Stick or twist?

Perhaps this is what is real forever.

That would be stick.

Perhaps there is something more real: we can do better, improve, develop.

That would be twist.

Two different stories.  Your choice.

‘Ramon felt light and energised.  Thinking ish-ly allowed his ideas to flow freely.’*

ish is Peter Reynolds’ wonderful encouragement to all ages to draw without worrying about getting everything right.

‘Ramon loved to draw.’*

Like so many of us, drawing comes naturally and Ramon pursues it heart and soul.  That is, until his older brother Leon pokes fun:

‘On day, Ramon was drawing
a vase of flowers.
His brother , Leon,
leaned over his shoulder.

Leon burst out laughing.
“What is that?” he asked.’*

Like so many of us, Leon has lost the joy of drawing.  And for most of us, there will have been a time when someone leant into our lives and smirked, or derided, or loftily queried what we were doing; perhaps a parent, a teacher, a peer, an expert.

Instead of drawing just for the love of it, Ramon felt he had to ‘make his pictures look right,’ but when the never did:

‘After many months and
many crumpled sheets of paper,
Ramon put his pencil down.

“I’m done.”

Drawing has stopped for most of us … and usually something else, too.  An idea.  A dream.  A question.

Someone had been watching Ramon all this time.

His little sister Marisol picks up one of the crumpled papers and runs to her room.  Ramon chases into Marisol’s room, only to be stopped in his tracks by a gallery of his crumpled pictures on the walls:

‘“This is one of my favourites,”
Marisol said, pointing.

“That was supposed to be a vase of flowers,” Ramon said,
“but it doesn’t look like one.”

“Well, it looks vase-ISH!”
she exclaimed.’*

Ish changes everything for Ramon:

‘Ramon felt light and energised.
Thinking ish-ly allowed
his ideas to flow freely.

He began to draw what he felt –
loose lines.
Quickly springing out.
Without worry.’*

Ramon began to draw everything and everywhere, all the time.  He doesn’t stop at ish art but begins writing poems, too.  This is what happens when we start listening to our hearts and pay less attention to everyone else – except when they’re telling us to listen to our heart:

‘We will always need to be humble enough to accept that our heart knows why we are here.’**

This is about pursuing our art – whatever kind of art it might be – and encouraging others to pursue theirs.

Have a look at Hugh Macleod’s Ignore Everybody for some more encouragement towards your creativity.

(*From Peter Reynolds’ ish.)
(**From Paulo Coelho’s Aleph.)

‘Oxytocin is released when we’re physically close to another person’s body, and can be described as a “social glue,” since it keeps society together by means of cooperation, trust and love.’*
(Meik Wiking)

We use the phrase “We’re worlds apart” to express how far we can be from finding agreement with someone.  But we only need look within ourselves a make the same discovery, that we are many worlds – many people, far from the simple person we make ourselves out to be.  This makes for a lifetime of discover and wonder:

‘To reclaim the beauty of the multitudes we each contain, we must break free of the prison of our fragments and meet one another as whole persons full of wonder unblunted by identity-template and expectation.’**

In these personal worlds we’re developing languages and cultures and systems.  These come into contact with the personal worlds of others, and, you an me, we are more than who we are, we are becoming:

“Each one of us is the custodian of an inner world that we carry around with us.  Now, other people can glimpse it from [its outer expressions].  But no one but you knows what your inner world is actually like, and no one can force you to reveal it until you actually tell them about it.  That’s the whole mystery of writing and language and expression – that when you do say it, what others hear and what you intend and know are often totally different kinds of things.”**

That our worlds are not fixed but are developing is how we are able to move forward together.  Our languages and cultures and systems are open. We notice how others have better words to describe things and use them ourselves, they live in fascinatingly rich cultures we want to borrow from, and have developed systems that work better than our own so we import from them.

When our worlds collide, there is the exciting possibility of togetherness rather than apartness.

(*From Meik Wiking’s The Little Book of Hygge.)
(**From Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: A Gentle Corrective for the Epidemic of Politics Turning Us On Each Other and Ourselves.)
(**John O’Donohue, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: A Gentle Corrective for the Epidemic of Politics Turning Us On Each Other and Ourselves.)

Jimmy Cliff sang about the difference seeing clearly made:

“I can see clearly now the rain is gone
I can see all obstacles in my way
Gone are the dark clouds that had me down
It’s gonna be a bright bright sunshinin’ day
It’s gonna be a bright bright sunshinin’ day

Oh yes, I can make it now the pain is gone
All of the bad feelings have disappeared
Here is that rainbow I’ve been praying for
It’s gonna be a bright bright sunshinin’ day”

I had a cataract removed from my left eye yesterday.  I now have two new eyes and can say I can see clearly now.  (A big thank you to the staff at the hospital at this point for making this possible.)

It takes some getting used to.  I’m struggling with there being so much light and the eye feels a little bruised, but these things will pass.  It changes everything I turn my attention to because I can simply see more.

Seeing in a new way, a better, clearer, brighter way, is a quest defines our lives, whether we have cataracts or not.  We see ourselves and the world around us increasingly differently, as Alex McManus points out hopes and fears go together.  When we see something more clearly, or in more detail for the first time, it can be uncomfortable, even painful:

‘Imagining possible futures is also where we must face both our deepest fears and greatest hopes.’*

We can’t do something about everything we come to see but we can can do more about something.  We might call this our “original way of seeing,” seeing, as we do, what others perhaps cannot or do not choose see.  When we act upon this original seeing, we become original people as pointed to by Gary Wills, shaping and honing our lives:

“A very original man must shape his life, make a schedule that allows him to reflect and study, and create.”**

Walt Whitman has introduced me to the word debouch, which means “to emerge from a confined space into a wide, open area.”  Physically, this is where my new seeing finds me: I am debouched.  It is also where I am stretching to emotionally, mentally, and spiritually:

‘There is that in me … I do not what it is … but I know it is in me.’^

(*From Alex McManus’ Makers of Fire – eBook version.)
(**Gary Wills, quoted in Eugene Peterson’s Run with the Horses.)
(^From Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.)

“Live the questions now.”*
(Rainer Maria Rilke)

‘So what don’t we have enough of?

Short answer: Mattering.  Making a difference.  Doing something important.’**
(Hugh Macleod)

The industrial revolutions have been very good at providing us with stuff, more than enough stuff.  Human life has benefited in many ways but not in all ways.  We find we still need to add more.  Otherwise we sleepwalk through consumerist answers being directed at us every day, but we can be awakened by our questions about meaning and “mattering.”  Keri Smith writes:

‘A consumerist system creates a belief in the “scarcity within,” the belief that we need material goods to invoke the imagination, that we are incapable of constructing our own lives out of whatever we have at our disposal, that only others can provide us with the things needed to live.’^

Joseph Campbell offers this:

‘Privation and suffering alone can open the mind to all that is hidden from others.’^^

Beyond all the stuff and its answers, there’re the questions that promise to engage us in a fully awakened life:

‘[T]echnology is not going save us.  Our computers, our tools, our machines are not enough.  We have to rely on our intuition, our true being.’^^

(*Rainer Maria Rilke, quoted in the Northumbria Community’s Morning Prayer.)
(**From gapingvoid’s blog: Our infinite need to be meaningful.)
(^From Keri Smith’s The Wander Society.)
(^^From Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth.)

‘Yes, we frequently sell ourselves too short.  We don’t ask for compensation commensurate with the value we create. It’s a form of hiding. But the most common form of this hiding is not merely lowering the price. No, the mistake we make is in not telling stories that create more value, in not doing the hard work of building something unique and worth seeking out.’*
(Seth Godin)

“Each one of us is the custodian of an inner world that we carry around with us.  Now, other people can glimpse it from [its outer expressions].  But no one but you knows what your inner world is actually like, and no one can force you to reveal it until you actually tell them about it.  That’s the whole mystery of writing and language and expression — that when you do say it, what others hear and what you intend and know are often totally different kinds of things.”**
(John O’Donohue)

We can spend our whole of our life hiding: wasting time, staying put, picking second-best, avoiding the questions that can change everything.  I know, I’ve tried a lot of these and more.

We do this because we believe we have nothing others want, that we’ll jeopardise the way things are, others will think less of us, we’ll find ourselves alone, and many such and similar things.  It becomes difficult to tell our excuses from the reasons.  Yet the very things we say mean we cannot turn up and do the different thing are the very things we can use uniquely:

‘Constraints are the womb of creation.’^

This is our “inner world,” as John O’Donohue names it, and it is a world, big and crammed with astonishment, surprise and wonder.

Don’t hide your world – many will value seeing it.

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: Getting paid what you deserve.)
(**John O’Donohue, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: A Gentle Corrective for the Epidemic of Politics Turning Us On Each Other and Ourselves.)
(^From Alex Mcmanus’ Makers of Fire – eBook version.)

On the one hand, wisdom isn’t something we have but is more the relationship existing between our true self and the world around us.

On the other hand, we cannot rely on others for our happiness – we must generate this within ourselves, and for this we must know what lies deep within.

It is knowing what lies deep within that allows us to hold these two thoughts together: wisdom appears when my deep and your deep meet.  This is not easy, as John O’Donohue points out:

“One of the sad things today is that so many people are frightened by the wonder of their own presence.  They are dying to tie themselves into a system, a role, or to an image, or to a predetermined identity that other people have actually settled on for them.  This identity may be totally at variance with the wild energies that are rising inside in their souls.  Many of us get very afraid and we eventually compromise.  We settle for something that is safe, rather than engaging the danger and the wildness that is in our own hearts.”*

Too often we meet each other in our “lessness” rather than our “moreness.”  When we do not find the “me” we want to be, I suspect we refuse the “me” in each other.  If this language sounds strange it is indicative of the extent to which we have lost the means of self-reflection in our modern life.

In her thoughtful essay cum blog exploring how we find more reasons for excluding each other rather than including, Maria Popova  reflects:

‘Where Walt Whitman once invited us to celebrate the glorious multitudes we each contain and to welcome the wonder that comes from discovering one another’s multitudes afresh, we now cling to our identity-fragments, using them as badges and badgering artillery in confronting the templated identity-fragments of others.  (For instance, some of mine: woman, reader, immigrant, writer, queer, survivor of Communism.)’**

Whilst we must work against exclusion if we are to find a wiser world, we must also be careful not to create new exclusions – like my touch-screen gloves that, while allowing me to use touch-screen technology and keep my hands war – limit my contact to a finger and thumb on each hand:

‘The censors of yore have been replaced by the “sensitivity readers” of today, fraying the fabric of freedom — of speech, even of thought — from opposite ends, but fraying it nonetheless.  The safety of conformity to an old-guard mainstream has been supplanted by the safety of conformity to a new-order minority predicated on some fragment of identity, so that those within each new group (and sub-group, and sub-sub-group) are as harsh to judge and as fast to exclude “outsiders” (that is, those of unlike identity-fragments) from the conversation as the old mainstream once was in judging and excluding them.’**

Correctness sells us short every time:

‘In our effort to liberate, we have ended up imprisoning — imprisoning ourselves in the fractal infinity of our ever-subdividing identities, imprisoning each other in our exponentially multiplying varieties of otherness.’**

I didn’t know I’d be reading Popova’s thoughts when, yesterday,  I was conversing with my friend and mentor Alex McManus on this very thing.  It also just happens that I came upon these words from Alex this morning:

‘Love is the emergent capacity of empathetically including others within our own self-identity.  It is the context for all faith and love.^

This allowing others within our identity appears to be the most frightening thing of all to us for we struggle with it so much that we avoid going there because of what may be found.  As Brené Brown reflects on a disagreement she had with her husband:

‘Both of us were scared to embrace our own vulnerabilities, even knowing full well that vulnerability is the only path out of the shame storm and back to each other.’^^

Kosuke Koyama caught my attention when he remarked:

‘Straightness is not natural. […] It is technological.

[…]

Nature is full of curves that embrace curves; acute curves and gentle curves.  Curves produce irregular forms.  Straightness contains only fragments of straight line.  Human nature is made up of nature and un-nature, un-artificial and artificial.’*^

Koyama admits that he has no idea how a photocopier works but he can press a button and it copies for him:

‘I work only “superficially” from the outside.  It works for me.  Technology is increasingly making us outsiders.’*^

I found myself wondering whether our language for others is becoming more technological, straight, efficient, superficial, when we need it to be curved.

Koyama illustrates where we began today, of knowing my own deep self is only one end of the wisdom tension:

‘There is not point in crying out “I see myself.  As long as I see myself, I am not lost!”  Precisely then I am lost.  Strangely “I see myself” is a lost condition.  I must see myself among others.  Personality is not a static condition.  Personality is an event.  It takes place when there is a meeting between myself and others.’*^

I cannot be lost when you, I see.

(*John O’Donohue, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings:  A Gentle Corrective for the Epidemic of Politics Turning Us On Each Other and Ourselves.)
(**From Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings:  A Gentle Corrective for the Epidemic of Politics Turning Us On Each Other and Ourselves.)
(^From Alex McManus’ Makers of Fire – eBook version.)
(^^From Brené Brown’s Rising Strong.)
(*^From Kosuke Koyama’s Three Mile an Hour God.)

“When a great moment knocks on the door of your life,
it is often no louder than the beating of your heart,
and it is very easy to miss it.”
(Boris Pasternak)

‘[T]he human heart may perceive future events before the brain does
[…]
at the very least it implies that the brain does not act alone in the perception of human events’.**
(Joseph Jaworski)

Shedding light uncovers many things that may otherwise be missed … and each of us is light.

Early in the day we connect with the things that make it possible for us to produce our light, making it possible to see what others may not, and, because light is not about hiding but disclosing – we benefit from the light of 0thers, as they benefit from ours.

Futurist Ramez Naam believes we’re going to see something very important happen in human thinking – which is what human light is about:

‘We stand poised on the brink of the largest ever explosion of human mental power, a second Renaissance more transformative, and more inclusive than the first.’^

Joseph Jaworski, above, reminds us that this will be further enhanced by recognising how our hearts and guts also display intelligence, allowing us to “see” more of what we might otherwise miss.

In their latest book The Power of Moments, Chip and Dan Heath write about how and why moments hold significance for us; these moments can be transitions, milestones, and also pits (the opposite of peaks).  Whilst we may want to avoid looking at these too closely, they can become some of the most valuable things we see:

‘What’s least commonsensical is that pits can be flipped into peaks.’^^

A company can turn a bad experience into a loyalty-building moment if it’s prepared to see it for what it is.  And we can make a difference, even be defined by, the very things that causes us most difficulty and, even, pain.

Our light, or ability to see, is greater with the light others provide for us – as well as connecting to our own light as early as possible in the day, when we include others – their books, podcast, articles, videos.  More available than ever, the light of others may well be one of the most powerful forces in making Naam’s dream a reality, though it will never be by brainpower alone.  Our light shines even more brightly when mind and heart and gut combine:

‘Careless thinking and impurity of heart can make a dreadfully destructive combination.  The brain must be guided by the heart.  The heart must be enlightened by the brain.’*^

(*Boris Pasternak, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(**From Joseph Jaworski’s Source.)
(^From Ramez Naam’s The Infinite Resource.)
(^^From Chip and Dan Heath’s The Power of Moments.)
(*^From Kosuke Koyama’s Three Mile an Hour God.)

‘See ever so far … there is limitless space outside of that,
Count ever so much … there is limitless time around that.’*
(Walt Whitman)

“Without us here to notice, the universe is just pointless physics unfolding.”**
(“Cormac Wallace”)

In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Ron Weasley has to ask of Hermione when she’s saying it’s fun breaking the rules, “Who are you and what have you done with Hermione Grainger?”

It’s a question about who we think we are and who we are capable of becoming.  And it’s a questions, as Maria helps us to see, that demands our honesty because:

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

The best questions enlarge our worlds, connecting us with the wonder both around and within us, and the possibilities for what life can become. Popova quotes John O’Donohue from a conversation he had in 1997 with John Quinn:

“One of the most exciting and energetic forms of thought is the question.  I always think that the question is like a lantern.  It illuminates new landscapes and new areas as it moves.  Therefore, the question always assumes that there are many different dimensions to a thought that you are either blind to or that are not available to you.  bSo a question is really one of the forms in which wonder expresses itself.  One of the reasons that we wonder is because we are limited, and that limitation is one of the great gateways to wonder.”^^

The best questions are capable of opening the mind, the heart and the will – to be nothing less than present:

“Take me down to the spring of my life, and tell me my nature and my name.”*^

But there’re also bad questions, and they can be closing and limiting and destructive, leading to absencing:

“All thinking that is imbued with wonder is graceful and gracious thinking … And thought, if it’s not open to wonder, can be limiting, destructive and very, very dangerous.”^^

Mary Alice Arthur writes about what happens when listening rather than speaking takes the lead:

‘I’ve seen things dramatically shift when participants realised we were moving away from keynote speakers to keynote listeners, and they were being asked to become sensemakers themselves.’^*

We simply have no idea of just how much we are capable of growing and becoming in such a universe as the one we find ourselves in, one in which we are each invited to become more and more present.  Our next move will involve honesty about where we are and where we are moving to; we can only begin here:

‘The journey of a thousand miles begins beneath our feet.’⁺

(*From Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.)
(**Daniel Wilson’s protagonist Cormac Wallace in Robogenesis.)
(From Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: A Gentle Corrective for the Epidemic of Politics Turning Us On Each Other and Ourselves.)
(^^John O’Donohue, quoted in Popova’s Brain Pickings: A Gentle Corrective for the Epidemic of Politics Turning Us On Each Other and Ourselves.)
(*^George Appleton, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(^*From Drawn Together Through Visual Practice.)
(⁺From Geoff Nicholson’s The Lost Art of Walking.)

All is about intensity, imagination and love are about diversity.

Everyone is included, no one is excluded, except by our choice.

Alex McManus speaks of how:

‘A world that works for everyone does not exist except in the imagination.  So we must feed the imagination.’*

Without imagination and love we persist at things but life lacks flair and wonder.  Without intensity we give up before breaking through -but life if often a slow journey in the same direction.

Edgar Schein writes about how we need four forms of inquiry to go deeper, to break through: pure, diagnostic, confrontational and process-orientated.    The question is not “Can we?” but “Dare we?”

When intensity and passion come together we enter into a different kind of time.   Chronos time – seconds becoming minutes becoming hours becoming days …  – can be too up close, not allowing us to see the wonder of a moment as an expression or manifestation of the greater picture of who we are becoming and what we are contributing – story over a list of pros and cons.

We need to learn how to live in both forms of time:

‘Could our lives be journeys in which we stumble on things of indescribable beauty?  Are we to be alert to even the most ordinary moments of our for the possibilities?’**

(*From Alex McManus’ Makers of Fire – eBook version.)
(Alex McManus from a lost source.)