Passion is individualistic. […] purpose is something people can share.*
(Chip and Dan Heath)

I write and talk a lot about passion but Chip and Dan Heath make a good point.  It was Frederick Buechner who pointed out that we find our purpose where our deepest joy meet the world’s greatest need.

Of asking others about what they are doing, the Heaths conclude:

‘You know you’re finished when you reach the contribution.’*

We can’t contribute towards ourselves – that would be to only answer the “Who am I?” question that is important but must be counterweighted by “What is my contribution.”

Which takes us to others with others.

(*From Chip and Dan Heath’s The Power of Moments.)

The only difference between people that matters is the difference between those who allow this space to fill with flow – and those who don’t, or won’t allow it.*
(Richard Rohr)

The proverb announces: “iron sharpens iron”.**  This is about interdependence.  I need you to sharpen me; you need me too sharpen you.  An “iron sharpens iron” world is not competitive but collaborative, the like of which is difficult too imagine because it is about abundance, about valuing everyone, and we have lived too long in a world of scarcity.

I’ve picked up a 1988 edition of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.  In the introduction, Carl Sagan remarks:

‘Except for children (who don’t know enough not to ask the important questions), few of us spend much time wondering why nature is the way it is; where the cosmos came from, or whether it was always here; if time will one day flow backward and effects precede causes; or whether there are ultimate limits to what humans can know.’^^

We have left the world of questions and we are struggling to find our way back, but out is not impossible.

I needed to look up the meaning of the word lacuna after coming across it in Maria Popova’s Two Hundred Years of Blue.  It means an unfilled space or gap.  Here we find new horizons and discoveries.  Here we all know something and none of us know everything:

‘Equidistant from the atoms and stars, we are expanding exploratory horizons to explore the very small and the very large.’^

(*From Richard Rohr’s The Divine Dance.)
(**Proverbs 27:17.)
(^Carl Sagan, from Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.)

It is egotism that makes us identify with one opinion rather than another, become quarrelsome and unkind, say this could not mean that, and think we have a duty to change other to suit ourselves.*
(Karen Armstrong)

Anger is a powerful emotion but it can be a lazy kind of power when we need it to become smart power.  Needing to become courage and generosity and wisdom, anger often alerts us to something that is not right.

We then need to be asking questions: What’s wrong here?, How can it be changed?

Unless we do this anger can be an ego thing, about me, when it needs to be an eco thing – about us.

Anger doesn’t always spill out.  That’s the message In one of Adam Saddler’s better films Anger Management.  His character doesn’t realise he’s internalising anger and its spoiling his life and the lives of those around him – that is, until he’s set up by his girlfriend to meet an anger management counsellor in the form of Jack Nicholson.

It reminds me, Angry is not where I want to live.

(*From Karen Armstrong’s Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life.)

You can’t manufacture “moments of courage.”  But […] you can practice courage so that, when the moment demands it, you’ll be ready.*
(Chip and Dan Heath)

The whole point of climbing is to avoid objective dangers as much as possible, and to eliminate subjective dangers entirely by rigorous discipline and sound preparation.**
(Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)

Spelunking and kerplunking may sound quite similar but they are very different endeavours.  Beware taking up an invitation to go spelunking if you imagine you’re going to play a table game, the object of which is to pull horizontal plastic straws out of a drum without letting any marbles fall through.

Spelunking, I discover, can be a derogatory term for stupid and unprepared caving.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi introduces me to the term when he picks out the flow experience of mountaineers which involves eliminating risk rather than inviting it:

‘Rock climbers, for instance, recognise two sets of dangers: “objective” and “subjective” ones.  The first kind are the unpredictable physical events that might confront a person on a mountain […].  Subjective dangers are those that arise from the climber’s lack of skill […].’**

Everyday courage is our ability to turn up as ourselves every day and make our contribution within the familiar and unfamiliar – the flow of our talents, our dreams and our values.  If I want to extend the flow of my own talents, dreams and values, I will need to be more courageous.

Csikszentmihalyi’s point about eliminating subjective dangers by rigorous discipline and sound preparation connects with what Chip and Dan Heath point to: if we want to have more courageous moments in our lives that we can be proud of in the right way, then we need to practise our values, asking questions such as:

What are my values?
What will they mean for different people and how I treat them?
What will I say?
What will I give?
Or receive?

Maybe I will find that, instead of different people and things disrupting my flow, the flow extends to them.

Richard Rohr writes of flow:

‘You just have to walk and breathe and receive and give, and – voilà – you’re in the flow.’^

This might sound like careless or carefree spelunking, but Rohr has to write a whole book to explain how he believes we can live in this way.

I don’t want to play Kerplunk but I don’t want to go spelunking through life either.

(*From Chip and Dan Heath’s The Power of Moments.)
(**From Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow.)
(^From Richard Rohr’s The Divine Dance.)

We don’t get to know who we are because we’re not listening.*
(Keri Smith)

It turns out there is no way to divorce the demands of the head and the needs of the hand from the longing of the heart.**
(Bernadette Jiwa)

The young person had described themselves as stubborn.

Stubborn can be useful until it isn’t.

Will we change your minds?

Can we change your minds?

There’s always a choice, even when we feel we’ve been here so long we can’t get out.  It’s one of the most wonderful things in the world when we do:

‘Part of the wonder of being a person is the continual discoveries that you find emerging in your own self; nothing cosmically shattering, merely the unfathomable miracle of ordinary being: this is the heart of longing which calls us into new forms of belonging.’^

This “ordinary being” moves us from claustrophobic I-in-me to see more, to see the alternative: I-in-it.  Here is Bernadette Jiwa’s “demand of the head,” because we are opening our minds.

From here we find it easier to move towards I-in-You: the “longing of the heart,” which is to open our hearts to the other.

Encouraged, we see the possibility of I-in-Now, which is the “needs of the hand,” to create, but not without you – wherever possible, with you.

Here is the everyday unfathomable miracle of ordinary being open to each of us:

‘The revolutionary force in this century is the awakening of a deep generative human capacity – the I-in-Now.’^^

(*From Keri Smith’s The Wander Society.)
(**From Bernadette Jiwa’s Meaningful.)
(^From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)
(^^From Otto Scharmer’s Theory U.)

Mine was a journey of learning to trust not knowing and to stay open to what appears – and help others find their own next steps.*
(Bob Stilger)

When you put the right idea into the world, people can’t unsee it.’**
(Seth Godin)

Before I act, there is the thinking and the feeling, but you probably can’t see these.  After I act, it’s all out there for people to see.

Elle Luna helps meto get honest when she says:

‘If you’re not prioritising the things you say you care about, consider the possibility that you don’t actually care about those things.’^

Bernadette Jiwa causes me to think about what we each care about will be different, and how we need difference in the world when she writes:

‘Disruptive innovators thrive on creating difference first and focus on growth later.’^^

We don’t have to organise difference, it just happens.  because of the way people are:

‘In these stories the hero is ready for the [adventure] he gets. […] The adventure is symbolically a manifestation of his character.’

Joseph Campbell is writing of the hero being the person who lives in the direction of the adventure that is within her.  The reality is then, the more we come to understand ourselves, the more the adventure appears.  This is our contribution..

As Seth Godin reminds us, once it’s seen, it can’t be unseen.

(*Bob Stilger, from Drawn Together Through Visual Practice.)
(**From Seth Godin’s blog: Before and after.)
(^From Elle Luna’s The Crossroads of Should and Must.)
(^^From Bernadette Jiwa’s Meaningful.)
(*^Joseph Campbell, from Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth.)

Blue skies
Smiling at me
Nothing but blue skies
Do I see*
(Irving Berlin)

So, if young adults no longer have the kind of money to support a life of conspicuous consumption our generation did, what takes its place?**
(Hugh Macleod)

I am increasingly hearing that the the resources enjoyed by the baby boomer generation are not going to be there for the next generations.  The skies in future are not going to be so blue, it seems.

A baby boomer myself, I’ve always been been suspicious of plenty and what it can do to us, and more likely to see consumption as a medical condition.

Maria Popova introduces me to Horace-Bénédict de Saussure‘s cyanometer, an instrument for measuring blueness, especially that of the skies.  Henry David Thoreau writes, as he looks upon a blue Spring sky:

“Where is my cyanometer”?^

Popova remarks:

‘Thoreau’s writings, dancing at the borderline between observation and contemplation, are strewn with his love of blue.’^^

This combination of observation and reflection and blueness fascinates me.

I wonder what happens if I don’t bring humble, grateful, faithful reflection to my life, to who I am and what I have and how I behave?

Robert McKee writes of why we love movies.  In everyday life we live in the experience but in movies we have a chance to experience and to reflect upon it.  I wonder whether we’re moving into a time when we can be more aware of the “movie” our lives are, that we will live our lives as both experiencers and reflectors.

Hugh Macleod answers his opening question:

‘Why, conspicuous production, of course.’**

Instead of going along with the production of others – what consumption is about and a production that is running out of steam – we are witnessing more opportunities to bring some that matters from the centre of our lives.

We can wait for the next blue sky to come along or we can paint our own.

I think it will seems working more and more together, hence cyanometrists only exist in collaboration of various forms, or hues.

(*Ella Fitzgerald sings Irving Berlin’s Blue Skies.)
(**From gapingvoid’s blog: Welcome to the hustle.)
(^Henry David Thoreau, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Two Hundred Years of Blue.)
(^^From Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Two Hundred Years of Blue.)

Such playing contains at the outset all the elements proper to play: order, tension, movements, change, solemnity, rhythm, rapture.

[…]

If […] we accept the essential and original identity of play and ritual we simply recognise the hallowed spot as a playground, and the misleading question of the “why and the wherefore” does not arise at all.**
(Johan Huizinga)

Bob Stilger writes post-Fukushima, having helped Japanese people to find their future when more than 20,000 lost their lives and 500,000 lost their homes and livelihoods.  Working as a conversation facilitator, he refers to these conversations as “sacred spaces” and further catches my attention when he writes:

‘Thinking and reasoning and analysing are important but they rarely provide direction.  In fact, they need direction.  And direction has to come from our senses.  When everything falls apart, we must invite our hands and our heart and our spirit to come out and play, and ask your analytical minds to wait.  Where is forward?  How do we proceed?’*

This opening up of play with the sacred and sacredness with play can bring into view the adjacent possible, otherwise it can remain invisible:

‘The “adjacent possible” is theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman’s wonderful term for all the myriad paths unlocked by every novel discovery, the multitude of universes hidden inside something as simple as an idea.’^

For me adjacent possibilities exist within the life of each person.  If they want to choose a different path, their talents, passions and experiences can show them where within the sacredness and playfulness of a human life.

For the future, we need to look within.

(*Bob Stilger from Drawn Together Through Visual Practice.)
(**From Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens.)
(^From Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler’s Bold.)

The basic words are not single words but word pairs.*
(Martin Buber)

A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.**
(Proverbs)

It feels as though social media deskills us when it comes to using words.  There can be a separating of who we are becoming – the source of our words – from the words we use.

Once upon a time, unless you were part of the world’s elite, the only way to communicate was if the other was right in front of you.   This will always be the most significant visual or illustrating of our words.

There’s a silence before words, but I’ve found myself wondering about the silence beyond words.  How there comes a time when people have shared time together, have conjoined their vocabularies, before remain.ng in each other’s company silent, full of the presence of the other.

(*From Martin Buber’s I and Thou.)
(**Proverbs 15:1; Today’s New International Version.)

The good news is, you already have what you need to begin something significant and remarkable.

The bad news is, it takes energy and focus and trial and failure and reflecting and … .

The good news is, you already have what you need to begin something significant and remarkable.

My MISSION at thin|silence

… is to help you to find it

Find out more by dropping me a line a geoffrey@thinsilence.org