Asking a generous question will elicit a generous answer.’*

I marvel at how everything is made of the same stuff as the planets and stars … and yet everything is different.

We live in this wonder of sameness and difference.

This kind of difference is not the same as surface-difference – lamented here by Erich Fromm:

‘If I perceive in another person mainly the surface, I perceive mainly the differences.  If I penetrate to the core, I perceive our identity, the fact of our brotherhood.’**

Deep openness to one another is a compassionate act.  The opposite action of closedness is cynical:

“When cynicism becomes the default language, playfulness and invention become impossible. Cynicism scours through a culture like bleach, wiping out millions of small, seedling ideas. Cynicism means your automatic answer becomes “No.” Cynicism means you presume everything will end in disappointment.”^

We can only discover our sameness and difference with the help of others in a generous otherness.

(*Krista Tippett in the online course The Art of Conversation.)
(*From Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving.)
(**Caitlin Moran, quoted in Maria Popova’s BrainPickings: Caitlin Moran on Fighting the Cowardice of Cynicism.)

‘There are three centres of what might be called mythological and folkloristic creativity in the Middle Ages. […] The cathedral, the castle, and the cottage – you go to any of the areas of high civilisation, and you will see the same – the temple, the palace, and the town.  They are different generating centres, but in so far as this is once civilisation, they are all operating in the same symbolic field.’*

A metaphor suggests there is more to see than simply what lies on the surface, beyond the function there is the experience.  Between the spirituality, the governance, and the day-to-day life of the people, there exists the possibility of creating expansive metaphors that move life beyond the functional:

‘Myths are so intimately bound to the culture, time, and place that unless the symbols are kept alive by constant recreation through the arts, the life just slips away from them.’*

Why the arts?

The arts are trying to say, this painting, this poem, this sculpture isn’t it; there’s something more beyond:

‘Our thinking is largely discursive, verbal, linear. There is more reality in an image than in a word.’*

Answers are more functional: Here’s something that should work.  A question opens an adventure:

“What people think of as the moment of discovery is really the discovery of the question.”**

In This is a Poem that Heals Fish, Arthur’s mother tells him how to heal his bored fish Leon:

”Hurry, give him a poem!’^

This turns out not to be an answer or solution, but the beginning of a quest for Arthur:

‘A poem!?  But what is a poem?’^

Arthur looks in cupboards.

And underneath beds but he cannot find a poem.

He realises his quest will take him further, to the people he knows, asking them what a poem is:

‘Determined, Arthur continues his search.
He runs to Lolo’s bicycle shop.
Lolo knows everything, laughs all the time,
and is always in love.’^

A year ago, I found myself in Washington D.C., walking the city as a way of reimagining my work having stepped out of a role that I’d fulfilled for more than thirty five years.  We’re rediscovering how walking is more than functional, how it leads us to experiences beyond what we see on the surface.  Walking itself is a metaphor:

‘The flaneuse is someone who gets to know the city by wandering its streets, investigating its dark corners, peering behind its facades, penetrating its secret courtyards.’^^

Solvitur ambulando.

(*Joseph Campbell in Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth.)
(**Medical researcher and virologist Jonas Salk, quoted in Michael Bungay Stanier’s The Coaching Habit.)
(^From Jean-Pierre Siméon and Olivier Tallec’s This is a Poem that Heals Fish.)
(^^From The Paris Review’s Radical Flaneuserie.)

“My Lord God,
I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.”*

We do not need certainty for the journey.

Hugh Macleod reminds me that we have more than enough for the journey if we notice it:

‘Abundance begins with gratitude.’**

Gratitude is seeing with an open mind.  It is a way of opening up life:

‘Gratitude isn’t about getting you into heaven after your dead.  Gratitude is a mindset about how to actually live.’**

I picked up a copy of Ken Mogi’s The Little Book of Ikigai a week or so ago:

‘Ikigai is a Japanese word for describing the pleasures and meanings of life.  The word literally consists of ‘iki‘ (to live) and ‘gai’ (reason)’^

He tells of how ikigai works out in the life of chef Jiro Ono:

‘Ono might even find ikigai in the cup of coffee he sips before starting each day.  Or in a ray of sunshine coming through the leaves of a tree as he walks to his restaurant in central Tokyo.

[…]

Ikigai resides in the realm of small things.’^

This being present to what is all around us and with in us provides us with what we need for our journey, including our values, talents, dreams, experiences, and friends and strangers who also live in this way.

Mogi continues by offering testimony of ikigai from a number of Okinawa residents who are more than 100 years old:

‘a 102-year-old Karate master told him that his ikigai was caring for his martial arts; a hundred-year-old fisherman said his could be found by continuing to catch fish for his family three times a week; a 102-year-woman said hers was in holding her tiny great-great-great-grand-daughter – she said it was like leaping into heaven’.^

These stories reminded me of the early Jesuit’s^^ who would begin their novitiate period with thirty days of solitude in order to identify what they must do they would go on to each say their endeavour was the most important thing in all the world.  It’s when we think there’s nothing more important to do than what we have identified our puropose, our ikigai.  When we see all there is to see, like a sunrise that seemed to take for ever to arrive:

Now the clouds are brighter than ever, on fire with pinklight, and still the sun is almost here.
It’s as if the promise of the day is the most beautiful – we come alive to the possibility of the day.

(*Thomas Merton, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(**From gapingvoid’s blog Let’s begin with “thank you”.)
(^From Ken Mogi’s The Little Book of Ikigai.)
(^^See Chris Lowney’s Heroic Leadership.)

Not laughter ha-ha but surprise ha-ha.

“Ha-ha” was the name given to the eighteenth century ditch which replaced the wall around aristocratic homes in Britain.  It was what people were heard to say when they came upon this intentional cut in the land that made it possible for long views to be enjoyed across the countryside.  The ditch was an important development towards the countryside being seen as a place to walk for pleasure rather than necessity.

Rebecca Solnit identifies a number of the transitions necessary for the Wordsworth siblings to take their enjoyable walks.  From the internal long gallery of the great houses to the outside walkways created wide enough for two people to walk abreast, and from this Medieval garden to the Renaissance to the Baroque to the naturalistically landscaped with ha-ha ditches.  These were movements of human imagination and illustrate Pixar’s Ed Catmull’s remark:

‘You’ll never stumble on the unexpected if you stick only to the familiar.’*

We can all imagine more.

We can imagine even more together.

(*From Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc..)

These past days and weeks have reminded all of us how dangerous this planet can be, how life is full of danger.  This is where we live, where we have to explore, to see and understand “just because” but also to try and and make life better for one another as a result.

When it comes to exploring, Seth Godin catches my attention when he suggests “living in a shepherd’s hut” in order to see whether this “piece of land” is where we want to build something more permanent:

‘Get as close as you can to the real thing, live it, taste it, and then decide how to build your career or your organization.”*

There’s a sense of adjacent possibility in this – to see whether there’s something else we may want to make into a different and permanent experience of life.  Because there’s something naturally resistant in us to trying on an idea or a space or a kind of work or some different kind of interest, the shepherd’s hut makes it possible to do something in a temporary way.

It may just make it possible for us to venture out into the expansive.

Frans Johansson points out that will be open to more “click moments” – his phrase for when our skills and the happenstance and serendipity of the universe are married together, if we “take our eyes of the ball”:

‘Conscientiousness is […] the type of behaviour that insures execution but also allows us to miss greater ideas, projects, improvements or connections that keep popping up around us.  Unfortunately, by rigidly pouring all of our effort into one approach we miss out on the unexpected paths to success.’**

I find myself thinking about adjacent lives – offering other ways for living out our talents, passions, and experiences, and which we can explore in impermanent ways.

Conscientiousness, then, is our enemy, hiding from us the expanse that is within and the expanse that is out there:

“Listen to your life.  See it for the fathomless mystery it is.”^

“When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in the garden or a mall?”^^

I found these words from Henry David Thoreau being quoted by Rebecca Solnit in her unwrapping of the beginnings of walking for pleasure.  The identification of this happens towards the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries: siblings William and Dorothy Wordsworth refer to long walks through the Lake District just for the pleasure of walking, here captured in one of William’s most famous poems:

‘I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.’*^

Walking, especially wandering or dawdling, offers itself as a perambulatory expression of the shepherd’s hut – becoming a way for us to join together the internal and external expanses.  After reading Iris Murdoch and Seth Godin describing what is an artist, I wonder whether this word is simply a way for describing those of us who are discovering some way or other to connect the inward and outward expanses:

Iris Murdoch writes of art:

‘But the greatest art is ‘impersonal’ because it shows us the world, outworld and not another one, with a clarity which startles us and delights us simply because we are not used to looking at the real world at all.’^*

The adjacent possibility is that which is right under our noses but we have no way of seeing it – back to Johansson’s remark earlier.  Seth Godin directs our attention to what artists (he is thinking of everyone being an artist) are trying to  deal with – reminding us that we live in a dangerous world and our lives are full of danger:

‘An artist is someone who brings humanity to a problem, who changes someone else for the better, who does work that can’t be written down in a manual.’⁺

The inward and the outward are entwined in an expansive way.

In their beautiful book This is a Poem that Heals Fish, Jean-Pierre Siméon and Olivier Tallec tell and illustrate the story of Arthur whose fish Leon has a problem:

‘- Mommy, my fish is going to die!
Come quickly!  Leon is going to die of boredom!

Arthur’s mommy looks at him.
She closes here eyes,
she opens her eyes …’⁺⁺

How do you heal a fish from boredom?  How do you heal anyone from boredom?  Here’s is Arthur’s mum’s way:

‘Then she smiles:
– Hurry, give him a poem!
And she leaves for her tuba lesson.”⁺⁺

But wait …

‘A poem!?  But what
is a poem?’⁺⁺

This is Arthur’s quest.

We each have a quest.

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: Can you live in a shepherd’s hut?)
(**From Frans Johansson’s The Click Moment.)
(Frederick Blechner, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(^^Henry David Thoreau, quoted in Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust.)
(*^From William Wordsworth’s I wandered lonely as a cloud.)
(^*From Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good.)
(⁺From Seth Godin’s Whatcha Gonna Do With that Duck?)
(⁺⁺From Jean-Pierre Siméon and Olivier Tallec’s This is a Poem that Heals Fish.)

‘Each of us has the capacity for love, wonder, and reverence.’*

Everyone!

Seth Godin writes about those who produce confusion in order to deny what our growing knowledge is showing us:

‘The data is more accurate than it’s ever been. Evolution is the best way to explain and predict the origin and change of species. Vaccines are not the cause of autism and save millions of kids’ (and parents’) lives. And the world is, in fact, getting dangerously warmer.

And yet…

Poll after poll in many parts of the world show that people are equivocating or outright denying all three. Unlike the increasingly asymptotic consistency in scientific explanations, the deniers have an endless list of reasons for their confusion, many of which contradict each other. Confusion doesn’t need to be right to be confusing.’**

We can experience this at the level of our personal stories.  Sometimes it’s because of what society or those around us tell us and sometimes it’s because of what we tell ourselves: Someone like you will never be able to pursue that, will never be able to do that pipe dream into reality.  Living our lives in an informed way, towards clarity changes things.

Confusers benefit the most when others are kept in the dark but in the end, everyone loses:

‘Ask a confusor that the next time he offers a short term smoke screen. If this is a race to be the most uninformed, and the most passive, what if we win?’**

All you have to do is set out on a journey to know more about yourself and others.  It feels confusing at first.  It’s a little like flying into clouds but keep on upwards and things become amazingly and wonderfully clear.

Donald Miller writes of those who are awakening to the truth that they have more to offer to others than they know when he writes:

‘They don’t know they can still live and love and connect.  They don’t know who they really are and what they’re capable of.’^

Things happen on the way.

(*From Joseph Jaworski’s Source.)
(**From Seth Godin’s blog Selling confusion.)
(^From Donald Miller’s Scary Close.)

I found myself looking on two words this morning: steadfast and dependent.

Steadfast means  “fast-fixed” – it’s like saying unmovable twice.  There are certain things that we want people to be steadfast in, like love and loyalty.  There are other things it’s good to have some movement in, such as ways of  thinking and beliefs and attitudes as new information becomes available.

Dependent means “hanging down from.”  In its extreme, I can’t do anything until you tell me to, or, I’ll do whatever you tell me to.

Groundbreaking astronomerMaria Mitchell considers relationships from the perspective of the planets, Maria Popova commenting:

‘Mitchell resolves to have more balanced relationships and reflects on how unwise it is to turn a single person into the centre of gravity in one’s emotional universe. Instead, one’s attachments should be distributed among many people, each fulfilling a different need — one providing intellectual stimulation, another rendering us “more elastic and buoyant, more happy and radiating more happiness, because we know him,” another inspiring in us such “warmth of affection” that “our hearts grow as if in a summer feeling.”’*

In his book Vital Friends, Tom Bath names eight different kinds of friend, a healthy group of friends comprising different kinds of friendship offered to us by a number of people and not one.  Imagine someone saying, I’m the only friend you’ll ever need.  Creepy.   Mitchell writes about a more health dependence:

“Who judges a work of art and sees only with his own eyes? Who listens to a lecture and hears only with his own ears? We turn aslant as we stand before the picture to see what good judges are looking. We open the guide book to see what we ought to admire…. Insensibly our judgment is inspired by that of those around us. It is not a weakness to be deplored. We were more than conceited did we rate ourselves so much above the rest of the world that we needed no outward aids to judgment. We were born dependent, our happiness is in the hands of others. Our character is moulded by them and receives its colouring from them as much as our feeling relates the parental impress.”*

What Mitchell is anticipating, it seems to me, is interdependence, our interrelatedness towards creating a better personal and societal future: an interdependent-dance, we might conceive: a nexus of steadfast and dependent.  When we each know ourselves and bring who we are and what we can do to others for their and our betterment, then we are introducing the greater imagination and creativeness through interrelatedness into the world.

(*From Maria Popova’s BrainPickings: Trailblazing Astronomer Maria Mitchell on How We Co-Create Each Other and Recreate Ourselves Through Friendship.)

‘It is apparent to infinite players that wealth is not so much possessed as performed.’*

Everybody has something to bring.  On the surface one person is trying to help another.  Beneath the surface, both have something to contribute.

‘By reinforcing the separation of people from their problems, problem solving often functions as a way of maintaining the status quo rather than enabling fundamental change […] where problems often arise from unquestioned assumptions and deeply habitual ways of acting.’**

How often will helpers sit in a room figuring out how to help those who will receive their help but who are not invited into the space?  We might argue that this is just too difficult to do, that we would never get anywhere, nothing would get done.  But perhaps we’re missing a trick.  Perhaps this is how it’s meant to be, we just try to short-circuit the human process of connecting people and problems.  Perhaps, in the long run, this way of producing solutions would take less time than the all the false starts and reruns that we often see played out.

I am reminded of the learning of Vincent Donovan, trying to work with young people.  It was one of his students who told him:

In working with young people do not try to call back to where they were and do not call them to where you are as beautiful  a place as that may seem to you. You must have the courage to go with them to a place that neither you nor they have ever been before.”

Here are some encouraging words from J.K. Rowling which help us to see how imagination gets to play within such proximity:

“Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore, the foundation of all invention and innovation.  In its arguably most transformations and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experience we have never shared.”^

(*From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)
(**From Peter Sense, Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers’ Presence.)
(^J.K. Rowling quoted in Bernadette Jiwa’s Hunch.)

“If people would but do what they have to do, they would always find themselves ready for what came next.”*

‘The religion gets in the way of faith.  Static gets in the way of motion.  Rules get in the way of principle.’**

What if this place you have arrived at is not the conclusion or terminus but is the beginning?

Joseph Jaworski writes about the human capacity to anticipate the “what next”:

‘Human beings are exquisitely designed to sense the future, shape it, and bring it to reality – to actualise it when necessary and meaningful, as it desires.’^

The future doesn’t exist, of course; there are many possible futures, some more possible than others.  Frans Johansson calls our anticipation of happenstance and serendipity click moments.  We cannot plan these:

‘The opposite of click moments are planned situations with expected outcomes.  On their own, these don’t generate the chaos and randomness needed to discover new, unique ideas.’^^

But we can be more ready to meet them.

The ability to play the “yes and” game that comes to us from improv theatre is one.  It’s a way of straining and striving to keep the future possibilities as open as possible.  Of course, this is a skill that requires a certain character.

One thing we can do is to develop our ability to play “yes and” allowing us to add to what others share rather than using “yes but,” “no and,” or “not put.”  To use Seth Godin’s concept of tribes, those that are an institutionalised, static, and concerned with rules cannot cope with this, but tribes that are about faith, motion and principle know this isn’t it, and every day ask, what comes next?

(*George MacDonald, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(**From Seth Godin’s Tribes.)
(^From Joseph Jaworki’s Source.)
(^^From Frans Johansson’s The Click Moment.)

“The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic living out of an inner journey.  The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer pilgrimage.  One can have one without the other.  It is best to have both.”*

Our purpose must find centredness in our lives and our centredness must be expressed in purpose.  We may call this a way of life.

One thing to beware of is mistaking a bad dream for a good one:

‘False dreams interfere with honest living.’**

And, of course, not to mistake a good dream for a bad one:

“It all started with a dream, but then I followed that dream: following the dream made all the difference.”^

(*Thomas Merton, quoted in Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust.)
(**From Eugene Peterson’s Run with the Horses.)
(^Stephen Kellog, quoted in Chris Guillebeau’s The Happiness of Pursuit.)