Distraction can be good and distraction can be bad.  It’s important to know which kind is which.

There’s something important you need to do, or some critical information you need to take on board but your mind is elsewhere.  Hopefully you can ask a question, feel embarrassed, and catch what you need to know when it’s repeated.

Sometimes, though, we go through life allowing ourselves to be distracted, consciously or unconsciously, at the most important moments. This is definitely not good.

Human life is an incredible thing; we simply don’t know what we’re capable of.  The wrong kind of distraction means we’ll never know.  Nothing is wasted, when it comes to the experiences of our lives, out of which can emerge some astonishing future possibilities for who we can be and what we can do.   It’s about reimagining all of this into what can only be described as art and contribution.  But there’s something very uncomfortable about this.  It’s about the unfamiliar.  It includes seeing the truth about ourselves.  It can be easier to allow ourselves to be distracted ted and watch some thoughtless TV instead:

‘They sit and stare and stare and sit
Until they’re hypnotised by it.
Until they’re absolutely drunk
With all the shocking ghastly junk.’*

Yet this possibility of human change and development is the closest thing we have to alchemy: a leaden life turned into something golden – I’m not thinking glitzy or celebrity.

There’s also a good sort of distraction.

The kind that’s curious about everything our lives contain, how we got to where we are – the work the relationships, the dreams … , what we can do with it, and how we feel about things.  This feeling stuff is what really trips us up.  Because curiosity in these things is about vulnerability and courage.

Curiosity, though, is another word for distraction.

The possibility of following the habit holes that our lives are riddled with, to find out the more about ourselves that can be life-changing.  It’s where we hear the deep whispers of our lives.

(*From Roald Dahl’s Songs and Verse.)

There is a critical moment when non-movement turns into movement, between staying put and actioning – a tipping point moment in which something ‘exercises a disproportionate influence’* on what we do.

What is that something?

I wonder whether that something is our “faith.”  Something different in each one of us connecting our past, present but, especially, our future, enabling us to see what we cannot see and to move towards it.  It is about our past and present inasmuch as it extends what we are curious and concerned about into future developments and possibilities.

‘Too much collective value without a lot of individual value creates a lot of swiss cheese.’**

There are various collective values – political, religious, business, familial, sports – yet without the contribution of our personal ones, these are full of holes.

We can trust we’re on a journey of faith and not some ego-trip when we embrace the first movement: pride to humility, greed to gratitude, and foolishness to faithfulness.

When we’re moving – at last – something else happens.  We change.  Our interaction with all around us requires this of us.  Ideas are more energising, towns and cities are more interesting, people more wonderful, nature so  much more colourful.

What is happening is we are opening our minds and hearts.  This doesn’t happen when we’re tempted to take shortcuts or move faster.

‘I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour.’^

Some have suggested that the opposite of faith is certainty, that is, a closed mind and heart, but in this context, I wonder whether it is also fraud.  When we are not being who we are and we are not doing what we ought to be doing.

Who am I?  What is my work?

(*Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.)
(**From Hugh Macleod’s gapingvoid.com.)
(^From Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust.)

“Drink in the silence.  Seek solitude.  Listen to the silence.  It will teach you.  It will build strength.  Let others share it with you.  It is little to be found elsewhere.’*

‘[I]n the psychoanalytic tradition, one speaks about narcissism not to indicate people who love themselves, but a personality so fragile that it needs constant support.’**

I’m challenged by the silence.  Where I live can be so quiet at night that if I waken I hear nothing at all – I even wear earplugs to keep the silence out (really it’s to manage the occasional sounds appearing louder in the quietness).   But I’m appreciating how silence isn’t empty, quite the opposite – how it’s is possible to tune into the inaudible or invisible, into the quantumness of it all.

‘And the set of possibilities being infinite as it is, if there is even a fraction of possibilities we cannot imagine, then there is an infinite number of possibilities we cannot imagine.”^

In the silence, we discover how life is more than we’ve been able to so far imagine.  How, then, do we listen, though, in a world which drowns out the silence?  In which silence and solitude are not valued or seen as useful?  In which our digital children have to be connected at all times, in danger of becoming Narcissus and on the other end of the call there is Echo^^ with ‘made-to-measure representations’ being received?**  That is, friends who say only what we want to hear.  Tom Rath’s Vital Friends names eight kinds of friend that make for healthier relationships, including with ourselves.*^  And so we make a real difference for one another.

‘Visonaries hold out for two and two making five, and they help people to turn their situations around.’^*

Life is richer through the silence.  It’s full of people and places and possibilities.  As we continue to be people in transition, I hope we’ll understand technology, as much fun as it is, is but a veneer covering our deeper and more ancient needs for significant relationships and service.

(*Frances Roberts, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(**From Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together.)
(^From Alan Lightman’s Mr g.  These are the words of the Stranger to the Creator in Lightman’s story of creation.)
(^^Erwin McManus labels this “the drowning pool”: ‘Narcissus’ greatest admirer was a nymph called Echo.  They were, after all, a perfect match.  He only spoke about himself, and she in turn could only repeat his self-indulgent praise.’  From McManus’s Uprising.)
(*^The eight kinds of friends/friendships are: Builders, Champions, Collaborators, Companions, Connectors, Encouragers, Mind-openers, Navigators.)
(^*From Harriet Harris’s Faith Without Hostages.)

The other day I picked up a disloyalty card for seven independent coffee shops in Edinburgh: “Collect a stamp from every member of the Disloyal 7 and then claim your free coffee from the cafe of your choosing.  Shop local and support independents.”  Being disloyal involves supporting all seven whilst overlooking the national and international coffee spots found all over Edinburgh.

It’s about stepping out of the norm and finding something a little more niche.

There’s more to niche than coffee shops (and you may prefer tea, anyway).

This is an invitation  to step outside the normal way of understanding life and our lives within it, identifying different ways to be content, though, I need to add some dissonance: this is the kind of content that arises from discontent, making you disloyal to the norm, and seeing beyond what we see around us and, also, within us.  To find this sweet spot of content requires we identify what it is we must do – it is a particular discontent.

‘For those of us who live comfortably, it is all too easy to carry on doing so without greatly challenging our lifestyles.’*

‘Human creativity suggests a thin fissure in a purely cause-and-effect view of the world.’**

To find this must will mean moving beyond the noise we make in the busyness of life in order to receive the signals coming from the inner and outer universes of infinite possibilities.

“Some people come into my room and rushed in and rushed out and even when they were there they were not there … . Some people who came in just for a moment were all there, completely in the moment.”^

“Within the new quantum reality, I was exquisitely aware of the fantastic number of possibilities at each point of existence, each with its own consequences leading to an infinite chain of possibilities.”^^

Dis-loyal.  Dis-content.  Dis-position.

(*From Harriet Harris’s Faith Without Hostages.)
(**From Alex McManus’s Makers of Fire.)
(^Anne Morrow Lindbergh, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(^^From Alan Lightman’s Mr g.)

We can blame the religion, the institution, and the system but in the end we are these things.  For good and bad, it comes down to us.  Even when what has happened is because of outside forces, we get to choose our response.  Welcome to the house of the gods.

When Hugh Macleod doodles ‘Entrepreneurship is about human potential.  Everything else is secondary,’ he’s saying that who we are and what we must do breaks out of the straitjacket we have too often believed to be there and are now expressing ourselves.*  We make the mistake that entrepreneurs are a particular kind of business person but they’re only doing what humans do when they’re at their best.  We’re still trying to figure out the kind of world necessary for this to happen in.

Everyday we get to be explorers of our potential.  Erich Fromm wrote about how, in order to get well, a patient ‘acquires or has some idea of what his life out to or could be.’**  We’re recovering towards being what we can be.

Towards this, I think it’s helpful to understand ourselves to be “a little lower than,” something or someone else – an ideal, god, muse, world, universe, dream, cause, Other – we seek to serve.  When we think we are the gods is when we get into trouble.

(*From Hugh Macleod’s Gaping Void.)
(**From Erich Fromm’s The Art of Listening.)

‘The Walk of Fame might remind you that showbiz isn’t the place for permanence, but I suspect you know that already.’*

‘A person who cannot imagine the future is a person who cannot contemplate the results of his actions.’**

Geoff Nicholson notes all the lookalikes on Hollywood Boulevard – Elvis, Marilyn, Chaplin – pretending to be someone else for the tourists’ cameras, whilst underfoot are the stars in the pavement carrying the names of celebrities I’ve never heard of: Spanky McFarland and Stanley Kramer.

Perhaps the impersonators are only doing blatantly what so many of us do surreptitiously.  Some act as others want them to be.  Others aim to be more like their heroes or their bosses,  Then others react by resisting the temptation to be someone they’re not but lose themselves in the resistance.

The best kind of superheroes or superstars are those who quietly get on with what they know they must do regardless of what other think or notice.  It’s not about being remembered; it’s about making a difference.

And imagining the future is a superpower we all have.

(*From Geoff Nicholson’s The Lost Art of Walking.)
(**From Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams.)

One comes from inside of us, the other from outside.  One is spark and one is stodge.

Inner discipline is how we get to do amazing things: overcoming a steep challenge, with limited resources, connecting with our inner motivation or passion, and overcoming the judgement, cynicism, and fear of others.

We’ve no idea how far we can go, we only know that overcoming one thing sets us up for facing a new challenge, moving us from believing something is possible to knowing it is through doing it.  What we’re forming in the process is integrity, when who we are on the inside flows into who we are on the outside.

Then we come to realise we’re able to create the futures we most desire, and to help others to create theirs.  Sparky people know about this, how every day is an opportunity to practice their sparkiness.  Whereas, we don’t really need to practice stodginess.  It’s sparkiness that overcomes stodginess, meaning we need to focus on the things we love and are energised by rather than trying to stop being stodgy.

Synonyms for fallow: uncultivated, unploughed, untilled, unplanted, unused, undeveloped, dormant, resting, empty, bare, virgin.

When we open up the fallow ground of our lives or help others to break open theirs, we are groundbreakers.

‘Leave it all, and let your self just slip back into the rhythms of your intimate wildness.  You will be surprised at the lost terrains, wells and mountains that you will rediscover, territories which have been buried under well meaning but dead names.  To go beyond confinement is to discover yourself.’*

‘I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease … observing a spear of summer grass. […] My respiration and inspiration … the beating of my heart … the passing of blood and air through my lungs.’**

At some point in our pasts, we have left the lands we are meant to explore for our tame inside worlds.  Walt Whitman escapes the perfumed houses and rooms that can intoxicate for the odourless (fresh) atmosphere of the outdoors that is for his mouth forever.   Now he’s able to closely notice both the natural world and himself within it: ‘I celebrate myself.  And what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good as belongs to you.’**  This oneness of our outer and inner worlds, of me and you, Whitman invites us to experience first hand.

This first-handedness is our witness, is our groundbreaking.

‘There is a profound relationship – a love affair really – between curiosity and wholeheartedness.’^

(*From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)
(**From Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.)
(^From Brené Brown’s Rising Strong.)

Although I keenly appreciated the certainty of logic and clear definition, I also felt that the sharp edges of existence needed some rounding.  I wanted a bit of artistic ambiguity in my creations, a measured diffusion.’*

‘Thriving is where the impetus to survive meets both the craving for beauty and the need to love.’

Quantumness means life can be here and there, this and that, meaning there’s room for the misfits and all those excluded from our temples of normality.

It is a tragic thing to lose the life’s mystery in rote habit and repetition.  Quantumness is about never arriving, never fully knowing, always being curious and inquiring, requiring, as it does that we step outside of certainty, beyond being beholden to those who are always certain.

‘Choosing to be curious is choosing to be vulnerable because it requires us to surrender to uncertainty.’^

‘To be happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right.’^^

When we are feeling right, comfortable in our own “peculiar” and unique skin, thinking about feeling bad as well as about feeling good doesn’t faze us because it brings it all into our “strange” and special quantum story.  This annoys the socks off those who want to say that “This is what life is” We just don’t know what life can be without your contribution and that of seven billion others.  And what about those who have gone before us and those who have yet to be born.

Here’s to all those who will follow their different curiosities – opening our understanding of what life can be.

(*From Alan Lightman’s Mr g.)
(**From Alex McManus’s Makers of Fire.)
(^From Brené Brown’s Rising Strong.)
(^^From Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project.)

Truth be told, we’re all unreasonable though we are children of the Age of Reason.

‘[T]here is no special revelation anywhere, and none is needed, because the mind of man cleared of its fallibilities is sufficiently capable of the knowledge of God.  All people in the world are thus capable because all people in the world are capable of reason.’*

‘Whatever these forces are that make people do dumb things, they are powerful, they are often invisible, and they lurk even in the best of environments.’**

Reason is our myth inasmuch as it’s a creation of human beings explaining where we’ve come from and where we’re capable of going.  It’s the fallibilities we struggle to sort out, especially when they’re invisible to us.

I’m not too worried.  Some would say it’s our struggling with fallibilities that produces the most beautiful human inventions.

More than a reasoned statement, this beauty firstly feels like an effervescence, a song – more music than science.  When we listen carefully to our lives, we’ll feel it then hear it.

When we’re always busy, always with others, there’s too much noise, inseparable energy and music.  So we need to find a quiet place and time where we can feel and listen carefully to the uniqueness of our song.

‘The Void had always vibrated with the music of my thoughts, but before the existence of time the totality of sounds occurred simultaneously. … Now we could hear one note following another, cascades of sounds, arpeggios and glissades.’^

‘It’s only when we are naked that we’re able to fully take our turn and understand what it is to make something.  If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing this naked, this alone, this responsibly.’^^

It’s an unreasonable thing we do.  Finding a place of quietness and solitude, listening for the song within, sow e can join it with the music of others.

(*Joseph Campbell, from Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’s The Power of Myth.  Campbell is laying out the worldview of those men of Reason who constituted the United States, a nation born in this Age of Reason.)
(**From Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc..)
(^From Alan Lightman’s Mr g.)
(^^From Seth Godin’s It’s Your Turn.)