure understanding that we need to see more in evidence:

‘The root of the word “education” is e-ducere, literally, to lead forth, or to bring out something that is potentially present.’*

What if we could spin our educational systems around to see what is possible to bring out of every person?

(*From Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving.)

‘Most people are products of their time. Only the rare few are its creators.’*
(Maria Popova)

Maria Popova introduced me to the writing of Ursula Le Guin, and as a result, I bought myself a copy of Le Guin’s Words Are My Matter.  Popova now shares the news that Le Guin died a few days ago, her blog exploring the writer’s ‘question of how we measure the light of a life as it nears its sunset.’*

Mostly we can allow time to act upon us.  Or we may try to hold back the effects of time.  Others have an inkling that they can do something remarkable with time.  Le Guin lived for more than 32,000 days – which is one way in which we might measure a life –  but the writer appears to have filled her days with a sense of continuing work:

“I am not exactly retired, because I never had a job to retire from. I still work, though not as hard as I did. I have always been and am proud to consider myself a working woman.”

When we figure out that a job and work are different things – though they may exist simultaneously for some – we get to play with time differently.

We may pause a stopwatch but we do not really pause time, only our measurement of it.  Pausing, though, can be a valuable thing to do.  Alex McManus counsels:

‘When in doubt, scout.’**

McManus’ picture is of time rushing along like a white water river, seemingly getting faster and faster.  In conditions like these it pays to remove ourselves from the thrashing flow and figure what lies ahead and how we’ll tackle it.

It can be a struggle to extricate ourselves from the swirling experience of time and even when we are relaxing there can be more negativity in the experience than we want:

‘Any activity, if done, in a concentrated fashion, makes us more awake (although afterwards a natural and beneficial tiredness sets in), while every unconcentrated activity makes one sleepy – while at the same time it makes it difficult to fall asleep at the end of the day.’^

As I read Joseph Campbell describing how people make sacred space where they are, I wonder about the possibility of making sacred time:

“One should find the symbol in the landscape itself of the energies of the life there.  That’s what all traditions do.  They sanctify their own landscape.’^^

This is what we do when we see the contribution of perspective and gift we bring into the world for however many years, days and moments we have – it is something sacred and wonderful.  It is never too late to explore this.  We can ask the question what has our life been leading up to for today.

(*From Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Ursula K. Le Guin on Spare Time.)
(**From Alex McManus’ Makers of Fire – eBook version.)
(^From Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving.)
(^^From Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth.)

“The path is not somewhere in the sky, it is in our hearts.”*
(The Buddha)

“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”**
(Jesus of Nazareth)

To live with heart is to live with joie de vivre, a joy of living – something different for each of us.

Dan and Chip Heath write about the power of moments, designating the things that lie beneath remarkable moments as “mostly forgettable.”  This white noise is made up of the things in life that are just there, they’re not remarkable but, thankfully, neither are they unpleasant.

The Heath brothers claim many of us hope for mostly forgettable over unpleasant but Henry David Thoreau appears to be reaching for the remarkable when he penned the following words:

“We are sensible that behind the rustling leaves, and the stacks of grain, and the bare clusters of the grape, there is a field of wholly new life which no man has lived; that even this world was made for more mysterious and nobler inhabitants than men and women.”^

The question is, where will our hearts lead us to if we dare follow them.

Following our heart is far from easy and often does’nt yet exist.  Only our living with discipline – disciplines of engagement and withdrawal that we’ll each need to figure out for ourselves – will bring the path into being, enabling us to reach for a higher plane.

(*The Buddha, quoted in Keri Smith’s The Wander Society.)
(**Matthew 6:21)
(^Henry David Thoreau, quoted in Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution.)

‘[F]iguring out your life has become figuring out your job, which is still coming from an industrial revolution mentality’.*
(Patrick Dodson)

‘Attend.  Listen to what your life calls you to do.’**
(Otto Scharmer)

To shed light on something means to see it more clearly, to be able to know something more fully.  My experience has been that I have needed others to help me shed light on different aspects of my life, and I hope it means, I have become a shedder of light for others, and they to others.

Stephen Pyne writes about how we live in a world defined by fire:

‘The nature of life based on photosynthesis assures this will happen: fire will occur unless something blocks it.’^

Fire has been such a significant contributor to the development of human life on earth that we are able to refer to this period as the Anthropocene.  We are able to describe ourselves as fire-creatures.  One of the developments from being artists in fire has been the creation of the lightbulb, the symbol we use to identify the appearance of an idea.  Our brains are firing with electricity.  This is where everything beautiful, noble, good, and kind (and many more things) begins its life.  And we have no idea where all of this will end unless the light is blocked in some way or by some thing.

Those who’ve been light-people to us will have been able to do so because they foster certain behaviours in their lives, developing the art of light.  Erich Fromm suggests developers of an art will have been disciplined, focused, patient and valuing of the mastery of the art:

‘With regard to the art of loving, this means that anyone who aspires to become a master in this art must begin by practising discipline, concentration and patience throughout every phase of his life.’^^

Keri Smith adds more things to our list of helpful practices when she identifies the critical elements of wandering:

‘We use the tools of instinct, intuition, and experimentation.’*^

Instinct, intuition and experimentation are more curious and creative elements for inhabiting Fromm’s characteristics, the things that allow us to develop our unique form of light.  The human eye is unable to detect some 95% or so of light in our universe is a helpful reminder that we need to become better at seeing the unique light each person has to bring. Richard Rohr express this when he declares:

‘I love what I see: life excites me.’^*

He confesses how this drives him on to help others see:

‘Primarily, I am concerned with why people cannot see very well and how we perhaps can.’^*

Here are some more ways for developing our personal light:

Read as much as you can (this also includes listening to podcasts and watching videos, …).
Attend the things where your kind of light is being taught and practised.
Have conversations with people who are further ahead in expressing your kind of light in their life and ask lots of questions.
Shed a little light of your own: experiment, prototype.

(*From Patrick Dodson’s Psychotic Inertia.)
(**From Otto Scharmer’s Theory U.)
(^From Stephen Pyne’s Fire.)
(^^From Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving.)
(*^From Keri Smith’s The Wander Society.)
(^*From Richard Rohr’s The Naked Now.)