“She always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.”*

We are wanderers, never arriving, always between here and there.

It may not look like this on the surface.  We know exactly where we’ve arrived within certain borders – family, work, interests, nationality, friendships … .

These appear to be the critical borders, but they’re clumsy and clunky compared to the many others we cross or avoid every day: when we allow a relationship to deepen, or we spend time getting to know a stranger, when we encourage our children to pursue the things that interest them rather than look good on a report card, when we give time to explore a new idea, or stop to notice something we so often pass without paying attention.

Here we are prepared to accept that we are, in the truest sense, all ‘strange-appearing, strange-acting and strange-sounding people.’**

As Seth Godin suggests, we are all weird.^

Everyday we get to play in borderlands like these, the places that exist between people, ideas, and species and the natural world.  There is always more to life than we see.

We live physical and spiritual universes with their many borders, and we are ever explorers:

‘Each universe has its own power.  Each has its own beauty, and mystery’^^

(*Virginia Woolf, quoted in Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project – one of Rubin’s personal koans.)
(**From Rohit Bhargava’s Non-Obvious.)
(^See Seth Godin’s We Are All Weird.)
(^^From Alan Lightman’s The Accidental Universe.)

“Seek solitude.  Listen to the silence.  It will teach you.”*

“Oh do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.”**

Each of us has our personal koans, words and ideas and images we have collected through our lives which speak to us most loudly in the silent moments and places.

Making it possible to touch the wonder or promise of what is but cannot be seen, they remind us there is another world, more than this one.

Pulling us from the over-trodden path, away from the scant world that has become so many heuristics, they bring us to ‘the things others miss.’^

(*Frances Roberts, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(**T. S. Eliot, quote in Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project.)
(^From Rohit Bhargava’s Non-Obvious.)

We continue to witness the developing of human consciousness and imagination and practice.  This is not something we observe from the sidelines; we are right in the middle of it.

I see the development of faith and belief within this, as a heartbeat to the great human story.

This is the adventure we are called to, an adventure with others who are like us and others who are not.

My friend Alex suggests one of the most important questions of the 21st Century is, What does it mean to be human?  We come together to ask the question, What does it mean to be human like Jesus?

To make sense of how he lived his life to be able to do what he did.

Too often people have seen the wrong side of faith, like Richard Dawkins when he says:

“Faith is the great cop out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence.  Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.’*

Faith is a future sensing capability.  It’s about bringing in the future, the things that haven’t been discovered yet, or don’t yet exist, but they will if we act on what we believe:

‘Faith is the belief in things larger than ourselves.  Faith is the ability to honour stillness at some moments and at others to ride the passion and exuberance that is the artistic impulse, the flight of the imagination, the full engagement with this shimmering world.’**

Surprisingly, these words were written by another atheist.

We are capable of imagining and creating new possibilities for communion and love, for creativity and generosity and enjoyment, and this in a universe where chaos lies just beneath the surface, where circumstances are never perfect, the timing is not good, and we’re anything but ready:

“You’re a pioneer.  It’s supposed to be hard.  If it were easy, someone else would have done your side before you.”^

You may be thinking, I need to become someone else; I can’t do this.  But the truth is, you need to be more yourself, and, to know yourself at the core of your being, and you will open up possibilities for the future you cannot imagine in this moment.  Even making this journey will change how you see and what you see.

How often our organisations change the people we are, but we do not notice, asking us to perform some task or join some programme that we’re not really good at or interested in – we call it volunteering and we say that if people were really committed then they’d just do it.

When we find something we want to take responsibility for then something interesting happens, we begin producing an abundance of thinking or relating or behaving to be shared with others.  When a community of people are exploring life in this way, they don’t so much have abundance but we are abundance.

One of the greatest things a community of people can do is help its members to become more who they are, identify their responsibility, and join together in abundance for others.

This is possible, but it isn’t easy:

‘It’s easier to tach compliance than initiative.’^^

(*Richard Dawkins, quoted in Alan Lightman’s The Accidental Universe.)
(**From Alan Lightman’s The Accidental Universe.)
(^Beto Sicupira, quoted in Linda Rottenberg’s Crazy is a Compliment.)
(^^From Seth Godin’s Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?)

“if you surrender completely to the moments as they pass, you live more richly those moments’*

‘I suggest the word “inhumane” is a sign that we are discovering a meaning to life.  Our purpose to reject inhumanity and build a civilisation that is consumed by love.  In other words our purpose is to become human.’**

Hurry can make a mess of what we hope our life can be.

Sometimes we find ourselves negotiating life with what Steve Peters^ calls our Chimp – fighting, flighting, or freezing in reaction to the rush and push we encounter.

Other times we get a grip on things by turning Vulcan, being super-logical and strategising our way through all the hurry.

In-between, there is a way of fuller engagement and knowing with a universe of possibilities.

We are noticing animals.

We thrive when we slow things down and feed not only the mind but also the heart.  Zen koans are sayings intended to enable the student to move out of their logical way of thinking: “What sound does one hand clapping make?”  In a U.Lab coaching circle three or four people learn to listen with their hearts to someone delivering an issue in which they are stuck in the form of a short case study.  Recently, I shared my experience of flanering (wandering with curiosity and intent) in Washington D.C., which I used to notice more, about myself as well as the world around me.  There are many ways around making it possible to invent something that is our own.

This way of noticing more, is also a way of becoming human, and we do not know what we are capable of.

‘In science, no knowledge about the physical universe is off-limits or out of bounds.’^^

What is true of our minds is also true of our hearts.

(*Anne Morrow Lindbergh, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(**From Alex McManus’s Makers of Fire – eBook version.)
(^See Steve Peters’s The Chimp Paradox.)
(^^From Alan Lightman’s The Accidental Universe.)

‘It is fashionable to espouse the latest cynicism.  If we live in hope, we go against the stream. … It takes courage to act in hope.’*

‘Creating the future does not begin with a plan.  It begins with a dream,  And when someone actions a dream, it begins with a spark.’**

Spaces for hope are never easy or salubrious.  It often is a difficult and hopeless place, yet more than being a physical space, hope is found in action.  Hope loves to try but struggles with boredom and ennui.

Hope is action because it connects us with who we truly are, a connecting with the energy our life is comprised of:

“It was deep calling unto deep – the deep that my own struggle had opened up within being answered by the unfathomable deep without.^

Hope is found, then when we join the inside and the outside of life, my unique “me” with the absolutely everything, creating a field of possibility for what want to emerge: ‘more comes to those who look for the adjacent possible, the asymmetrical.’^^

“The beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them.  Each new combination opens up the possibility of new combinations.”*^

Sounds hopeful.

(*From Eugene Peterson’s Run with the Horses.)
(**From Alex McManus’s Makers of Fire – eBook version.)
(^A clergyman from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, quoted by William James, and quoted in Alan Lightman’s The Accidental Universe.)
(^^From Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile.)
(*^Stephenb Johnson, quoted in Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler’s Abundance.)

“[P]erhaps, the wild ones among us are our only hope for us calling us forward to our true nature.”*

‘My idea of the modern stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, and desire into understanding.’**

Outside the National Archives building on Washington D.C.’s Pennsylvania Avenue stand two sagely statues with the inscriptions, “What is Past is Prologue” and “Study the Past.”  As it were, it is important to study the past in order to create the future story.

Had I been walking in the opposite direction, I’d have read these inscriptions the other way around: Study the Past … What is Past is Prologue.  This time, I understand while the past is valuable it is past, and there is only the future.

There’s a kind of wildness, or nonconformity, which frees us to explore what is to come.  We need these dreamers to explore life beyond the practical and functional.  These are often perceived as being impractical because of how imagining and dreaming are misunderstood and undervalued; really, they make the future practical to our lives by living it now.

We can avoid wildness by preferring the predictably-practical, learning somehow to cope with the fact that twenty years later we’re in the same place doing the same thing with the same regrets.  Sometimes we go as far as to protect our practical lifestyles by abandoning core principles and practices to be able stay to stay where we are, trading the quality of life by securing some constant or better standard of living.

My friend Alex McManus would say, we’ve lost the art of making fire.  We’ve forgotten how we can take the fuel of artefacts and the oxygen of culture and beliefs, and add a spark of creativity:^

‘You have to break away from the day-to-day, immerse yourself in a new way of thinking about yourself.’^^

Spark people send postcards from the future, sharing something transformative for the present, helping reframe what is into what might be.  When we get to experiment with this, we find we’re quite good at it – we have hidden capacity, we’re regenerative beings.

‘Creativity is a skill and a habit.  You need to learn the skill, which then becomes a habit.*^

(*Joel McKerrow, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.  The original has back instead of  forward.)
(**From Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile.)
(^See Alex McManus’s Makers of Fire for an exploration of the the fire making analogy)
(^^Gary Wilson, quoted in Joseph Jaworski’s Source.)
(*^From Edward de Bono’s How to Have a Beautiful Mind.)

‘Pure inquiry is difficult because it requires you to suspend as much as possible your prejudices, preconceptions, a priori assumptions, and expectations based on past experiences.’*

They’re being sardonic.  You’re not being a big help.

There’s always an answer.

Our problem is how many more answers we miss by rushing into diagnosis and solution.

The person wanting help wants it fast.

The person offering help wants to be effective.

Pure inquiry, though, opens many more possibilities.

Possibilities mean choice, and choice makes life richer..

(*From Edgar Schein’s Helping.)

‘Effective help occurs when the helping relationship is perceived to be equitable.’*

My wanderings in the United States just about over, this burger bar declared itself to be Wanderlust.

For the last two days I had been doodling** with intent (dawdling purposefully), my flanering^ allowing me to meet people a little closer.

One of my last conversations, before heading to Dulles Airport, was with Shahgol (hello if you’re reading this, Shahgol), who told me about her zen-zig-zagging (I had to show Shahgol yesterday’s yesterday’s doodle).

I also learnt from Bailey, yesterday, that gezmek is Turkish for wander and, from someone else, whose name I wish I knew, helped me to identify that girlənmək is Azerbaijani for wander.

Wandering helps us to cross borders.  Flanering is about being open through curiosity and a non-judgemental to encounter cities and experiences and our world more deeply, and, most of all, people.

What we find is, everyone has something within them that will change the world, if only a little.

We need more flanerie.

(*From Edgar Schein’s Helping.)
(**I intend making the doodles from these days available as a colouring pack; watch this space.)
(^Check out my posts from the last few days to find out more about flanering.)

‘Our salon [of scientists and theatre artists] succeeds because we never have an agenda.  At the beginning of each session, one of us will begin talking about some random idea, another person will chime in or change the subject, and miraculously, after twenty minutes, we have zeroed in on a question everyone is passionate about.’*

For two days, I have wandered around Washington D.C., noticing some things and missing others – such as when, yesterday, I twice offered to take a picture of groups so everyone could be in their photo.  The first person said no, the second said yes, and this morning I read this from Edgar Schein:

‘Effective help occurs when both giver and receiver are ready.’**

Spot on.

We don’t have to wander a city almost 4,000 miles from our home, though, we don’t even have to wander our home town (though it’s a good thing if we do); we can engage in flanerie in our conversation with others.  Open to the twists and turns of everyone’s contribution, we can come upon something which intrigues and fascinates us together.  We begin by factually sharing and listening, then we notice we’re empathically listening, getting excited about something, and the conversation takes off excitingly for everyone.  We may even move on to generative flanering, when an idea emerges that the group will put into practice.

‘Ideas are going to continue to be more valuable.’^

These are the ideas that possibly will change the world.

Flannelling is the use of evasive language.

Flanering is the use of engaging language.

(*From Alan Lightman’s The Accidental Universe.)
(**From Edgar Schein’s Helping.)
(^From Seth Godin’s Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?)

‘At some point in the future, new stars will cease being born. … Solar systems will become planets orbiting dead stars.’*

‘To act on behalf of the future requires a deep sense of responsibility and selflessness.’**

We live in an impermanent universe, our own sun having some five billion years left.  Buddhism names this impermanence annica, teaching that attachment brings suffering (dukkha).

I found myself wondering about the nature of existence, and just how is this far richer when we belong to another and others and our world (eco) rather than believing these things belong to us (ego)?

To know who we are within the life of another, including the life of our planet, is a precious thing – I can say this even as an introvert.  When we live with humility, gratitude, and faithfulness, we’re opening ourselves up to this possibility of belonging within others.

This complexity of relationships are made possible by the human skill of helping, through which most things happen in our world; and though helping can often go wrong, yet out of even this some of the most beautiful and magical expressions of human life occur.

(*From Alan Lightman’s The Accidental Universe.)

(**From Joseph Jaworski’s Source.)