So that was 2017.  How has it prepared you for 2018?

Because it will have, whether you know it or not.

Life involves a lot of discovering that we have more to give than we often imagine.  The difficult pat is bringing it out.

There comes a natural end to this none of us will escape.  No-one wants to arrive at this point and for it to be said, “They could have given more.”

Yet for a thousand and one different reasons, we hold back.  But take who we are further and not only will 2018 be quite an adventure but 2019 will be even more so.

It’s like being in business, the business of being the best we can be.  (There’s a natural connection between life and business.)

Seth Godin reminds us that the best businesses exist for others just like people:

‘Kindness ratchets up. It leads to more kindness. It can create trust and openness and truth and enthusiasm and patience and possibility.

Kindness, in one word, is a business model, an approach to strangers and a platform for growth.

It might take more effort than you were hoping it would, but it’s worth it.’*

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: Kindness scales.)

‘Be ready when you get there.  Don’t make the mistake of waiting for good things to happen – make good things happen.’*
(Erwin McManus)

Rather than who, make it you.

Rather than when, make it now.

(*From Erwin McManus’ The Last Arrow.)

‘Read, look into other areas, use different learning mediums, ask better questions, reflect, be open to ideas, be surrounded by learners, and prioritise learning.’*
(Michael Heppell)

‘I know perfectly well my own egotism,
And know my omnivorous words, and cannot say any less,
And would fetch you whoever you are flush with myself.’**
(Walt Whitman)

As 2017 comes to a close, Maria Popova reflects upon what has been a turbulent year.  As a means of reflecting on this, Popova alights on the story of the 1977 NASA mission to send the spacecraft Voyager to take images of the outer limits of our solar system:

‘When I was growing up in Bulgaria, a great point of national pride — and we Bulgarians don’t have too many — was that an old Bulgarian folk song had sailed into space aboard the Voyager spacecraft, the 1977 mission NASA launched with the scientific objective of photographing the planets of the outer solar system, which furnished the very first portrait of our cosmic neighbourhood.  Human eyes had never before been laid on the arresting aquamarine of Uranus, on Neptune’s stunning deep-blue orb, on the splendid fury of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot — a storm more than threefold the size of our entire planet, raging for three hundred years, the very existence of which dwarfs every earthly trouble.’^

But there was another dimension to the mission, beyond the scientific inquiry:

‘But the Voyager also had another, more romantic mission.  Aboard it was the Golden Record — a time-capsule of the human spirit encrypted in binary code on a twelve-inch gold-plated copper disc, containing greetings in the fifty-four most populist human languages and one from the humpback whales, 117 images of life on Earth, and a representative selection of our planet’s sounds, from an erupting volcano to a kiss to Bach — and that Bulgarian folk song.’^

I feel that what Popova is describing here – her subtitle for which is illuminating: “Perspective to lift the blinders of our cultural moment” – is true for the mission we find each find ourselves on through space and time: inquiry and poetry.  ,These are the things that help us move forward in the best of ways rather than intoxicated with our own importance:

“In this way of working, you’e got to have a lot of humility.  You don’t have the answers.  You’re creating space for relationships to form and innovation to emerge, which is the responsibility of senior leadership.”^^

Peter Senge is quoting businesswoman Vivienne Cox here.  He later writes, in what is a critically important book for Earth, how we need:

‘to rediscover our capacity for awe at the marvel of the living world and our fellow travellers on Spaceship Earth, without which we are unlikely to discover our place in the larger natural order.’*^

Reality is, we are all voyagers, travelling through time and space, recording and learning from what we see, going beyond the useful to the poetic – the greater story, indeed, the greatest story we’re all included in.

(*From Michael Heppell’s The Edge.)
(**From Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.)
(^From Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: A Reflection on Living Through Turbulent Times.)
(^^Vivienne Cox, quote in Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution.)
(*^From Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution.)

‘This or that, one or the other, it doesn’t matter.
[…]
A choice, but not a decision.
[…]
We have to make choices like this every single day.  What colour, among three colours which are just fine.  Which route, between two routes within a rounding error in time taken.  Which flight, which table, which person…

Choices don’t have to be decisions.’*
(Seth Godin)

‘Why try to recover someone else’s originality?’**
(Richard Sennett)

Some people make choices as if they are decisions but decisions are the critical things.  Decisions change the trajectory of our lives, taking us into the unfamiliar and random:

“What a man can be, he must be.”^

Choices are the things we make along this trajectory, more straightforward than we think.

When we’re on the right trajectory for our lives then the kind of choices we get to make become more interesting, but:

‘When we repeat the same activities day in and day out, we limit our ability to have new experiences.’^^

Time to decide:

‘Write down your Must.’*^

Do it.

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: Choosing without deciding.)
(**From Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman.)
(^Abraham Maslow, quoted in Elle Luna’s The Crossroads of Should and Must.)
(^^From Keri Smith’s The Wander Society.)
(*^From Elle Luna’s The Crossroads of Should and Must.)

THE CONVERSATION THAT CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE

One of the most significant things we can do is to identify our talents and to describe them in new ways.

This is one element of the dreamwhispering journey I provide, focusing on the things abilities you have been developing, consciously or unconsciously throughout your life.  Choose this and a big decision may be following (buy this for £50 until the end of 2017 – have the conversation in 2018).

‘In a nutshell, in order to be happy, you need to accept yourself.
[…]
The epiphany here is that, paradoxically, accepting oneself as one is often involves releasing yourself, especially when there is an illusory self, which you hold to be desirable.’*
(Ken Mogi)

‘[T]he only way to keep making a difference is to keep giving.  Giving the best part of yourself, with or without the prospect of reward.’**
(Hugh Macleod)

Your worthiness cannot be given by another, only recognised.

Another stranger thing is that we can be more aware of our worthiness when we’re being exluded from something – something may then feel ourselves to be entitled to.  We seem less expressing our worthiness by beginning something new, when we make something happen.  Something that will recognise and include others – to give rather than get.  We need to believe we can this.

Edgar Schein writes about the kinds of question that help us move into things we have not seen or understood about ourselves:

‘Whereas the previous inquiry questions only steered clients through their own conceptual and emotional landscapes the confrontational question introduces new ideas, concepts, hypotheses, options, etc. that clients must now deal with.’^

We can be worthy generally but the artful question allows us to be worthy specifically, to know and name what it is that we have to bring.  Specific doesn’t happen quickly – it requires some slowness.  Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber describe slowness in this way:

‘Slowing down, in contrast, is about allowing room for others and otherness.  An in that sense, slowing down is an ethical choice.’^^

This is interesting because even in a fast world we still know that people and relationships are the most important part of life.  In a slower world, people can notice and grow their worthiness.  Slow time is about questions, having  time to find out more than we presently know, including about ourselves.  Slow listening is open and inquisitive about the whole person, the larger world and the universe of possibilities.

Joseph Campbell makes this intriguing point which can be related to specific worthiness:

“If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path.  Your own path you make with every step you take.  That’s why it’s your path.”*^

Add to this some remarks from Erwin McManus’ on indecisiveness and we may see that someone else’s path is exactly where we have found ourselves:

‘What I learned from twenty years of indecisiveness is that you will either define yourself or be defined by others. You will either choose your life or live a life that was never meant to be yours.”^*

Our lives are trying to get our attention so we might see our worthiness.  Of such attention as this, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes:

‘Attention is like energy in that without it no work can be done, and in doing work it is dissipated.  We create ourselves by how we invest this energy.  Memories, thoughts, nd feelings are all shaped by how we use it.  And it is an energy under our control, to do with as we please; hence, attention is our most important tool in the task of improving the quality of experience.’⁺

When our energy is engaged in what matters to us then what we find we have is flow:

‘When we are in rhythm with our own nature, things flow an balance naturally.’⁺⁺

This natural flow can be broken up or disrupted by a number of things.  Csikszentmihalyi names pain, rage, anxiety, or jealousy, and I would add premature judgement and cynicism as great interruptors.

Why not slow down and notice where your attention goes when it’s given free rein providing you with the possibility of becoming acquainted with your worthiness.

(*From Ken Mogi’s The Little Book of Ikigai.)
(**From gapingvoid’s Your time will come.)
(^From Edgar Schein’s Helping.)
(^^From Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber’s The Slow Professor.)
(*^Joseph Campbell, quoted in Elle Luna’s The Crossroads of Should and Must.)
(^*From Erwin McManus’ The Last Arrow.)
(⁺From Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow.)
(⁺⁺From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)

“Listen to your life.
See it for the fathomless mystery that it is.”*
(Frederick Buechner.)

‘Old age offers the opportunity to integrate and bring together the multiplicity of directions that they have travelled.  It is a time you can be awakened and new possibilities come alive for you.’**
(John O’Donohue)

Our lives are trying to tell us some important things about who we are and what we can do and they never stop trying to help us find the way.  Albert Espinosa encourages us to just keep moving:

‘North and south.  Nothing more.  Look for the north, look for the south.  Don’t stop travelling between them.’^

This is something the young Espinosa had been taught by an intensive care nurse as he was realising that he now only had one lung.  She had stroked his hair and said:

“Dreams are the north for everyone; if they come true then you’e got to head south.”^

Heading north and south, north and south, north and south will take us to everywhere that is anywhere in our world – a “multiplicity of directions.”  We collect many things on the way – skills, ideas, experiences, achievements, struggles, overcomings – and in our later years we can see what possibilities these can mean.

One note as we continue our north an south thinking: we’re not alone.  There’s often a tribe of people we can connect with:

“There is strength that comes when you walk together with those are are of one heart and mind as you.’^^

Over a lifetime there can be a positive and growing intensity to our lives.  We find it in the thoughts we have, the conversations we engage in and the actions we take.  I think of this as our gift.  Ken Robinson calls it my element.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi thinks of it as flow.  Joseph Campbell referred to it as my bliss.  Seth Godin might talk about our art.   Traditionally we have considered it to be calling or vocation.

When we’re travelling north and south between the poles of “Who am !? and “What is my contribution?” the gift is being forged.  All the time we’re moving we are realigning ourselves to this.

Realignment is not easy.  Brené Brown writes about three actions towards finds the better story for our lives: Reckoning involves an honest facing of the truth (“I am off-course”); Rumble means we must allow this to get to grips with us (“I am off-course because of … and need to let go of it”); and, Revolution (“I can now realign to what wants to come”):

‘We’ll do anything to avoid the lowest fo the low – self-examination.’*^

Daniel Kahneman, who knows a bit about how our thinking trips us up, points out that without another system of thinking we’re prone to think this is all there is and that we’re doing better than the rest:

‘The familiar System 1 processes of WYSIATI [What You See Is All There Is] and substituting [with an easier question] produce both competition neglect and the above average effect.’

Ken Mogi introduced me to the concept of datsusara – which feels like an act of realignment:

‘datsusara is a phenomonen in which a salaried worker, usually employed in office work, decides to leave the sage but unexciting life as a company employee to pursue their passions’.^*

The alternative seems to be exemplified in dojinshi.  Dojinshi are the self-published manga comics.  Beyond their salaried work, Japanese dojinshi producers will pay around £70 for a space that is only 90×45 centimetres at the huge Comiket event in order to sell their art.  The incredible thing is that some of these publications go on to re-sell at ten or even a hundred times their original price.  There is great demand for what they make.

Realignment might mean finding a new possibility or adding a new possibility to  dojinshi-style to what we’re already doing but the most important thing of all is to listen to what our lives is trying to tell us.

 (*Frederick Buechner, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(**From John O’Donohue’s Anam Cara.)
(^From Albert Espinosa’s The Yellow World.)
(^From Erwin McManus’ The Last Arrow.)
(*^From Brené Brown’s Rising Strong.)
(^*From Ken Mogi’s The Little Book of Ikigai.)

‘Frequently, in a journey of the soul, the most precious moments  are the mistakes.  They have brought you to a place you otherwise have always avoided.’*
(John O’Donohue.)

In her very enjoyable history of walking Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit, when moving from the open spaces of rural walking to the streets of urban walking, notices:

‘Streets are the spaces left between buildings.  A house alone is an island surrounded by a sea of open space, and the villages that preceded cities were no more than archipelagos in the same sea.  But as more and more buildings arose, they became a continent, the remaining open space no longer like a sea but like rivers, canals an streams running between the land masses.’**

This has demanded that we find new ways of living.  Ways we are still figuring out:

‘People no longer lived anyhow in the open sea of rural space but travelled up and down the streets, and just as narrowing waterway increases flow an speed, so turning open space into the spillways of streets directs and intensifies the flood of walkers.’**

All of human life seems to be witnessed and experienced in a more intense way in cities.  Perhaps this is also where we can find our hope because here there are lots of mistakes and accidents in cities.

Lauren Elkin is mesmerised by cities.  She confesses of her experience of living in New York:

‘I gaped at the gargantuan ornate apartment buildings, the wide boulevards, Zabar’s, H&H Bagels, the Hungarian Pastry Shop with its sticky glazed croissants, the men selling books on folding tables on Broadway.  To sit in a restaurant on Broadway with the world walking by and the cars and taxis and the noise was like finally being let in to the centre of the universe, after peering in at it for so long.’^

When many of our cities began to fill in space in this way, they were quite different to how they are today, as Solnit notes for us:

‘All the furniture and codes that give modern streets their orderliness – raised [pavements], streetlights, street names, building numbers, drains, traffic rules, and traffic signals – are relatively recent innovations.’**

The experience of cities for many, though, is quite different to how Elkin experienced New York.  Life’s needs are intensified too.  Whilst there are movements to get people from the cities into the countryside, to appreciate the natural world, movements that make it possible for people to feel all their city is theirs need to happen too.

But Elkin reminds me of how I felt when I arrived in Edinburgh.  I would walk around the streets and open spaces in what became a long Summer (I particularly remember an evening in Holyrood Park) pinching myself to see if I was really there.  But I also remember that I did not choose to come here, I followed my work.  And I loved living in the industrial town of Oldham on the edge of Manchester – a city without the long history of Edinburgh – and I wanted to stay there but couldn’t.  Before Oldham, there was the industrial town of Blackburn, a place I also wanted to stay but couldn’t.

Edinburgh, though, would teach me about my mistakes in a way other places hadn’t, would make it possible to change more than anywhere else.  This is why it’s become so special to me.  But it’s not the specialness of the city but how I walk in the city.  Elkin believes that the cities are finding hope – I think she is right, and a city can be a place of hope.  We have not finished with our cities and they are not finished with us.  :

‘But it is the practice of the city that we have the best chance of making a just world.  Freedom of movement is an intrinsic part of that.

Let me walk.  Let me go at my own pace. Let me feel life as it moves through me an around me.

[…]

The city turns you on, gets you going, moving, thinking, wanting, engaging.  The city is life itself.’^

There seems to be a growing “slow cities” movement, part of the slow movement, recognised here by Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber in their considering of the slow university:

‘Knowing that there is a global movement for slowing down can fuel us. […] Slowing down is about asserting the importance of contemplation, connectedness, fruition, and complexity.’^^

Here this slowness is expressed in a Wander Society leaflet:

“Society wants us to live a planned existence, following paths that have been travelled by others.  Tried and true.  The known, the expected, the controlled, the safe.  The path of the wanderer is not this.  The path of the wanderer is an experiment with the unknown.  To be idle.  To play.  To daydream.”*^

We may not be able to build new streets and alleyways but we can walk them differently, with new eyes and with new people.  Erwin McManus shares something that can remind us of how the best cities are those exploring new relationships when he asks:

‘Who are the people you have bound your life to?  Who are the people in your life to whom you have declared, “I am with you”?’^*

My challenge to self is to head into the city now and notice something happening between people I would have missed if I was going too fast.

(*From John O’Donohue’s Anam Cara.)
(**From Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust.)
(^From Lauren Elkin’s Flaneuse.)
(^^From Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber’s The Slow Professor.)
(*^From Keri Smith’s The Wander Society.)
(^*From Erwin McManus’ The Last Arrow.)

Really the door is either open or closed.

Metaphorically speaking, we’re either opening doors for people of closing them:

‘This is competition at its best, reminding us that the word compete comes from the Latin competere, meaning striving together.’*

Peter Senge is offering us an open door to walk through.  How often, though, does our culture close doors for most people, from an early point in their lives?  In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari concludes his chapter on The Capitalist Creed with the following thoughts:

‘The Industrial Revolution that swept through Europe enriched the bankers an capital-owners, but condemned millions of workers to a life of abject poverty.

[…]

Capitalism has two answers to this criticism.  First, capitalism has created a world that nobody but a capitalist is capable of running.

[…]

The second answer is that just need more patience – paradise, the capitalists promise, is right around the corner.’**

We’re not going to be able to restart the world without capitalism and some would argue the alternative philosophy of communism is even more destructive.  What we can do is seek to bring openness where there’s closedness.  It’s to be seen whether people like Peter Diamandis bring a different form of capitalism with the kind of openness we need to see introduced:

‘The world’s most precious resource is the persistent and passionate human mind.’^

I hope so.

Seth Godin advises:

‘Don’t wait for it.  Pick yourself.  Teach yourself.’^^

We need more of this kind of thinking to be shared around, opening doors for people.  Erwin McManus urges us to find others:

‘You will go faster and farther when you find your tribe.’*^

Tribes don’t have to be large in number.  Some of the best are very small but are places where we can explore openness – the mind, heart and will kind – in playful ways.  Eugene Peterson perhaps points out what can happen when we find our tribeship:

‘there is an older wisdom that puts it differently: by changing our behaviour we can change our feelings’.^*

The door still isn’t a jar but it may just be a little more open.

(*From Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution.)
(**From Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.)
(^From Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler’s Bold.)
(^^From Seth Godin’s Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?)
(*^From Erwin McManus’ The Last Arrow.)
(^*From Eugene Peterson’s A Long Obedience in the Same Direction.)

“I will not die an unlived life,
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible,
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise…”*
(Dawna Markova)

‘This is always one of the great tensions in an awakened or spiritual life, to find the rhythm of its unique language, perception and belonging.’**
(John O’Donohue)

Life feels more like a journey than a destination.  The unfinished business of understanding (expressing), as John O’Donohue has it, the thing that is our particular way of seeing, imagining, and connecting.  Life is energy and in these three things we are embedding energy in a unique way:

‘The key word here is energy.  All life is energy; without energy there is no life.  Passion is the power of positive spiritual energy.’^

Ken Robinson is touching here on the game-changer.  We think that if we only had more – information, money, time – then we could change the game.  All the time, we have our imagination, as The Wander Society puts it:

“Your imagination is being wasted.”^^

Nassim Taleb declares in his typically ascerbic but clearer-sighted way:

‘The problem with information is not that is it diverting and generally useless, but that it is toxic.

[…]

people often think that it will be the best batch of news that will really make a difference to their understanding of thing.’*^

It’s not that information is useless per se but more information is of little value if we cannot imaginatively use what we already have – which may be more than enough to get or to stay moving.

Which brings us to O’Donohue’s point about belonging.  The people we connect with can make a big difference.  Erwin McManus quotes an African saying:

“If you want to go fast, go alone.  If you want to go far, go together.”^*

The endless number of permutations of people can make astonishing things happen with all their information and imagination.

(*Dawna Markova, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(**From John O’Donohue’s Anam Cara.)
(^From Ken Robinson’s Finding Your Element.)
(^^The Wander Society, quoted in Keri Smith’s The Wander Society.)
(*^From Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness.)
(^*From Erwin McManus’ The Last Arrow.)

“If people would but do what they had to do, they would find themselves ready for what came next.”*
(George MacDonald)

‘An adage worth repeating is also halfway to being irrelevant.  You end up with something that is easy to say but not connected to behaviour.’**
(Ed Catmull)

No one wants to adage before their time.

Adaging creeps up on us as we rely more on what we have done in the past and less on what lies before us.  The future doesn’t exist and for this reason doesn’t do well with adages.

Seth Godin points to how we try and move into something new by comparing it with something old:

‘Of course, if you put a new experience in the box of an old experience, it’s not a new experience, is it?  Problem solved.

But you’ve also just cut yourself off from what that new experience could deliver.  A new box.  The entire point.’^

If we move into the future with the understanding that it can be what it wants to be then new things are possible – and within ourselves first of all.  Peter Senge writes:

‘An inner alignment starts to develop that can release extraordinary energy and creativity, qualities previously dissipated by denial, inner contradictions, and unawareness of this situation and oneself.’^^

John O’Donohue “adds” that we’ll find there’s more to us than meets the eye:

‘In the neglected crevices and corners of your evaded solitude, you will find the treasure you have always sought elsewhere.’*^

Here we find what we need to counteract the adaging affect.  Peter Senge continues:

‘It is critical that you don’t frame your goal in the context of what you know today.  If you do, you will limit the reach of your aspiration.’^^

Another treasure for overcoming early adaging is found in the companionship of others, particularly those who help one another to keep on exploring.  O’Donohue names these anam cara – soul-friends – those who bring their best self to others.

Erwin McManus finds himself challenged to believe in the friendship someone was offering him, and asks:

Who are the people who can believe in my friendship?’^*

If you find yourself using adages for oneself, don’t believe them, don’t succumb to adage.

(*George MacDonald, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(**From Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc..)
(^From Seth Godin’s blog: Experiences and your fear of engagement.
(^^From Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution.)
(*^From John O’Donohue’s Anam Cara.)
(^*From Erwin McManus’ The Last Arrow.)