It used to be that mapmakers filled in all the spaces on maps as if they knew what was there – with all kinds of rubbish.  They didn’t know.

When they began to leave blank spaces they were really saying “We have no idea but we’re going to find out.”

I wonder if it’s the same with our lives, admitting we don’t know everything opening up new worlds of possibility?

The first turning up is being born.

The second turning up involves the unique combination of our bodies, brains, imaginations and decisions.

Now what?

Starting on a new path will likely involve others.

We will read their books, listen to them speak, meet them spend time with them.

It’s about seeing all of these things as opportunities to do something new.

Nothing wasted.

‘Fearful that we’ll expose our incompetence, we hide.  Remembering the lessons of childhood, we wait to be picked.  But the Peter Possibility points out that we’re far more competent than we imagine.  That once we pick ourselves, we have precisely what we need to do generous work.’*

Seth Godin is here turning the Peter Principle around into the Peter Possibility.

Michael Bhaskar introduces me to #firstworldproblems – such as the “pain” we experience when the wifi isn’t working fast enough.  Citing Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – physiological, safety, love/belonging, esteem, self-actualisation, and acknowledging we’re at the top of the pyramid, he writes this about our first world problems:

‘It’s all a big joke and quite how vacuous we have become.  Yet it also reflects something significant.  That problems really have changed.  That more is not always more.’**

Bhaskar questions whether the things creativity produces at the top of the pyramid is always a net positive.

I’m not a lover of hierarchies but perhaps there is an exception at play here.  To see this, we need to place an inverted pyramid alongside Maslow’s original.  Now we see the possibilities of creativity in each of the levels of need being useful in needs of the adjoining, just as we have most probably benefitted from someone’s creativity in the pyramid adjoining our own.

Bernadette Jiwa captures something of this when she writes about innovation in this way:

‘True innovation isn’t about finding an alternative that gets us from A to B; it’s about envisaging news As and Bs.  It’s about being open to redefining where problems begin and where solutions must end and working out why it matters that we make these new connections or forge different paths.’^

(*From Seth Godin’s blog: The Peter Possibility.)
(**From Michael Bhaskar’s Curation.)
(^From Bernadette Jiwa’s Hunch.)

(I’m going to be taking a break for a couple of days but I’ll aim to put up a few doodles after the weekend.)

… doing!

‘We define ourselves as doers.  Changers.  People who push on towards a goal. […] To be a doer is more than a name; it’s an action-by-action choice. […] We’ve chosen to be doers – so we get things done.’*

We’re here.  It’s as if the universe, our god, our muse has given an “A” to us and waits to see what we’ll do with it.  We’ve stumbled on obedience.

Obedience is what happens when we begin to weave stories, to make things live.

I thought about doing this so I tried it and guess what!

Obedience feels very different when it swells up from inside us rather than being forced upon us from outside.  This obedience is about doing what our lives tell us we must do – it still requires effort but it’s the kind of stuff that changes the world.

Bernadette Jiwa tells the story of Susan Beal who visited 500 families that’d experienced the loss of their baby to SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome).  I can’t imagine what this felt like, to visit these families in the first, most raw hours following a baby’s death, but the findings led to public education that is saving hundreds of thousands of lives.**

This feels very much like a story of obedience, the thing Susan Beal knew she MUST do.

Peter Senge helps us to see why this kind of obedience is so necessary when he writes:

‘the vast changes required by a regenerative society will not be achieved just by reacting to crises after they arrive.  They will require inspiration, aspiration, imagination, patience, perseverance, and no small amount of humility’.^

Jonah Lehrer perhaps puts a finger on why this kind of obedience to our lives is so hard when he writes:

‘The art that makes us feel is the art that makes us hurt.’^^

Joseph Campbell frames this in a different way when he speaks of our need to make sense of our lives:

‘To be in accord with the grand symphony that the world is, to put the harmony of our own body in accord with that harmony.’*^

Eugene Peterson offers what I think is another layer of seeing to this:

‘all life is given and must continue to be given to be true to its nature’.^*

(*From gapingvoid’s blog: Doing the Authentic.)
(**See Bernadette Jiwa’s Hunch.)
(^From Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution.)
(^^From Jonah Lehrer’s Proust was a Neuroscientist.)
(*^Joseph Campbell in Jospeh campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth.)
(^*From Eugene Peterson’s Run with the Horses.)

‘If I choose to hide you away, it is for a reason.  I have brought you to this place.  Drink in the silence.  Seek solitude.’*

Digital analyst James McQuivey writes:

‘Before you can disrupt your product you have to disrupt your process.’**

When the product is the contribution we make with our lives, I take this to mean, if you want to look at what you want to do with your life, you have to look at the person you are and are becoming.  I’m connecting this with Theory U‘s two questions: Who am I? and What is my work (contribution)?

I read these words from Roz and Ben Zander at the same time as reading McQuivey’s:

‘Gracing yourself with responsibility for everything that happens in your life leaves your spirit whole, and leaves you free to choose again.’^

This encouragement to take responsibility for our lives took me back nineteen years, to a moment of potential burnout which I needed to take responsibility for.  At the time, I journaled how I would not blame others, nor the organisation I was part of, or the situations I’d been in.  I think I found some kind of freedom: if I was free to take responsibility I was also free to take the next step.

I don’t think I would be doing what I do today without that moment of realisation.

Systems exist because of certain interdependencies and interactions; they can involve friends, families, businesses, societies, politics, the natural world, and they can also be interpersonal.  System scientist Peter Senge points out how every system is made up of at least a reinforcing loop and a balancing loop.  The reing=forcing loop concerns what’s happening on the surface, the balancing, for good or bad, is what is happening below the surface.  If I connect this to Theory U intrapersonally then the reinforcing loop is What is my work? and the balancing loop is Who am I?

The latter is more neglected than the former:

‘Finding the time and space to question a cultural landscape that doesn’t encourage it, it challenging.’^^

We are the cultural landscape so how do we go about asking the deeper questions of yourself?

“I must listen to my life telling me who I am.”*^

‘To whit, your story tells you its meaning, you do not dictate meaning to the story.’^*

It is this thought which lies behind what I refer to as dreamwhispering: the art we develop throughout our lives that is about listening to what our lives are saying, especially in three ways – our passions or hopes, our talents, and our experiences.

We need to down when everything demands we keep going fast.  It is about asking questions when all we want is answers.

‘As Carl Jung said, wellness is found through integration of the unconscious life into consciousness.’⁺

When I look more closely at my balancing loop, I see how I can be struggling with pride, greed, and foolishness.  The things that mess up most relationships.  I may not use these words and it may look like me wanting to be recognised for something I’ve done, or justifying some purchase I feel I need to make, or believing I can shortcut some issue by avoiding thinking about it.

As I reflect on these things I’m reading Bernadette Jiwa’s passage on signs and signals in which she offers this illustration:

‘As a novice, every firefighter learns to read the four attributes of smoke: volume, velocity, density and colour.’⁺⁺

It feels as though the smoke is the stuff happening unnoticed in our balancing loops, the things I’ve mentioned above.  When I notice what’s happening then I can bring some humility to my pride, some gratitude to my greed, and some faithfulness to my foolishness.  When I do II hope I become “productive in the things that really matter: love, kindness, gifting and suchlike.

(*Frances Roberts, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(**From James McQuivey’s Digital Disruption.)
(^From Rosamund and Benjamin Zander’s The Art of Possibility.)
(^^From Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)
(*^Parker Palmer, quoted in Henri Nouwen’s Discernment.)
(^*From Robert McKee’s blog.)
(+From Philip Newell’s The Rebirthing of God.)
(++From Bernadette Jiwa’s Hunch.)

“There’s a guy in this coffee shop, sitting at a table, not on his phone, not on a laptop, just drinking, like a psychopath.”*

Before the internet there was the universe.  Maybe being open and present to the amazing place the universe has always been looks really weird.

There’s a great deal of mystery in the universe and we’re perhaps the most mysterious part of all, adding imbalances to the universe’s unfolding:

‘Gifts are the essence of art.  Art isn’t made as part of an even exchange, it is your chance to create imbalance, which leads to connection.’^

Imbalance produces the new, the unimagined and unheard of.  Of course, much of this can be bad or indifferent.  But some of it is really good and some is really, really good.

Balance is more likely to get caught up in repeats – what used to be remarkable but is no longer.

Our greater understanding is that we’re living in a universe of requirement – as in the room that appears in Harry Potter’s Hogwarts when required … but bigger.  We get to explore the stuff that fascinates us and do something remarkable.

The dynamic is that seeing more can lead to feeling more and feeling more can lead to doing more, producing the greatest imbalances of all: love, goodness and beauty.

Just something for us to think about when we get up tomorrow.

(*Jason Gay’s 2015 tweet that went viral, quoted by Bernadette Jiwa in Hunch.)
(**From Seth Godin’s V is for Vulnerable.)

“I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion.”*

‘”That is the disquieting place where people must always find us.”**

Writing at the close of the Second World War – absurdity in its most extreme form – Albert Camus’ observations ring true when it comes to the lesser absurdities.

Our passion involves revolt – the rejection of other things and ways being implicit. There is also freedom from comparisons and competitions with the things and ways of others.

If I do not know my freedom then my passion is at risk, my revolt half-hearted.

It is these three things together that make it possible to live in the disquieting place.  Another term for this is curation.  In order to highlight certain things, others must be overlooked or rejected.  None of us can do everything.  Only comparisons and competition keep us in such a diverting arena.

This less is more, the simplicity on the far side of complexity:

‘In order to prosper we’ll start to appreciate the value of less, of simplicity in a complex world.’^

Tsundoku is the Japanese word for buying books but never reading them.  I use it as a term for wanting what others have and not getting on with what it is we ought to be doing.  The solution:

‘In Tokyo’s Ginza district there is a bookshop that sells one book at a time.  It’s a start.’^

What is your one book through which you might live out your revolt, passion, and freedom?

(*Albert Camus, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Albert Camus on the Three Antidotes to the Absurdity of Life.)
(**William Brodrick, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(^From Michael Bhaskar’s Curation.)

Really?

Maybe it’s not far enough?

The Big Bang set in motion a journey outwards and we find this movement in evidence in each of our lives – this expanding universe is also within us.

Whilst there are many calls for us to settle down, there are many who think an unsettled life is a maturing life.

Walt Whitman wandered and noticed many things.

Throughout his days Whitman walked and saw and thought deeply.  He noticed the wonder in the smallness as well as the vastness of the universe:

‘I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and the grains of sand and the egg of
the wren,
[…]
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlours of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery’.*

Here he enjoys the wonder of a human being:

‘I hear the sound of a human voice … a sound I love,
I hear all sounds as they are tuned to their uses … sounds of the city
and sounds out of the city … sounds of the day and night’*

There feels a oneness or presence in Whitman with what he observes.

Frans Johansson asks an interesting question of what we considered to be well-ordered and sorted:

‘What if all of the well-planned and well-executed strategies people have told of us about are really the result of unplanned meetings and encounters, random moments and events, serendipity and plain luck.’**

Here’s another way of looking at presence, one requiring us to be open to what is happening around us.

Furthermore, Martin Seligman connects presence to our wellbeing when he writes:

‘Positive mental health is a presence: the presence of positive emotion, the presence of engagement, the presence of meaning, the presence of good relationships, and the presence of accomplishment.’^

If being present – in our journeying, discovering and makings – is important to out wellbeing, we have to be concerned about how the way we use technology is hindering rather than helping.  Reflecting on how we can check our various messages up to 150 times a day, Bernadette Jiwa expresses this concern:

‘We’ve stopped taking time to notice and to ask questions, to think and reflect and just to be.’^^

Jiwa goes on to encourage us to be ‘waist-high and elbow-deep in the stuff that invites our curiosity and ignites our imagination’.^^

To tweak some words from Seth Godin – in what I hope is a legitimate way:

‘[Personal] identity is an emotional reaction to a complicated world.’*^

Have we gone far enough?  I don’t think so.

We all have promising future possibilities.  Mine are different to yours, yours are different to those around you.   But what we are living in is an age of seeing more and just how far we can go:

“Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”^*

(*From Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.)
(**From Frans Johansson’s The Click Moment.)
(^From Martin Seligman’s Flourish.)
(^^From Bernadette Jiwa’s Hunch.)
(*^From Seth Godin’s blog: My side, right or wrong.)
(^*T. S. Eliot, quoted in Eugene Peterson’s Run With the Horses.)

‘perhaps the wild ones among us are our only hope in calling us back to our true nature’*

“If I were to wish for anything I should not wish for wealth or power, but for the passionate sense of what can be, for the eye which ever young and ardent sees the possible.”**

Perhaps it’s more about being called forward to our true nature – what we can become.  How often have we thought, I can do better than this.

Seth Godin tells me the word “ocellate” means eyelike.  In another place Godin writes:

‘Once you break the components down you can put them together into something brand new.’^

This is real alchemy: solve et coagula.

Rebecca Solnit states that the fossil evidence for hominids shows, when it came to brain development or walking upright:

‘Walking came first.’^^

I can only begin to imagine what walking made possible for seeing and brain development.

Jonah Lehrer writes about Paul Cezanne’s contribution to what we know about how the brain and eyes interact, how there are ten more connections going from the brain to the eyes than the eyes to the brain:

‘We make our eyes lie.’*^

There’s a blind spot at the centre of our seeing and the brain fills in the missing information:

‘But we are blind to our own blind spot: our brain unfailingly registers a seamless world.’*^

It’s only a metaphor for seeing wildly, the possibilities of the future being there for us to imagine, but I wonder what is out there for those who bring their thinking, seeing, and walking together.

Bernadette Jiwa highlights the growth of “in-ground traffic lights” for pedestrians who’re getting run over because they’re not looking up from their smart phones.  We trust too much in our technology, when maybe getting out there walking, seeing, and thinking will open up more:

‘We’re getting worse at looking where we’re going at every turn. […] Technology is hijacking our minds.  As a result we’re seeing less and missing more.  We’re throwing away the chance to think and reflect.’^*

(*Joel Mckerrow, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(**Soren Kierkegaard, quoted in benjamins and Rosamand Zander’s The Art of Possibility.)
(^From Seth Godin’s Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?)
(^^From Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust.)
(*^From Jonah Lehrer’s Proust was a Neuroscientist.)
(^*From Bernadette Jiwa’s Hunch.)