I’m going to be wandering into Washington D.C. At the end of some work over here, to see what I can see and imagining the new direction I’m taking  and doing some doodling.

I am going to be a flaneur (female: flaneuse).

My friend Charlotte had sent me an article on flanerie and this seemed to be the perfect time to read it – which is an act of flanerie in itself.

The French flaneur first appears in the late sixteenth century.  There’s also a Scandinavian flana (a person who wanders) from which the French term may have been derived.  This article outlines one way in which flanerie, and particularly the flaneuse is being reimagined:

‘Flanerie, [Pierre-Alexis Dumas] explained, is not about “being idle” or “doing nothing.”  It’s an “attitude of curiosity … about exploring everything.  It flourished in the nineteenth century, he continued, as a form of resistance to industrialisation and the rationalisation of everyday life … .’*

As I read this, I found myself reimagining flanerie as being about actively taking oneself off the well trodden path, out of the familiar environment, to follow curiosity and to be open to more.  But more than this, the aim of this wandering is to expand the capacity of our hearts towards taking a new direction and finding ourselves in new activities and pursuits, particularly wrapped around being a helpmate to those we may meet along the way.

Flanerie is an antidote to the same old same old of life that has the effect of contracting rather than expanding our hearts.

‘Oblivious to our human yearnings for permanence, the universe is relentlessly wearing down, falling apart, driving itself to a condition of maximum disorder.’*

Though the universe is what it is, it unwittingly throws out to us a new beginning every day, a dawn of possibilities, light to walk into with imagination and creativity.

Some understand that we live in just such a universe of complexity and contradiction, and are alive to making it possible for more and more to enter into the beauty of it all.

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

‘The stuff it takes to be intimate is authenticity, vulnerability, and a belief that other people are about as good and bad as we are.’*

We tend to think of confession as the admittance of bad things, but what it was about confessing good things?  To share the full self of who we are with others in an act of communion and service?

Yesterday, I found myself sharing with the leader of Corrymeela, a community of peace in Northern Ireland, and he was telling me how they use confession positively, and I loved this.  It connected with my understanding about how humility, gratitude and faithfulness open up a bigger self and greater life:

Humility and gratitude and faithfulness burn away everything but the generative self, our crystallising intent.

(*From Donald Miller’s Scary Close.)
(Today’s doodle was provoked by this comment from Carlos, who served me my cortado on the Potomac waterfront.)

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

I am spending this week with people from more than thirty countries, with many languages and cultures.  We’ve been identifying the difficulties we can have when different languages meet, such as how we might even use a term and concept in one language that doesn’t even exist in another.

Reflecting on this crucial nature of language, I found myself thinking about how we each have a prime need to develop and learn the language of our own lives, so that we might communicate with ourselves and better communicate with others.

For those who do not do this, there will always be the danger of using another person’s language for their life – ignoring their own passions and needs, missing the uniqueness of their talents and abilities, and misinterpreting the value of their own experiences.

When we learn the language of our lives, we are also in a better place to listen to the language of each other’s lives, appreciating each of us is ‘an ever-changing being that is becoming and will never arrive, but has opinions about what is seen along the journey.’**

What each person sees is so critical to our development as Human Becomings.

(*Frederick Buechner, quoted in the Northumbria Community’s Morning Prayer.)

(**From Donald Miller’s Scary Close.)

We are discovering there is dark energy in the universe, making it possible for the universe to accelerate outwards.

There is also bright energy, exuded by humans, making it possible for e universe to come together.  We don’t know what absolute truth is, but we can be explorers of trust.  Bright energy makes this possible, and we all give it off.

As it it something that can be grown, we can all learn to do this.

‘What do I want to make of myself, and what do I have to work with?”*

‘In my experience, the flat-footed grow conservative; the nimble-footed get imaginative.’**

Humans change the story.

It used to be about the survival of the fittest, about natural selection, but we have found ways of stepping outside of this.  When we use our imaginations, we give ourselves a chance.

We wrongly think humility is about taking a lower view of ourselves but, for many, it’s about taking a higher view.

(*Erik Erikson, quoted in Eugene Peterson’s Run with the Horses.)
(**From Linda Rottenberger’s Crazy is a Compliment.)

“Everything’s wrong says he.  That’s a big text.  But does he want to make everything right?  Not he.  He’d lose his text.”*

“loosen my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise …”**

There are many things we do not know, but we do not know ourselves most of all.

Today’s title appears in a story about the Hebrew Jacob on the run when one night, in the middle of nowhere, he had a dream about God.  In the morning, he wakes up, gasping, “God was in this place, and I did not know.”  Except the Hebrew says “and I, I did not know.”  It seems it wasn’t God or “out there” or anything and everything that he didn’t know, it was himself.

In the places between places is where we come to realise, we don’t fully know ourselves.  Geography, work, age can all feel like an exile.  Our complaint can become our life.  Even when something bright appears, I’ve seen people destroy it because they prefer their complaint.

These spaces feel can like an exile to us, or they can be a place for living our best self, where, through the creativity of humility, gratitude, and faithfulness, we get to imagine a world filled with what matters most of all.   To dare to strip everything away and find our primal energy.^

I can do this.  You can do this.

Wherever you are, know yourself, then do something amazing.

(*From George Eliot’s Felix Holt, quoted in Eugene Peterson’s Run with the Horses.)
(**Dawna Markova, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(^Check out this video sent in timely fashion by my friend Steve.

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

‘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.’**

There are plenty of people who want to tell us what they think (and what we ought to think); as Edgar Schein sees it, ‘Feedback is generally not helpful if it is not asked for.’^

If I ask for feedback, I try to lead through specific questions; when unsolicited feedback is provided it often is found lacking, being ‘too general, judgemental, or related to some goal’ of the other person.^  As such, a lot of feedback is evaluative rather than descriptive, aiming to overpower someone rather than meeting them on the same level.

Religion belongs to the powerful, faith belongs to everyone, a future sensing ability in all humans, and one that opens up stories of possibility, and stories are important because:

‘Characters only change when they live through a story.^^

Feedback is a skill – an art, even.  It can even be thought of as a journey we take together into the unknown.

Now, what’s your question?

(*From Seth Godin’s Tribes.)
(**From Joseph Jaworski’s Source.)
(^From Edgar Schein’s Helping.)
(^^From Donald Miller’s Scary Close.)

‘With the pain and in the midst of alienation a sense of freedom can occur. … False dreams interfere with honest living.’*

Life is a series of arhythmic dislocations.   For most of us these are mini-exiles, moving from what we know to what we do not know.

As we search for and journey into truth, we’re moving into the unknown or the new-known, an exile experience.

I had to leave my home for school – a very scary and unpleasant experience as I remember it.  I had to leave school and childhood for adulthood and work – scary.  I have sometimes found myself pushed out of one work context and had to journey into another to begin over.

When in exile, we want to be somewhere else, to return to where we came from or to at least get away from here – this job, this small town, this person – but for those who embrace where the dislocations of life have brought them, there’s the discovery of something magical, a strange alchemy that turns exile into blessing.**

You may be just what those around you need and don’t know it.  Prophets of hope make little sense to those who feel at home, but for those embracing their strange lands there is magic to be worked.

(*From Eugene Peterson’s Run with the Horses.)
(**I’m not referring to those whose experiences are so toxic that the only thing they can do is leave.)

“We complete our personality only as we fall into place and service in the vital movement of the society in which we live.”*

“We are sensible that behind the rustling leaves, and the stacks of grain, and the bare clusters of grape, there is a field of a wholly new life which no man has lived; that even this world was made for more mysterious and nobler inhabitants than men and women.”**

There will always be surprises.  Hardly surprising in a universe such as this one.  One?

‘According to the current thinking of many physicists, we are living in one of a vast number of universe.  We are living in an accidental universe incalculable by science.^

We may try and insulate ourselves from surprises, but perhaps they are where life is most vitally found.

Yesterday I spent the afternoon with two others pondering how an experience we’ve been involved in designing and evolving might be shared with more.  We had come to an impasse.  The experience had begun with one person’s question, developed into an enterprising community exploring crucial questions.  How to offer this without being to prescriptive?

Someone then said, invitation feels to be the right way to move forward, meaning the experience will only exist as it continues to be co-created.  The other two of us felt this to be good and right.  The word had come through the openness of one, and the other two of us were open to the surprise of this.

Surprise begs improv for the flow to continue: yes and … .

‘[T]he proverb is, when in doubt, scout.’*^

Instead of avoiding surprise, there’re ways to be open to surprise which leads to us being more alive, even more human.

‘I wanted to be with people who were humble and hungry, had healthy relationships, and were working to create new and better realities in the world.’*^

(*Peter Forsyth, quoted in Eugene Peterson’s Run with the Horses.)
(**Henry David Thoreau, quoted in Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution.)
(^From Alan Wightman’s The Accidental Universe.)
(^^From Alex McManus’s Makers of Fire – eBook version.)
(*^From Donal Miller’s Scary Close.)