When we make journeys into the things we’re curious about and make our discoveries then what we return with is also valuable to others.  In some sense of the word, we have become a guide.  When this is welcomed by others – and it always needs to be – then our movement has produced a blessing.

We might also imagine it this way.  Our journey through the wonders of the universe which speak to us most of all become a meal and a conversation when we have returned and are at rest.

I want to describe this as my “zing.”  This is the excitement I feel inside when I am connecting with something that is deeply meaningful to me.  I share the following because we all have zing, and zings are all different and good.

I came to call my zing dreamwhispering.  My friend Alex McManus heard me use this term and described it in far better than I could.  I make my journeys through thoughts and speculation and experimentation and then come to a table, with coffees and teas, sharing these things with others:

‘Often […] entrepreneurs of the spirit are dream whisperers who awaken hope.  They connect meaning to action.  The craft narratives that release human energy.  They make new maps that guide us into places where there are no paths.  As importantly, they help us discover the courage it takes to journey towards our humanity.’*

So what is your journey about, and what does the table and coffees look like that you share with others?

Alex mentions meaning and narratives.  In a random universe, these are the patterns life invites us to make.

Geoff Nicholso in his book on walking describes nature as ‘rough, scary, sometimes beautiful, but always utterly indifferent.’**  He’s right, and continues:

‘In the face of this, a walk seems like exactly what it is; something but not much, certainly not a means of salvation.  It may be pleasurable and worth doing, it may stop you getting depressed, but in the end it’s just a walk.  Why would you want it to be more?’**

Nicholson is also wrong – as are we all.

We are the universe.

We make up our meaning but I have to wonder how the universe might be offering meaning through a species made of stardust and moons and meteors.

With this, through our journeys and our tables shared with others, we are guides.

(*From Alex McManus’s Makers of Fire.)
(**From Geoff Nicholson’s The Lost Art of Walking.)

I love the idea of restoring the future rather than the past. opening up the future through the way we are prepared to think, feel, and act in the present.

The future is where we find hope. We don’t have to repeat the mistakes of the past. We don’t have to feel trapped by old patterns and habits but can create new ones. It’s where new insights can replace the old ones that no longer work.

Because the future emerges through people, itt will require the kind of conversations the like of which we have rarely seen or experienced.

Sherry Turkle picks up some weak echoes of the future in the way young people use instant messaging and avoid phone calls.

‘All the Richelieu sophomores agree that they thing to avoid is the telephone. Mandy presents a downbeat account of a telephone call: “You wouldn’t want to call because then you would have to get into a conversation.” And conversation, “well, that’s something where you only want to have them when you want to have them.”‘*

This is only a weak signal. We don’t know whether or how much such a resistance to conversation might develop.

Some would remind us that adolescents have always avoided conversation and have been monosyllabic. We were all there once.

We’re left pondering just how the integration of technology into our lives may make deeper changes in us as a species because of our neural plasticity and so. affecting the quality of our conversations.

A hopeful future will require four important conversations.

One.

The first conversation is with ourselves. It concerns how we listen to our lives and what we must do as a consequence. We soon need to include conversations with others, otherwise we become too fixed in our thinking, feeling, and doing.

Two.

The second conversation involves those who are not like us. It arguable that conversations with others who are like us is really a first conversation – these only reinforce what we already think, feel, and do. The second conversation, however, introduces to us the thinking, feeling, and doing of others and can lead to anything from retreating into our first conversation to moving on into the third. There’s usually a lot of debate and disagreement in this conversation and we have to figure out some way of bringing all of this together into something more effective and productive.

(In the weeks ahead, towards 2017 general election in the UK, I’m expecting we’ll witness a lot of one and two conversations – it’s how the system is set up.)

Three.

‘We don’t move enough. Maybe you do, but the collective ‘we’ – we’ve left that part of our lives behind.’**

The third conversation includes others and also their worlds and, collectively, the world we share. Stepping into each others worlds means something more, a third thing, is happening. Maria Popova’s reflection on Anne Lamott’s book on mercy is very helpful here. Lamott reckons mercy will “buy us a shot at a warm and generous heart.”

“Mercy is radical kindness. […] Mercy, grace, forgiveness, and compassion are synonyms, and the approaches we might consider taking when facing q great big mess, especially the great big mess of ourselves – our arrogance, greed, poverty, disease, prejudice.”^

Conversation Three helps us to find our warm and generous heart as we step into each other’s worlds – a possibility Lamott hopes is still to be found in each of us:

“the sweet child in us who, all evidence to the contrary, was not killed off, but just put in a drawer”.^

Four.

Out of our openness to the contributions everyone has to bring, a more hopeful future is able to emerge, imagined and designed by more people for more people.

In their book on creating new markets, Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne tell the story of a company that came up with a win/win strategy. The problem was not everybody had been in the room when it was put together. The salespeople would sabotage it:

‘The strategy was doomed because the sales force fought it. Having not been engaged in the strategy-making process nor apprised of the rationale for the strategic shift, sales reps saw the expert system in a light no one on the design team or management team had ever imagined.’^^

‘[T]he capacity to be present to everything that is happening, without resistance, creates possibility.’*^

In coming from the future, Conversation Four, in one sense, means no-one is an expert, one of the causes of resistance. Instead, we are required to learn and practise a new set of skills. There are many but I borrow the following six from my friend and mentor Alex McManus, adding a little interpretation of my own.

Reflecting: We slow things down to consider everything, not just the first or perceived needs or issues, but all of them.

Anticipating: Our openness to the weak signals coming from the future; we will often find these coming from what everyone in the room is seeing, not just the few.

Imagining: We are the imagining species; we want to imagine and we will if we remove the barriers: time, hierarchies, privilege, limited means of contributing, etc.

Synchronising: Integrating our thinking, feeling, and doing with what is emerging and being imagined so that more details will emerge.

Designing: Making something happen sooner rather than later – meaning prototyping and experimentation and pilot schemes.

Creating: The final “product,” shaped by the many, tested to see whether it’s really the future, and finally delivered.

The future is already in the conversations we will have.

(*From Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together.)
(**From Hugh Macleod’s gapingvoid.)
(^Anne Lamott, quoted in Maria Popova’s BrainPickings.)
(^^From Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.)
(*^From Rosamund and benjamin Zander’s The Art of Possibility.)

We don’t need others to fail or struggle or get hurt to feel good about ourselves.

Anne Lamott “fesses up” how she feels about others and her own need for mercy,  How someone getting hurt can make her feel better but not for long.  Mercy is a daily requirement for the human condition:

“So why today is it absolutely all I can do to extend mercy to myself for wanting to nip an annoying relative’s heel like a river rat? Forget extending mercy to this relative, who has so messed with me and my son – she doesn’t even know she needs my mercy.  She thinks she is fierce and superior, while I believe she secretly ate her first child.  Horribly, she is perfectly fine.  I’m the one who needs mercy – my mercy.  The need for this, for my own motley mercy, underpinned most of my lifelong agitation, my separation from life itself. […] I came here with a huge open heart, like a big, sweet dog, and I still have one.  But some days the only thing that can cheer me up is something bad happening to someone I hate, preferably if it went viral and the photo of the person showed hair loss and perhaps the lifelong underuse of sunscreen.  My heart still leaps to see this.  I often recall the New Yorker cartoon of one dog saying to the other: “It’s not enough that we succeed. Cats must also fail.”  This is the human condition.”*

Our lives, though, are bigger than we know.  Big enough to be bigger with others – big enough to be bigger with ourselves.  We only need to see it.   Erich Fromm writes:

‘The fact is that most of us are half asleep while we believe ourselves to be awake.’**

We’re already in the flow of something that does not require another to fail so we feel better about ourselves.  Rather the success of another adds to our understanding of what we might call an infinite dance – after the infinite game which aims to include as many as possible for as long as possible and when the rules threaten to exclude from or to end the game, the rules are changed.  Such a dance and such a game would be full of mercy.

‘The fool views himself as more unique and others more generic; the wise views himself as more generic and others more unique.’^

We haven’t explored this for long enough with enough people yet to know just how our lives, and the lives of others and our communities might be changed.

It’s possible to dance alone, two begin to change the danc , three changes the dance for ever, making  it possible for the fourth and fifth and more to join in.

It could change everything.

(*Anne Lamott, quoted in Maria Popova’s BrainPickings.) 
(**From Erich Fromm’s The Art of Listening.)
(^From Nassim Taleb’s The Bed of Procrustes.)

So there’s science and there’s story, and then there’s story and science.

Whilst science aims to precisely tell us about all that is, human life is always far more chaotic than that.  Somewhere in all the human chaos, though, we can find something beautiful, and science can help us make it more so.  Each needs the other.

Yuval Noah Harari Writes about how, once upon a time, we only had story to  to help us explore and theorise on life.  These stories could look more to the past, forming into ways and beliefs and practice, and discouraging change.

Science looks at things differently, observations aren’t enough and it’s theories often aren’t proven for a long time:

‘Instead of studying old traditions, emphasis is now placed on our observations and experiments. […] Earlier traditions usually formulated their theories in terms of stories.  Modern science uses mathematics.’*

Mercy is a fascinating study in humanness, emerging out of the chaos of what it means to be human.  There’s no scientific theory or formula for mercy, or compassion,  we know mercy involves physics, chemistry, and biology but these things are wrapped in a myriad of personal and cultural stories.

The reason I’m mentioning it is because I happened to also be reading Maria Popova this morning.  Popova wants to secularise mercy, reclaiming it from religion, and exploring Anne Lamott‘s book Hallelujah Anyway as a means of doing this:

‘Mercy is the conscious choice to be kind when one can be cruel – without cruelty, there is no mercy.’**

Popova continues: we are capable of producing ‘myriad small spirited, begrudging tendencies by which we fall so woefully short of our ideal selves.**  But that’s not the end of the story.  Nassim Taleb points to the beauty that can emerge from flawed humanity:

‘Beauty is enhanced by unashamed irregularities; magnificence by a facade of blunder. […] Life’s beauty: the kindest act toward you in life may come from an outsider not interested in reciprocation.’^

Seth Godin reminds me that we whilst we may never be a right answer, we can learn from science that life is a process and it’s okay not to pretend – then we may find ourselves moving in the right direction.

‘Science is a process.  It’s not pretending it has the right answer, it merely is the best process to get closer to that right answer.’^^

It’s never one or the other; it’s always about science and stories.

(*From Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.)
(**From Maria Popova’s BrainPickings)
(^From Nassim Taleb’s The Bed of Procrustes.)
(^^From Seth Godin’s What Does “Science” Mean?)

Except there probably aren’t any.

That person isn’t thinking that about you.  You are not an idiot who lost out in the gene pool.  You don’t need permission to explore your dream.

Conspiracy stories don’t look like conspiracies most of the time, of course.  They’re just the way we think about things, the reasons we make the choices we do.  There has to be a reason, we reason, rather than this simply being randomness.

Brené Brown connects conspiracy with story.  We are storytelling animals, everything is story to us:

‘Conspiracy thinking is all all about fear-based self-protection and our intolerance for uncertainty.  When we depend on self-protecting narratives often enough, they become our default stories.  And we must not forget that storytelling is a powerful integration tool.’*

It’s possible, though, through effort, to learn the secret of seeing things for what they are and moving from the past into the future:

‘The good news is that people aren’t born with an exceptional understanding of the stories they make up nor does it just dawn on them one day.  They practiced.  Sometimes for years.  They set out with the intention to become aware and they tried until it worked.  They captured the conspiracies and the confabulations.’*

When Seth Godin writes about it being our turn, he means this life is our opportunity to do the thing or things we feel we are here to do:

‘You don’t need a permit or a blessing or any sort of permission to decide to take your turn.  You only have to open your eyes and look.  And then choose.”**

Cue more conspiracy stories: it’ll never work, someone else is already doing it …. better, no one is interested because you put an email out and no-one got back to you.  Hit the pause button and practice being aware.  One of the most powerful tools we have is writing – just writing it all down uncovers the conspiracies for what they are – confabulations.  Literally note down the anxieties and fears, and then move on to do what you must do.

Just by writing, you have taken action:

‘When fear arrives, do what you should do.  Note the fear, welcome it if you can, but do what you should do.’**

(*From Brené Brown’s Rising Strong.)
(**From Seth Godin’s What To Do When It’s Your Turn (and it’s always your turn.)

A state of being only a few steps away from us.

At the end of the day, I read myself to sleep with Terry Pratchett and and Stephen Baxter’s The Long Earth.  A gift from my son Matthew. he wrote in the front of the book: I hope that the possibility of unlimited worlds will spark your imagination:

‘Earths, untold earths.  More Earths than could be counted, some said.  And all you had to do was walk sideways into them, one after the next, an unending chain …’*

It’s a discovery opening up new frontiers and new beginnings for the characters who see the endless opportunities of starting over.

Yesterday, I was meeting with someone standing on the edge of their known world with new possibilities calling.  As for each of us, they can choose to step ‘re able to step into their own adjacence, made possible by their talents, passions, and life experiences.

It comes, though with the unknown and unfamiliar and for this reason many do not step.

‘The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and others don’t know, rather than the reverse.’**

The Long Earth‘s steppers are mostly nauseous immediately after moving from one reality to another.  K. M. Weiland warns us that ‘a good story should never be an entirely easy experience,’ quoting Franz Kafka’s counsel to only read= stories that ‘bite and sting.’^

Why?  Because then we know we are alive?  Otherwise may we be tempted to engage in some more dangerous or expensive or selfish way of proving our life in not in a rut without ends?

The slow journey into adjacence reminds us there is another way.

‘The first step is the most difficult but luckily it’s over quickly.’^^

(*From Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter’s The Long Earth.)
(**From Nassim Taleb’s The Bed of Procrustes.)
(^Both from K.M. Weiland.)
(^^From Hugh Macleod’s gapingvoid.)

There’re so many things to believe in, we have to choose what we’ll act upon.

Listen to your life.  See it for the fathomless mystery it is … in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”*

The most tragic of lives is the one failing to complete belief in anything.  We can think of this as completing a story.

In the morning, I gather up whispers from different places and people.  Often these are whispers anyone can collect but they may be overlooked or they weave together in permutations others cannot see.  I wonder how they may be woven into my life and the lives of others.  This is my story but the same things happen in all our lives.

I hear the things I hear because I’m following my storyline – you may call yours something different.

Native Australians have songlines, or dreaming tracks.  Gwendolyn Brooks speaks of our poems.  John O’Donohue of our prayers.  And Warren Berger of our questions.

‘Write a prayer that is worthy of the destiny to which you have been called.’**

‘Instead of hoping that you’ll emerge from a meeting with “the answer” (which almost never happens and thus leaves people feeling frustrated), the goal is to come out of it with a few promising and powerful questions – which is likely to provide a sense of direction and momentum.’^

Questions are what we have in abundance, from where we find ourselves touching the earth and the lives within it – O’Donohue reminding us of our incredible opportunity:

‘We have received everything, even the opportunity to come to earth and walk awake in this wondrous universe.’**

Brooks writes her life as a poem:

“Yet I know
that I am Poet!
I pass you my Poem.
[…]
My poem is life, and not finished.
It shall never be finished.
My poem is life, and can grow.”^^

The words of our poems (storylines, songlines, prayers, questions) are not pleasant and sweet things, they emerge from our real lives.  They begin here not there:

“This is the time for Big Poems.
Roaring up out of sleaze,
poems from ice, from vomit, and from tainted blood.
This is the time for stiff or viscous poems.
Big and Big.”^^

Brené Brown reminds us we are storytelling animals and sometimes our stories are complete fabrications: why we did what we did, why they did what they did.  Our need for honour, nobility, and enlightenment causes us to rewrite the truth about our motives, thoughts, feelings, and actions.  But, as Brooks reminds us, our story begins here not there, and this is a thing of hope.

When we get defensive we also get stuck.  Good storylines help get us unstuck, help us complete our belief.

Joseph Campbell speaks of our need for societal and personal myth.  He also speaks about how life is so fast these myths aren’t forming for us.  Myths aren’t untruths.  They are great stories that lead us out of our stuckness.  Karen Anderson describes myths in their original sense:

‘A myth was an attempt to express some of the more elusive aspects of life that cannot easily be expressed in logical, discursive speech. […] The myth of the hero told people what they had to do to unlock their own heroic potential.”*^

Our storylines help us to identify and live out the most important beliefs we have.

Chris Guillebeau offers some useful advice for where to begin:

‘Be attentive to what happens when you lose yourself in the moment.’^*

You’re likely touching your storyline already.  And the more people who do this, the greater the possibility that we’ll change some things.  Seth Godin’s list of systems, here, could be longer but he reminds us well enough, systems are only people:

‘There is no industry, no economy, no market.  Only poeople.  And people, people can take action if they care.’⁺

(*Frederick Buechner, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(**From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)
(^From Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)
(^^Gwendolyn Brooks, from Maria Popova’s BrainPickings.)
(*^From Karen Anderson’s Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life.)
(^*From Chris Guillebau’s The Happiness of Pursuit.)
(⁺From Seth Godin’s There is no ‘The Industry‘.)

“And above all, if you must, shine!”*

When the day has dawned, especially, I can see you.

At the end of the day the light fades, the darkness overcomes the day and I cannot see you any longer.  Every day we need new light, we rely upon a fresh dawn.

It’s a metaphor for how we need new people to bring their light.  Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler describe the benefit of a prize for helping us to look at problems in new ways, but they could be describing the promise of a new dawn:

‘Prizes attract new players – outsiders mavericks, and other innovators unlikely to work within a traditional research setting.’**

It’s as if the prize acts as a light-source, making it possible for people to contribute their own weird light.^  Diamandis and Kotler provide quite a list of benefits created by a prize: it makes a problem visible, reconfigures what we think is possible by transcending societal constraints, and changes the paradigm of what people believe is possible.

This isn’t about having to offer a prize, it’s about connecting to the Source of our light and bringing our weird light into the everyday adventures we can find ourselves in.  As my friend Alex McManus, reminds us, this comes with being human:

‘By virtue of conscious self-awareness, we are connected to the mystery from which we emerge.’^^

We also have this encouragement from choreographer Twyla Tharp to believe in our light:

‘I cannot think of a more compelling reason to foster the creative habit.  It permits me to walk into a white room … and walk out dancing.’*^

My friend Alex once put a little video together for me – a hazy image of a person walking with Alex’s voice providing the narrative: each of us has a unique perspective to bring to our world.  When our life ends that perspective is lost.

This is our light: our way of seeing, of feeling, of doing.  I find the same thinking with Eckhart Tolle when he writes:

‘Each person’s life – each life form, in fact – represents a world, a unique way in which the universe experiences itself.  And when your form dissolves, a world comes to an end – one of countless worlds.’^*

When we connect to our Source – be it our muse, myth, dream, god – we become more than reflectors of light – we are generators of light.  We let it gain brightness we need to begin.  Poet Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about our “light” as our poem:

“In writing your poem, tell the truth as you know it .  Tell your truth.  Don’t try to sugar it up.  Don’t force your poem to be nice or proper or normal or happy if it does not want to be.”⁺

Which I guess is to say, let it be weird.

The light comes with questions because that’s what light does – it brings out our curiosity: What’s that?, What are they doing?, Where are you going?, How does that work? …

‘As in writing itself, life is not about finding the right answers.  Rather it’s about asking the right questions.’⁺⁺

(*Kerry Hillcoat, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(**From Peter Diamonds and Steven Kotler’s Bold.)
(^I borrow the idea of weird from Seth Godin’s We Are All Weird.)
(^^From Alex McManus’s Makers of Fire.)
(*^From Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit.)
(^*From Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth.)
(+Gwendolyn Brooks, quoted in Maria Popova’s BrainPickings.)
(++From K. M. Weilands.)

Our lives want to tell us far more than our heads often allow.  Richard Rohr captures this when he describes the affect of contemplation and reflection:

‘This awareness deepens on the cellular level, breathing level, hearing level, touching level, aroma level.  This is what is being refined in a regular “contemplative sit.”  the thinking level will be the last to “fall” because it always overstates its own importance and represses the other sources.’*

What these other sources allow us to be is more present to what is, when we’ll be required to find new words or to use old words in unexpected ways.

We can’t be in this “contemplative sit” all the time but to find times to practise it – there are many different ways and means including those we make for ourselves – makes it possible to take more contemplative perspective when we need to, when we’re in danger of mistaking the reality we find ourselves in and making poor decisions.

Hugh Macleod questions our hold on reality when the pressure is on:

‘It’s rare that urgent deadline is totally inflexible.  It’s rare that need to take is as disastrous as you think.  And the world?  It’s never as serious as it seems.’**

Practising a contemplative way allows us to find different words for where we are right now.  Words open up or close down possibilities. Yes and no are the most obvious but there’re many more.  Words help us see things differently, as Ursula Le Guin describes for us:

“We are a wordy species.  Words are the wings both intellect and imagination fly on.  Music, dance, visual arts, crafts of all kinds, all are central to human development and well-being, and no art or skill is ever useless learning; but to train the mind to take off from immediate reality and to return to it with new understanding and new strength, nothing quite equals poem and story.”^

Rebecca West underlines how art is far more fundamental to human existence than we think:

“art is not a plaything, but a necessity … a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and tasted”.^^

Without these skills, we are, at best, responsive in a limited way, at worst. reactive to what is happening around us.  With these skills, though, we become innovative and are able to reinvent and initiate.  There feels to be a link here with what Nassim Taleb is imagining as movement from the fragile, through resilience, to antifragility.*^  The first breaks or is diminished under stress, the second manages to maintain integrity under stress, whilst the third grows.  Le Guin underlines the possibility of learning such skills:

“All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them  We need to be taught these skills, we need guides to show his how.  Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people.”^

This development of skills, though, demands our interaction with others.  Just last night I was with some sixty or so people exploring hopeful conversations in which words will be used differently; we came into new worlds as we listened to how we each shared what made bad and good conversations:

‘Listening is an act of community, which takes space, time, and silence.’^

In his novel about creation, Alan Lightman shares through his character Uncle Deva how important it is to see every thing’s essence without comparison, and I would say every one’s, too:

‘Why should you compare? said Uncle.  Each thing possesses its own special essence, which has nothing to do with anything else.  Understand the essence of a thing said Uncle, and you know everything you need to know.’^*

We need more words.

To describe the essence of a person requires even more.

(*From Richard Rohr’s The Naked Now.)
(**From Hugh Macleod’s gapingvoid.)
(^Ursula Le Guin, quoted in Maria Popova’s BrainPickings.)
(^^Rebecca West, quoted in Maria Popova’s BrainPickings.)
(*^See Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile.)
(^*From Alan Lightman’s Mr g.)

Imagination is how we make sure we fill our lives with meaningful things.

It is how we connect our passions with the needs of others.

In-between the two lies an apprenticeship of the imagination where others help us to become more the person we can be and hone the work we want to do.

I am not thinking about formal apprenticeship schemes, though these may count, and I am not primarily thinking about young people, though everyone is included.

There are people all around us who can be our mentors, helping us become the people we dream of and to use the talents we’ve been shaping.

We need words to describe all of this.   Our forms of words will hold us prisoner or allow us to fly.

The best words will make it possible to imagine more.