‘We have to listen to ourselves first of all.’*

‘Unlikely never feels quite the same as difficult, and sometimes it appears impossible.  It’s neither.  It is something risky, and something without a map or a guarantee.  We hesitate to do it because it might not work, precisely because it’s more difficult.’**

Percussionist Evelyn Glennie lost nearly all her hearing by the age of twelve.  She’s a walking example of how we listen with more than our ears.  As Glennie listens with her whole body to her instruments and the world around her she makes the point that we need to listen to ourselves and each other if we are to move from a shallow translation of a life to a deeper interpretation – she illustrates this point by showing how there’s a difference between translating a music script and interpreting it:

‘I need time with people to interpret them not just to translate them but to interpret them.’*

Listening to ourselves, not only to our head but also our heart and gut, is critical if we are going to live more than a translation of life.  The unlikely will never be pursued only by translating but by interpreting our lives with all of their talents, passions, and experiences.  Our bodies are amazing instruments for this – Glennie speaks of listening through her hands, arms, cheekbones, scalp, tummy, chest, legs, and more.

We notice our involvement in something significant usually before or after.  In the moment we are totally caught up in what it is that has been happening but in anticipation of this or afterwards we hear what our whole body is saying to us.

This can be developed, honed, and we can make the move our life is telling us to make – whether a step or direction.  Joseph Campbell tells us we can attune our lives to the story or myth our lives are trying to tell us: through training

‘There has to be training to help you open your ears so that you can begin to hear metaphorically instead of concretely.’^

We’re not merely travellers through life but people pursuing purpose:

‘The mantra of the traveller is to make peace with waiting.  The mantra of the quester is to keep moving forward.  Whatever it takes, whether facing an immense challenge or spirit-sapping tedium, just keep making progress.’^^

(*From Evelyn Glennie’s TEDtalk How to truly listen.)
(**From Seth Godin’s blog: Impossible, unlikely, or difficult?)
(^Jospeho Campbell from Jospeh Campbell and Billy Moyers’ The Power of Myth.)
(^^From Chris Guillebeau’s The Happiness of Pursuit.)

‘Don’t assume that the person with the question has asked the right question.’*

A question can simply be a belief in disguise, intended to demolish the position or argument or hubris or silliness of another.

Finding the right question can be the difference between a face-off with the beliefs of another and stepping into an experience with each other, questions that become quests that carry us across thresholds.

Towards this, Rebecca Solnit offers some helpful ideas out of her experiences of labyrinths:

‘I understand the moral of mazes: sometimes you have to turn your back on your goal to get there, sometimes you’re farthest away when you’re closest, sometimes the only way is the long one.’**

Sometimes we can win an argument when there’s a deep experience developing into relationship on offer.  Solnit reflects on how there are things that cannot be seen by looking, only in walking:

‘And sometimes the the map is the territory.’**

What is true for geography is also true for our meetings with each other:

‘Part of what makes roads, trails, and paths so unique as built structures is that they cannot be perceived as a whole all at once by a sedentary onlooker.  They unfold in time as one travels along them, just as a story does as one listens or reads, and a hairpin turn is like a plot twist, a steep ascent a building of suspense to the view at the summit, a fork in the road as an introduction of a new storyline, arrival the end of the story […] symbolic structures such as labyrinths call attention to the nature of all paths, all journeys.’**

We have to walk with each other awhile as an experience that promises to open up the future beyond the past and the present.  That is, we find thoughts emerging in our meeting together of what the future might be like in our co-creation.

It sounds far-fetched but there are those who are exploring these possibilities in different ways.  Kio Stark tells of the Portals Project:

‘Imagine yourself stepping inside a large golden box and striking up a conversation via full-body video with someone in Herat, Afghanistan; Tehran, Iran; Havana, Cuba; New York’s, New Haven, or Washington, DC, in the United States, that replicates what it’s like to talk with them in the same room.’^

These are not meetings of people who have a lot in common or even like each other as far as their preconceptions and prejudices lead them, but in fact:

‘Most users come away with positive, moving experiences, and often say they wish there could be a Portal in every country. […] The project is both grandiose and compact in its aims.  The artful extension of people’s ability to interact with strangers far and wide ups the ante for the ways we can extend ourselves as cosmopolitans.’^

We do’t have to build a portal for this kind of experience – though we could, the construction and technology plans are available to build one and join the network.  Theory U^^ involves an “empathy walk,” arranging to meet up with someone we don’t know much about and go for a walk of an hour or so in which we the time is spent taking turns to find out more about each other, not with the sedentary questions but journeying questions.  It’s here where we encounter the emerging future.

(*From Edgar Schien’s Humble Inquiry.)
(**From Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust.)
(^From Kio Stark’s When Strangers Meet.)
(^^See Otto Scharmer’s Theory U.)

‘Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person: it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one ‘object’ of love.’*

“The universe is a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects.”**

Erich Fromm wrote about how we believe the fallacy about love, meaning:

‘most people believe that love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty.’*

The object, then, must be worthy of being loved.  Fromm’s point turns this around.  The person who treats all with a consistency of care is more loving that the one totally and utterly besotted by one other, indifference to others.

‘Because one does not see that love is an activity, a power of the soul, one believes that all that is necessary to find is the right object – and that everything goes by itself afterward.’*

There is a delicious connection between love as a power of the soul and time.  Alan Burdick writes about our perception of time:

‘”We must put aside the idea of a single time, all that counts are the multiple times that make up experience.”^

These multiple times are the ones we each bring to the encounters of life:

“Our slightest social exchanges – our glances, our smiles, and frowns – gain potency from our ability to synchronise them among ourselves […].  We bend to make time with one another, and the many temporal distortions we experience are indicators of empathy; the better able I am to envisage myself in your state of mind, and you in mind, the better we can recognise a threat, an ally, a friend, or someone in need.”^

These are not only powerful thoughts to guide toward exploring what it is to be human together, but also when it comes to identifying our purpose in life.  There’ll be some interests or concerns that come to feel like friends to us: this something resonates in us and itself vibrates with our energy.  This is what we must do in life.  Time will feel as if it is slowing down and speeding up in a synchronicity of self and contribution.

Love and empathy are not characteristics we have or do not have, or that are fixed for our lifetimes – they are learned and practised and individualised:

“But empathy is a sophisticated trait, a mark of emotional adulthood: it takes learning and time.  As children grow and develop, they gain a better sense of how to navigate the social world.  Put another way, it may be that a critical aspect of growing up is learning how to bend our time in step with others.’^

As soon as I read this I could hear Sherry Turkle telling me about her research into how technology is interrupting our interactions with one another, exaggerating the worst of our interconnecting.  Alan Burdick’s comments arise from neuropsychologist Sylvie Droit-Volet‘s research into people’s sensing of time when shown images of people expressing different emotions or being younger or older shifted their perception of time:

‘In one experiment, she presented people with images of human faces — some neutral, some happy, some angry, some frightened — each displayed on the screen for anywhere between half a second to a second and a half. The research subjects were then asked to evaluate how long the faces appeared for.

She found that across images displayed for the same duration, happy faces were perceived to last longer than neutral ones and shorter than angry or fearful ones.’^^

As I have said before, I am not against technology but hold that the more technology we use, the more time we have to spend time with one another – playfully, exploringly, discovering and learning and practising.

We are, it seems, makers of time to love.

(*From Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving.)
(**Thomas Berry, quoted in Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution.)
(^Alan Burdick, quoted in maria Popova’s BrainPickings: Empathy is a Clock that Ticks in the Empathy of Another.)
(^^Maria Popova in BrainPickings: Empathy is a Clock that Ticks in the Empathy of Another.)

The status quo doesn’t fear a lot of what we often think of change.  It can use most things to its own ends and advantage.

What it fears are changed people, people who we might describe as moving from ego to the eco.

In his latest blog, Seth Godin writes about something he names “with-ness”:

‘It’s tempting to be oppositional. To see the different as the other.  To dominate, to win, to move up as others move down (because in the zero sum game that we’ve built around us, that’s the only way).’*

But he’s witnessing a different world grow:

‘But a networked world, one based on connection—one held together by the sheerest gossamer—can’t tolerate the tension and pain that bullying and dominance require.

An alternative is with-ness.

The practice of talking so we can be heard, and listening so we can understand.’*

In another place, Godin identifies some of the practices of those who are making this journey:

‘When you lead without compensation, when you sacrifice without guarantees, when you take risks because you believe, then you are demonstrating your faith in the tribe and its mission.’^

Our mission is for everyone to thrive, not just the few.

(*From Seth Godin’s blog Toward cooperation.)
(^From Seth Godin’s Tribes.)

“Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart,
and try to love the questions themselves
as if they were locked rooms
or books written in a very foreign language.”*

Just because we don’t know something doesn’t mean we will never know it.  Just because we can’t do something doesn’t mean we will never be able to do it.  If it is important to us, and I don’t mean a whim, then there’ll need to be a slowness, a willingness to remain with just what this is for a long time, perhaps a lifetime.

‘We’re all capable of huge insight and empathy if we’re willing to work to learn how.’**

Perhaps we express our exasperation at not having enough time to do what we really want to do, but what if we are time?  Jorge Luis Borges wrote about how:

“Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”^

Alan Burdick helps us to see the limitations we place on time by the ways we metaphorise it:

“Whenever we talk about it, we do so in terms of something lesser. We find or lose time, like a set of keys; we save and spend it, like money. Time creeps, crawls, flies, flees, flows, and stands still; it is abundant or scarce; it weighs on us with palpable heft.”^^

Whatever we liken time to, says Burdick, in the end time matters to us because one day it will run out:

“Yet whatever one calls it, we share a rough idea of what’s meant: a lasting sense of one’s self moving in a sea of selves, dependent yet alone; a sense, or perhaps a deep and common wish, that I somehow belongs to we, and that this we belongs to something even larger and less comprehensible; and the recurring thought, so easy to brush aside in the daily effort to cross the street safely and get through one’s to-do list, much less to confront the world’s true crises, that my time, our time, matters precisely because it ends.”^^

When someone says to me, “I will give you some of my time,” it doesn’t mean the amount of time they have lessens whilst mine increases, rather our times intertwine.  This sense of time shared helps us to move to the things we could never learn or feel or do on our own.

Kio Stark writes about the value of encountering strangers.  When we allow time for interaction, we are potentially opening up greater possibilities, creating time for change:

‘But when you talk to a stranger, when you admire and respect their difference from you, when you help them, your are making the world around you more malleable, creating space for change.’*^

Strangers may be the least likely to receive our time and yet it may be that these will be some of the most significant and valuable moments of our lives when we see it’s not about having time but about being time.

(*Rainer Maria Rilke, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(**From Seth Godin’s blog The musclebound baby.)
(^Jorge Luis Borges, quoted in Maria Popova’s BrainPickings: Empathy is a Clock that Ticks in the Empathy of Another.)
(^^Alan Burdick, quoted in Maria Popova’s BrainPickings: Empathy is a Clock that Ticks in the Empathy of Another.)
(*^From Kio Stark’s When Strangers Meet.)

‘In conversation, the interval of time that elapses between the other person’s sentiment or question and my father’s response greatly exceeds the average, a lapse swelling with Kierkegaard’s assertion that “the moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity.”’*

Maria Popova is commenting on her father’s slow response to others’ thoughts and inquiries.  She came to understand how this was not about the difficulty of the subject matter or conundrum, but about empathy:

‘It turns out that my father’s liberal pauses are so discomposing because our experience of time has a central social component — an internal clock inheres in our capacity for intersubjectivity, intuitively governing our social interactions and the interpersonal mirroring that undergirds the human capacity for empathy.’*

It feels like the internet, and social media in particular, is the opposite of this slow empathy.  Popova’s words had caught my attention as I’d been thinking about how life was to be found more in questions than in answers we often we can rush towards.  We’ll only truly know the true worth of many people and many things in the future we cannot see, perhaps one we will not even live to see.  It means we are best served by openness rather than closed-ness.  If, then, we say we don’t care about what the whole truth or picture is then we’re reducing if not eliminating empathy.

Is it possible, then, to live our whole lives wondering?

I am reminded of Mary Oliver’s words which I posted a few days ago:

“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom , taking the world into my arms.”**

I read a little more from Bernadette Jiwa after reflecting on Popova’s story.  Jiwa is outlining practices to help us notice more: I find myself reading about the practice of identifying the backstory:

‘What new things did you learn about the person?
How does that change the way you feel about them?”^

Jiwa had been listening to her father speak about his working life, discovering that he had more than twenty five jobs in his lifetime:

‘You’re looking to gather insights here, not just about what people do, but also about why they do it.’^

This involves inquiry, and not assuming we know the answers. It is about empathy, about understanding what makes another tick.  Elsewhere Jiwa has written:

‘Your purpose is not what you do but why you do it.’^^

If we are to see deeper into one another, we will need to live in questions rather than answers.

I hope I’m move trying to offer an answer, rather, uncovering of a question.

(*From Maria Popova’s BrainPickings: Empathy is a Clock that Ticks in the Empathy of Another.)
(**Mary Oliver, quoted bin Philip Newell’s The Rebirthing of God.)
(^From Bernadette Jiwa’s Hunch.)
(^^From Bernatte Jiwa’s Difference.)

‘Under Niagara, the cataract falling like a veil over my countenance;
Upon a door-step … upon the horse-block of hard wood outside,
Upon the race-course, or enjoying picnics or a good game of
     base-ball,
At he-festivals with blackguard jibes and ironical license and bull-
     dances and drinking and laughter’.*

Walt Whitman was a walker, a wanderer.  There’s seems to be no limit or boundary to where he goes and what he sees during his lifetime.  In his poem Leaves of Grass, Whitman continues to show us what he is seeing:

‘At the cider-mill, tasting the sweet of the brown sqush … sucking the
     juice through a straw,
At apple-peelings, wanting kisses for all the red fruit I find,
At musters and beach-parties and friendly bees and hustings and
     house-raisings’.*

On and on Whitman walks, his short descriptions taking us into numerous new worlds:

‘By the cot in the hospital reaching lemonade to a feverish patient,
By the coffined corpse when all is still, examining with a candle;
Voyaging to every port to dicker and adventure’.*

He appears  not always to be in a place of wonder:

‘Hurrying with the modern crowd, as eager and fickle as any,
Hot toward one I hate, ready in my madness to knife him’.*

Whitman recovers, though, finding his way again:

‘Solitary at midnight in my back yard, my thoughts gone from me
     a long while,
Walking the old hills of Judea with the beautiful gentle god by my
     side;
Speeding through space … speeding through heaven and the stars,
Speeding amid the seven satellites and the broad ring and the diame-
     ter of eighty thousand miles,
Speeding with tailed meteors … throwing fire-balls like the rest,
Carrying the crescent child that carries its own full mother in its belly,
Storming enjoying planning loving cautioning,
Backing and filling, appearing and disappearing,
I tread day and night such roads.’*

This path before me seems to have no end.  I walk it and, like Whitman, I stumble, but the path is kind, giving me the time and grace I need to stand again and start to walk once more.  Andy Raine reflects how not everyone see the path this way:

“Too many people, guilt-stricken, wounded,
walk in regret,
feeling bad about failing,
apologise even for breathing.”**

Who told them that they couldn’t start over?

I reread these words from Daniel Kahneman on how we struggle to cross thresholds:

‘As in the case of lines, you are likely to stop where you are no longer sure you should go further – at the edge of the region of uncertainty.’^

But it is in these regions of uncertainty, where the continuing path takes, that the presently unimaginable can happen.  If we stop, building our cities, and naming them “Destination,” then we will never know what can be.  Kahneman’s words help me see this path is an expression of the infinite game: it is for as many as possible to travel for as long as possible, and when something threatens to stop people in their tracks we invent new ways of walking, of keeping going.  Seth Godin encourages:

‘Don’t be trapped into accepting shame from someone who is trying to keep you from doing something you have every right to do.’^^

The road or path or way we follow is full of questions and possibilities, and, somewhere between, a quest.

It’s everyone’s road.

‘I fly the flight of the fluid and swallowing soul,
My course runs below the soundings of plummets.

I help myself to material and immaterial,
No guard can shut me off, no law can prevent me.’*

(*From Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.)
(**Andy Raine, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(^From Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.)
(^^From Seth Godin’s blog: Common traps, worth avoiding.)

“The least strained and most natural ways of the soul are the most beautiful, the best occupations are the least forced.”*

‘New social movements do not come from this in the centres of power. […] Look to the periphery, to people and places where commitment to the status quo is low, toward where hearts are most open to the new.’**

Seth Godin’s blog on airbrushing got me thinking about why we might “airbrush” our lives, presenting an images of ourselves, our lives, our families, our jobs, that feel to be more presentable to others, where we don not feel ourselves to be misfits, feeling embarrassment, or worse:

‘Spend enough time looking through the glass on your tablet and you’ll come to believe that you’re the only one with a less-than-perfect situation. With the right filter, the grass really is greener…”^

What we lose, according to Michel de Montaigne and Peter Senge, whose words lead us into today’s post, is the natural beauty and the beautiful-new which come from the uncontrived and less acceptable edges.

When our ways of speaking and acting change because we’re in the company of someone we’re playing up to or down to then we’re acting out of our ego – airbrushing has been around a long time, we just called it something else.

When we’re able to meet the world and those in it just as we are, with our unique perspectives we not only produce more but we change for the better the world that is increasingly in need of living without the airbrush.

(*Michel de Montaigne, quoted by Gretchen Rubin in The Happiness Project.)
(**From Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution.)
(^From Seth Godin’s blog Airbrushing.)

“The fool, with all his other faults, has this also, he is always getting ready to live.”*

Wisdom is more than knowing, it is about living.  Epicurus’ defining of a fool, above, allows us to see foolishness can mean many things but not acting upon them.  This kind of wisdom then becomes our capacity to deal with complexity.

After reading this, Philip Newell catches my attention when he writes:

‘One of the primary features of the rebirthing of God is reconnecting with wisdom, allowing the truth that has been etched into our being to come forth in new ways.  This reconnection will happen through a journey into the forgotten and unknown depths of our own soul and traditions.’**

Whilst Newell is a minister in the Church of Scotland and his focus and concern is for the maturing of the Christian faith, he gives expression to the possibility for those who are not religious continually develop and rebirth their worldview, whatever that be.

However, it’s the next part of his statement that is of particular interest.  When we go down into what George Appleton names “the deeps of my being,”^ we find we are less foolish than we think.  We know a lot of things, a lot of things we can act upon – which is what wisdom is about.

‘I just wanted to do it!  It was an internal drive that I couldn’t ignore.’^^

What Chris Guillebeau is describing here is what lies in the deeps of every person if they could find there way there.  The problem is in noticing.  Other voices, needs, demands distract us from travelling to this place in ourselves.

Frans Johansson would say we need a strategy:

‘The purpose of strategy […] is not to find the right answer, because you will be wrong anyway.  The purpose of the strategy its to move us to act.’*^

Maybe we don’t act because we want to get it right straightaway, or in the gaze of others.  Johansson is saying, though, that it’s far more important to be moving than getting it right the first (second, or third) time.  John Ortberg aligns with this when he remarks:

‘It’s better to go through the wrong door with your best self thank the best door with your wrong self.’^*

It’s about movement, and movement at our natural speed is the best way of thinking about this.  This can feel like a resurrection, a coming to life, and I offer this thought in an Epicurean way:

‘Peregrination was sometimes described as “seeking the place of one’s resurrection,” leaving the familiar in order to experience new birth, dying to boundaries and securities of home to be alive to what one had never imagined before.’**

Peregrination or walking is a useful metaphor because it requires that we take only the necessary things from the journey.  Necessary then is interesting.  Beyond the essentials everyone might take for their walk, each will have different things they feel necessary for their walk.  I came across an exercise from Bernadette Jiwa that ties in helpfully here.  Jiwa is offering an empathy exercise in the form of “Notice what she carries” drawing four quadrants, filling each in as the things necessary to the journey are reflected upon:⁺

I suggest four labels four the quadrants which come from the Jesuits, as these suggest an inward and outward journey.

I offer this as a means of reflecting on what you find in the deeps or truth etched into your being:

What are you most aware about yourself: your talents, passions, learnings?
How have you been most imaginative and creative when it comes to doing something with these things – your experiments, even if these have failed?
Who have you shared these things with, as a means of love?
Where have you been most heroic (selfless), standing up for something that matters to you and changing something?

(*Epicurus, quoted in Maria Popova’s BrainPickings: A Stoic’s Key to Peace of Mind.)
(**From Philip Newell’s The Rebirthing of God.)
(^George Appleton, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(^^From Chris Guillebeau’s The Happiness of Pursuit.)
(*^From Frans Johansson’s The Click Moment.)
(^*From John Ortberg’s All the Places to Go.)
(⁺From Bernadette Jiwa’s Hunch.)

“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited the world.”*

We compete in many arenas to win, but what is it we’re competing for?

These words from Mary Oliver suggest for me the kind of life many would hope to win.

I was born in 1959.  The world has changed in many ways since then.  I certainly know that I don’t want to live in a 1959 world today.

The world of humans has developed and improved in so many ways since then, thanks to the things many people have competed around and won in many areas of life; work: education, gender, sexuality, medicine, technology, politics.

The world has also become worse in many places, or at least remained the same: poverty, terrorism, conflict, global warming, personal anxiety.

There are certainly many places in which we need to keep pushing forward.

One way to win is to become people acting upon these things rather than being acted upon.  Echoing Erich Fromm’s belief** that no-one is absolutely free but more or less free, Alex McManus writes:

‘Freedom is the ability to choose within our bounds.’^

To know our bounds holds is also to know the possibility of expanding our bounds.  Maria Popova writes about a stoic’s key to peace of mind when she quotes Seneca:

“There are more things […] likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we often suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”^^

Popova includes an illustration from author Catherine Lepange showing how normal people and anxious people see.

It is indeed critical to be people who see beyond ourselves but I want to add to this illustration to look like this:

If we are to know how we are able to interact with what we see beyond ourselves, we also need to know ourselves – our bounds.

-I don’t want to be stuck in in 1959 and I don’t want to remain in 2017 either.  To understand that we are people capable of changing the world will require us to face failure – often the reason for much our fear and anxiety.  To know this comes with the territory and to better know ourselves is to give ourselves a better chance of winning:

‘where people do failure avoidance, they will never achieve the kind of courage and risk taking that lead to bold innovation’.*^

We hold on to victory.

(*Mary Oliver, quoted in Philip Newell’s The Rebirthing of God.)
(**See Erich Fromm’s The Art of Listening.)
(^From Alex McManus’s Makers of Fire: ebook version.)
(^^Seneca, quoted in Maria Popova’s BrainPickings: A Stoic’s Key to Peace of Mind.)
(*^From John Ortberg’s All the Places to Go.)