‘there is a sweet spot, between the known and the unknown where originality happens; the key is to be able to linger without panicking’*

Theoretical physicist Alan Lightman writes about how we know we are progressing as a species:

‘One measure of the progress of human civilisation is the increasing scale of our maps.’**

I would add, another way of knowing is the decreasing scale of our personal maps to show up the incredible detail there is in each and every life, indicating talents, passions, experiences, and relationships. showing how everything relates to everything to make us uniquely who we are.

Somewhere between the increasing scale and decreasing scale maps of our lives something wonderful takes shape.

“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.”^

(*From Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc..)
(**From Alan Lightman’s The Accidental Universe.)
(^Boris Pasternak, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)

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

‘Kodawari is a personal standard for which the individual adheres in a steadfast manner. […] Kodawari is personal in nature and it is a manifestation of a pride in what one does.’**

To know more about ourselves and what we can do opens up life – an amazing world of people and things..  Some are content with knowing only so much about themselves and that has to be okay, but what if David Shenk^ is right to say we don’t know what our limits are as yet – the things that would transform every day.  Frans Johansson looks on a universe full of random possibilities and offers:

‘Every minute, every hour there is another surprise around the corner.’^

What we’re giving ourselves to is freedom – freedom to grow.  We won’t catch all the serendipitous moments but will miss less as we become people who find ourselves able to bring our critical curiosity and inquiry to them.

So what if drilling down to core of who we are allows us to see the kind of detail that makes it possible to develop the kodawari no ippin, the signature dish of our lives for others to enjoy even more.

(*George Appleton, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(**From Ken Mogi’s The Little Book of Ikigai.)
(^See David Sheik’s The Genius in All of Us.)
(^^From Frans Johansson’s The Click Moment.)

‘By practice, we mean doable habits or rhythms that transform us, revising our brains, restoring our inner ecology, renovating our inner architecture, expanding our capacity.  We mean actions, within our power that help us become capable of things beyond our power.’*

Those people around you who seem to have superpowers have probably discovered something that is available to all of us.

It’s likely they know that the thing getting them up every morning needs to be poured into all the small things the day contains – with “consistent emotional labour,” as Seth Godin describes it.**

There ‘s something that matters to each of us and defines our lives.  It connects us to ourselves but we will know it because of how it connects us to everything else: our god, our worldview, other people, our planet.

I’m inclined to believe that when you live the contribution you want to make in the world into the small things of the day something even more powerful will happen (which isn’t the same as big).

(*From Eugene Peterson’s Naked Spirituality.)

Once it didn’t matter.  Nobody wanted to know.  Now we all want to know.  This is eco beyond ego, the importance of the one to the many and the many to the one.

We bring asymmetry to one another, and life grows richer – the adjacent, something we were not expecting.  We can roll with it or reject it but we suspect that life is richer if we roll.

The finite games of life are symmetrical.  All tidy and economical, but the infinite, the including of everyone for as long as posse, as untidy as the asymmetrical is, is welcomed.

We find that life isn’t only about having an option, though, but following a path with a heart.

‘As generalists, we must be curious.  Curiosity is what makes things come together in that unique way, where “innovation” happens.’*

‘If we are looking for something specific, we set aside anomalies and remain focused.’**

My hope is that life is becoming more interesting for more people.   I was born at the end of the 1950s and have increasingly realised how I have lived through what feel like seismic shifts in our understanding of everyone’s capacity to open their minds, hearts, and wills with artists and passion.

‘In each new epoch – perhaps every generation, or even every few years, if the conditions in which we live change that rapidly – it becomes necessary to rethink and reformulate what it takes to establish autonomy in consciousness.’^

I don’t see a flowing in one greater, stronger direction.  There are cataracts and eddies and white-water and meanderings along the way.  We don’t know yet how much our increasing reliance on technology will impoverish our consciousness.  This is the simply the adventure of life we find ourselves in.  Astronomist Vera Rubin reflects:

“If there were no problems it wouldn’t be much fun.”^^

In this remark, Rubin is commenting on how how here discovery of dark matter was not so welcome at first:

“I think many people initially wished that you didn’t need dark matter.  It was not a concept that people embraced enthusiastically.”^^

As Alan Lightman points out about Rubin’s work:

‘As in her earlier work on the bulk motions of whole galaxies, dark matter would require a revision in cosmological thinking.’*^

We are curious, we explore, we discover, our thinking shifts.  In the cosmological world but also in the amazing universes that are human lives.  Rubin had wanted to be an astronomer from childhood, some of us figure out what it is we want to do in our forties.  We have to be noticing.  It’s something we can all do, even if it’s to relearn it. Jamil Mahuad points out:

“Possibilities can be disguised.  They can be blurred, and the most important thing – they flicker.”^*

The most important expert we can be is an expert in ourselves.  You being an expert in you.  Me being an expert in me.  E.E. Cummings encourages us towards this when he writes about the courage to be ourselves:

“As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and whenever we do it, we’re not poets.”⁺

Cummings says, don’t let people say you can’t be a poet.  Rubin despairs at the the kind of gender stereotyping that robs science of female scientists, something that takes hold at such an early age.  Rubin’s granddaughter at the age of three had cried out at an uncle “Boys can’t be girls”- he’d suggested he be the nurse and she be the doctor when treating a sick rabbit:

“So you may talk about role models and your thinking about colleges but this happens at the ago of three.  I think its a terrible problem.  It sets in very young.  Somehow or others, you have to raise the little girls who have enough confidence in themselves to be different.”^^

This is where we are, rethinking consciousness of self, helping others to explore the Self they can be.  Cummings, on seeing what everyone else was fitting in with and the kind of world that might result, reflects:

“And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world — unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.

Does that sound dismal? It isn’t.

It’s the most wonderful life on earth.

Or so I feel.”⁺

What do you want to be when you grow up?

I am 58 years old and, in one sense, I still don’t know, but I am certain that when we explore our consciousness then, as Eugene Peterson points out:

‘The larger the world we live in, the larger our lives develop in response.’⁺⁺

(*gapingvoid’s blog: Generalists vs experts.)
(**From Frans Johansson’s The Click Moment.)
(^From Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow.)
(^^Vera Rubin, quoted in Alan Lightman’s A Sense of the Mysterious.)
(*^From Alan Lightman’s A Sense of the Mysterious.)
(^*Jamil Mahuad, quoted in Frans Johansson’s The Click Moment.)
(⁺E.E. Cummings, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: The Courage to be Yourself.)
(⁺⁺From Eugene Peterson’s Run With the Horses.)

The story we have for our lives may not be great but we have one and we can work on it.  We only need to own the reality that we create our own character arcs.  Our lives are unfolding.  Nothing is set in stone:

‘”You’re doing it all wrong.”  But at least you’re doing it.  Once you’re doing it, you have the chance to do it better.  Waiting for perfect means not starting.’*

Mihaly Csiszentmihalyi writes about the “control of consciousness” determining our lives.  What he is describing relates to determining our story:

‘The most important step in emancipating oneself from social controls is the ability to find rewards in the events of each moment.  If a person learns to enjoy and find meaning in the ongoing stream of experience in the process of living itself, the burden of social controls automatically falls from one’s shoulders.  Power returns to the person when rewards are no longer related to outside forces.’**

I happened to hear cricketer Andrew (Freddie) Flintoff speaking about how the nerves that were so difficult to overcome for other cricketers, when batting or bowling, were the feelings he loved; he understood his nervousness differently, making them a special part of who he was.

When it comes to feelings, E.E. Cummings claims:

“Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.”^

Whatever we can learn or believe or know has to be connected at a heart level.  Getting to know our heart, and allowing this to create a better story is what we have the opportunity of doing every day of our lives.  I leave the last words to Cummings:

“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”^

(*From Seth Godin’s blog “You’re doing it wrong”.)
(**From Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s Flow.)
(^E.E. Cummings, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: The Courage to be Yourself.)

“If I chose to hide you away, it is for a reason.
I have brought you to this place.
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.”*

Courage is found in an unexpected place.  It begins with our awareness, the breaking open of our pride, greed, and foolishness by our mindful use of humility, gratitude, and faithfulness.

The courage to be ourselves is the courage to be ourselves for others.

This has serious implications for our planet, as I will come to.  Seth Godin describes the difference between pleasure and happiness from his perspective as a marketer with a heart, in which he sees the marketplace wanting us to buy from it for our personal pleasure:

‘Pleasure is short-term, addictive and selfish. It’s taken, not given. It works on dopamine.

Happiness is long-term, additive and generous. It’s giving, not taking. It works on serotonin.

This is not merely simple semantics. It’s a fundamental difference in our brain wiring. Pleasure and happiness feel like they are substitutes for each other, different ways of getting the same thing. But they’re not.’**

Pleasure is becoming an increasingly powerful force in a world of more choice, twisting how we think of happiness; Godin continues:

‘More than ever before, we control our brains by controlling what we put into them. Choosing the media, the interactions, the stories and the substances we ingest changes what we experience. These inputs lead us to have a narrative, one that’s supported by our craving for dopamine and the stories we tell ourselves. How could it be any other way?

Scratching an itch is a route to pleasure. Learning to productively live with an itch is part of happiness.

Perhaps we can do some hard work and choose happiness.’**

Pleasure is often short-lived, we need the next fix.  Happiness tends to be self-growing because it reaches a part of us that is regenerative.  Ed Catmull offers a metaphor from his experience within Pixar:

‘But the differences between directing a five-minute short and directing an 85-mibute feature are many.’^

Life isn’t a short.  And we can’t find the happiness we’re wanting in life the way we can provide ourselves with pleasure.

The harder work Godin alludes to is enabled by our humility, gratitude, and faithfulness, because these lead to integrity, wholeness, and perseverance – the generative self I mentioned earlier and the second part of being our courageous self – I discover I have more than enough and can be about ‘giving not taking’ (Godin).

Within this there’s a sense of less is more, that we do not need to go after everything because what we have allows us to be far more imaginative and creative than we know.  It’s the equivalent of shopping at Aldi over Sainsbury’s:

‘Less is more contradicts two core beliefs held in our culture:

More information is always better.

More choice is always better.’^^

We’re connecting to our gut feelings, our essential Self.

The reason this has planetary implications is that moving from pleasure to happiness is a movement from making more faster, to making what we need: at the moment we’re consuming 1.5 Earths and one day that will catch us up.

The third part of this moment to being our courageous self, then is a movement towards sharing ourselves – from integrity comes personal courage, from wholeness comes generosity, and from perseverance comes living-wisdom.

It all begins in the silence, the emptiness we so often try to flee is not empty at all.  Ken Mogi writes about why in Japanese culture there’s a sense that the morning is the most productive time of the day:

‘In the morning, assuming you have had a sufficient amount of sleep, the brain has finished its important night job.  It is in a refreshed state, ready to absorb new information as you start a day’s activities.’*^

And maybe we don’t simply need more of what we had yesterday.  Perhaps at the beginning of the day, for a few moments or more, we can wait in the silence and imagine something new out of the deep source of our lives:

‘They just see more because they’ve learned how to turn off their minds’ tendencies to jump to conclusions.’^

(*Frances Roberts, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning prayer.)
(**From Seth Godin’s blog, The pleasure/happiness gap.)
(^From Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc..)
(^^From Gerd Gigerenzer’s Gut Feelings.)
(*^From Ken Mogi’s The Little Book of Ikigai.)

Ardently: very enthusiastically or passionately.

“Love from day to day, just from day to day. […] If you let yourself be absorbed completely, if you surrender completely to the moments as they pass, you live more richly those moments.”*

Some are always waiting for the future and miss today; others are busy visiting the future in order to live today more ardently.

We don’t have to wait:

““No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life.”**

We have enough to build the bridge Friedrich Nietzsche imagines.  To live in the moment of who we are and what we have now will provide us with what we have to begin, though Eric Ries reminds us that there is a cost when he points out:

“If you cannot fail, you cannot learn.”^

When we fail and learn we are discovering that se are generative beings: Okay, that didn’t work; what if I do it this way?

We need to explore with playfulness; the game takes us farther:

‘Mixing what we see, hear, learn, and read – that’s an art in itself, not to be underestimated.’^^

I have never failed to come across amazing abilities and experiences in the people I work with that makes me conclude, not only can we know we have choice and feel what that choice might be, but we can use it ardently.

I like playing with words that ought not to be only for people who are religious but for everyone.  So this is about identifying a personal sacrament, the elegant interface we enter each day connecting us to our story, defined by Iris Murdoch in this way:

‘A sacrament provides an external visible place for an internal invisible act of the spirit.’*^

Let bridge-building begin.

(*Anne Morrow Lindbergh, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(**Friedrich Nietzsche, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: The Courage to Be Yourself.)
(^Entrepreneur Eric Ries, quoted in Frans Johansson’s The Click Moment.)
(^^Alfredo Carlo, from Drawn Together Through Visual Practice.)
(*^From Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good.)

James Carse writes about how infinite players don’t play within boundaries but with boundaries.  Their game is about including as many people for as long as possible and, when the rules get in the way, they change the rules.*

Kio Stark introduces us to the social convention called “civil inattention,” meaning when we approach someone, we notice them and then avert our attention, indicating we’re not going to interrupt their progress – sometimes it can be accompanied by a brief “hello of some sort .”**

These are more finite game rules, playing out to different strengths in different cultures, but needing to be moved beyond if we’re to explore what it is to be human.

Theory U encourages us to push the boundaries social norms, moving us towards one another and towards presence, rather than away from one another and absence.^

It simply asks that we invent ways of opening our minds to there being more, before we open our hearts, and before we move to working together.

It’s a good start.

(*See James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)
(**See Kio Stark’s When Strangers Meet.)
(^See Otto Scharmer’s Theory U.)

“Where, my friends, have the wild ones gone?”*

Wisdom sometimes looks contrarian, like wildness.

One of K.M. Weiland’s six lifestyle changes to protect creativity is to notice the seasons.  This makes good sense.  We think nature is wild yet we are made of nature.  There are many things with which we immunise ourselves from this, at the same time losing sight of the sheer exoticness and vibrancy of life:

‘But the overwhelming problem that confronts most of us in the world most of the time is that we are not falling in love with the heart of another another and the heart of other nations and species. […] Yet within us is everything.’**

This journey is from ego to eco: this wildness allows us to be our true self, not more and not less.  It is where we are able to see the wildness in one another.

(*Joel McKerrow, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(**From Philip Newell’s The Rebirthing of God.)