No.

But give me more time to read, speak to a few people, have different experiences – with their accompanying failings and resulting learnings, and I can come up with better:

‘Every once in a while, someone steps up and makes something better,  Much better.  When it happens, it’s up to us to stand up and notice it.’*

Two things from these words from Seth Godin: we can always do better and others always benefit when we do.

Of course, we could be thinking “This is the best there is.”  Not only is there no possibility for improvement but there’s no need, so we stop trying.  The other downside of this way of thinking is that we personally don’t get any better:

“”I’ve been trying all my life to find out what my limits are and have never reached them yet.  But then the universe doesn’t really help, it keeps on expanding and won’t allow me to know it entirely.”**

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: Why we don’t have nice things.)
(**Paulo Coelho’s character J in Aleph.)

COLOUR YOUR WAY INTO A NEW UNDERSTANDING AND EXPERIENCE OF LIFE

Slow Journeys in the Same Direction is coming out soon (5 February).  It is not only a colouring book but an accompanied journey with an online resource for anyone wanting to notice more, feel more and do more.

You can pre-order a copy here: cost £5.99 plus postage and packing.

The best you can do is not to copy someone else really well.  It’s really about doing what only you can do with as much truth, nobility, rightness, purity, loveliness, admirableness, excellence and praiseworthiness as you can pursue in.

What would that look like?

“Don’t colour over the lines,” we were once told, but now we know we don’t want to just colour within the lines of others: we can create our own unique lines.

This uniqueness will come from thousands of places.

It won’t try to be everything to everyone.

It will pare more down to be less and then grow less to be more.

Andy Warhol visualises this for us, taking images that were all around him from the culture of his day and doing something new no one else had imagined or thought to do.

None of us plucks newness and uniqueness out of the air.  We take the artefacts of others, we understand the culture in which we find ourselves and then we add our spark.  This might well be some art as we commonly think about it, it may be ideas that we have, or ways of relating to others, communicating a message or getting the job done (all of which are art in the sense that art is the thing we produce with imagination, dexterity and determination.

For more resourcing, check out Alex McManus writing about the three things needed for fire making: fuel, oxygen and spark.  These he respectively relates to artefacts (thoughts and things), the culture in which we find ourselves, and our unique creativity; we are becoming Makers of Fire.

‘[Ideas and poetry] come out of an elite experience, the experience of people particularly gifted whose ears are open to the songs of the universe.’*
(Joseph Campbell)

“With sloth, you will live a longer, happier, and more rewarding life by removing the nagging tug of passion, creativity, and individual desire. … Comfort is much more important than any social achievement or social contract.”**
(Wendy Wasserstein)

Mythologist Joseph Campbell speaks of an elite experience but I believe this to be our choice not the privilege of some.

Playwright Wendy Wasserstein, parodied the self-help genre when she wrote a guide to non-committal inertia.

There remains, however, something tugging at us, a pull from beyond us.  It comes to us every day, reminding us that when it comes to bringing our art of hoping, imagining and creating as our contribution or gift to others, it is still our turn.

(*Joseph Campbell from Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth.)
(**Wendy Wasserstein, quoted in Patrick Dodson’s Psychotic Inertia.)

Other resources to connect to today’s theme include It’s Your Turn – a wonderful, illustrated encouragement of a book from Seth Godin.   His thesis Stop Stealing Dreams explores what education can look like towards this.  Ken Robinson’s TEDtalk on education is an entertaining uncovering how education lets us down; his books The Element and Finding Your Element are serious guides to identifying individuality.  Elle Luna’s essay The Crossroads of Should and Must takes a look at look at some of the things that get in the way; it is also available in a longer form as a book.

YOU CAN FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE TUG YOU FEEL IN YOUR OWN LIFE

Dreamwhispering is a way of exploring what it is your life is trying to tell you.  A journey of five conversations will lead you through identifying your passions, talents, and story, and can be entered into through meeting, skyping, or telephone (£175).

Drop me a line to find out more.

“True wisdom consists in respecting the simple things we fo, for they can take us where we need to go.”*
(Yad)

“Drink in the silence. Seek solitude.

Listen to the silence.

It will teach you. It will build strength
Let others share it with you.
It is little to be found elsewhere.

Silence will speak more to you in a day than the world of voices can teach you in a lifetime.
Find silence. Find solitude – and having discovered her riches, bind her to your heart.”**
(Frances Roberts)

In the silence we are completely free to be no more and no less than who we are – which is a work in progress.

More than this, when we enter the silence alone we carry our silence and the integrity of solitude within.  Then, when we are surrounded by the noise and the crowd, we can be our most true self.

This can be our daily play, this game of silence and solitude.  Kosuke Koyama speaks of nirvana as the “cooled life,” the way of tranquility, which sounds as though it could be the life silence and solitude afford:

‘The affirmed life is new life.
The new life is overwhelmed life.
Overwhelmed life lives with danger and promise.’^

Here we find the person in progress each of us most strongly is.

(*Paule Coelho’s character Yad in Aleph.)
(**Frances Roberts, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(^From Kosuke Koyama’s Three Mile an Hour God.)

“Tone your wants and tastes low down enough, and make much of negatives, and of mere daylight and the skies.”*
(Walt Whitman)

The wonder and glory that is life is all around us.  This new year will be full of such and we only need open our eyes or listen for it or touch it – all ways of saying we are taking notice or paying attention.

Constantin Cavafy wrote of what the wise hear but others do not:

“In their intense meditation the hidden sound of things approaching reach them and they listen reverently while in the street outside the people hear nothing at all.”**

There’ll be much that passes us by in 2018 unless we find ways to be present and open to it.  Kosuke Koyama tells of how he touches the same pine tree in the same place each day on his way to work.  There’s something about being more present and connected in this simple action:

‘Touching my tree day after day, reminds me of time.  It tells me that I can only wait for time.  I cannot push or hold it.’^

The hidden sound of things approaching.  Happy New Year.

(*Walt Whitman quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Walt Whitman on What Makes Life Worth Living.)
(**Constantin Cavafy, quoted in Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness.)
(^From Kosuke Koyama’s Three Mile an Hour God.)

2018 can be a new year, or it can be a new kind of year.

In part, it will be shaped by patterns and rhythms of the past.

It will also be shaped by events outside of our control, some of which will be good and some will be bad.

And a great deal of it will be shaped by our preferences and choices – more than we know.

Okay, midnight on the 31st December is an artificial line drawn into time by humans but why not make it count for something bigger than simply turning over a new leaf?

365 days of exploring your curiosity inventiveness and artistry?  Come the 31 December 2018, you’ll be in quite a different place.  Not bad for new.

‘You can decide you want some new habits.’*
(Seth Godin)

If new possibilities come your way, it’s likely you’ll need some new habits.

Habits create spaces for us to be imaginative and innovative and creative in.  Who thought that getting up earlier or finding some space to be alone or turning some pages of a book each day or just getting out of the usual space (the list is endless)?  Yet it’s in these very places the future forms.

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: New habits.)

‘Profluence, in brief, is about flow.  It means movement, tension, propulsion, unexpected twists, and resolution.  All good stories whether narrative or documentary, are profluent because they create an experience of starting somewhere, and by the end of the story we arrive somewhere else.  We are moved.  Profluence is the narrative connective tissue that transforms moments into scenes, scenes into stories, and stories into connections.’*
(Anthony Weeks)

RecogniseD or not, each of us lives our life within a story.

We can continue in this story or we can change it for another.  Story is powerful, a way of understanding ourselves and the world around us.  The most powerful stories are transcendent – this is really that – and therefore transformative.  As Kosuke Koyama encourages us to see:

‘Beauty is beautiful when it makes non-beautiful beautiful.  Rich is rich when it makes poor rich.’**

Story moves us from functional life to artistic life.

(*Anthony Weeks, from Drawn Together by Visual Practice.)
(**From Kosuke Koyama’s Three Mile an Hour God.)

‘The wanderer becomes one with himself or herself and the universe.  We connect with the energy of all living things.  We live according to our inner nature.’*
(Keri Smith)

A few things about desire.

There’s a desire for building a safe place to be – a hygge place – and there’s a desire to reach out and explore.  We need both.

There is good desire and there’s bad desire but we cannot live without desire.

A bad desire can become a prison for our heart, whilst a good desire can be the expression of our heart with benefits for others.

Bad desires aren’t helped by the fact that the speed of desire, from wanting to getting, has increased in ways we couldn’t imagine twenty years ago.

Slowing down helps a lot to notice our greatest desires, the ones that will define our lives.

(*From Keri Smith’s The Wander Society.)

“I get knocked down, but I get up again
You are never gonna keep me down
I get knocked down, but I get up again
You are never gonna keep me down”
(Tubthumping)

Long before Tubthumping sang their lyrics over and over again, Theodore Roosevelt was encouraging us to keep getting up:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Every story has a beginning and an end.  In between, there’s the middle bit – providing us opportunities to write some different possibilities.

2018 is a whole year of such possibilities.