‘As the scholastics used to say: Homo non proprie humanus sed superhumanus est – which means that to be properly human, you must go beyond the merely human.’*

‘And while the poet must struggle to invent a new metaphor and the novelist a new story, the composer must discover the undiscovered pattern, for the originality is the source of the emotion.  if the art feels difficult, it is only because our neurons are stretching to understand it.  The pain flows from the growth.’**

We need the new, else we become complacent and narrow-minded.  It seems we must stay open-minded to have any mind at all: wisdom only grows in a life of doing things, and in this experience of knowing things, we come to know we can do more things in the future.

We find different metaphors and images for our lives that important for triggering our getting up, exploring, seeking, and questioning – ways for exploring our calling.

‘Old age offers the opportunities to integrate and bring together the multiplicity of directions that you have travelled.  It is a time when you can bring the circle of your life together to where your longing can be awakened and new possibilities come alive for you.’^

Old age just means you have more to invent new things from; defying definitions, you become more than you – more than the sum of your parts.  As such, you are a heretic, shaking up the order of things you know to be a threat to life in all its fullness.

(*From Eugene Peterson’s Run with the Horses.)
(**From Jonah Lehrer’s Proust was a Neuroscientist.)
(^From John O’Donohue’s Anam Cara.)

‘The days are long, but the years are short.’*

“You may be sure that it was not for any merit that others do not possess, nor for any power or wisdom, at any rate.  But you have been chosen and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.”**

Is all of today enough for you?

You are already enough for today.

The future asks you to do something you cannot do.  This thought comes to you as thin silence, barely audible or visible yet returning to your consciousness like some determined flotsam remaining afloat on a restless ocean.

Sometimes irksomely, other times hopefully, always persistently, the future is calling you, not allowing you to deduce that life is only work, entertainment, and sleep, but is an adventure – whether one that is hidden or visible to others – that you are undeniably called.

(*From Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project.)
(**Gandalf to a protesting Frodo in Lord of the Rings, quoted in Eugene Peterson’s Run with the Horses.)

‘[A]ll life is given and must continue to be given to be true to its nature.’*

‘[T]he 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.’**

Givenness is something we all can develop.

Some are more expressive in their givenness than others, but none of us know the limits of our capacity to give.  The question is more about how much more we can daily give in hundreds of ways, rather than some big once-in-a-lifetime way.

Our willingness to pursue givenness takes us into unknown, unfamiliar, and challenging places which lie between or uponon the far side of what we normally know and fill our days with.  These are preparing spaces, places of previously unknown knowledge and invisible energy becoming available  to us – like the wilderness for Jesus or Dagobah for Luke Skywalker.  They are places of challenge to be alive.

“He not busy being born is busy dying.”^

We accept our givenness by beginning, overcoming, giving it on, again and again.

(*From Eugene Peterson’s Run with the Horses.)
(**From Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution.)
(^Bob Dylan, quoted in Jonah Lehrer’s Proust was a Neuroscientist.)

‘I never speak the first word.  I never make we first move.’*

“The years as they pass plunder us of one thing after another.”**

Each of us arrives in this life with a history, even if we’re unaware of it.

We sometimes speak of destiny, but where on earth does that come from?  And yet it can make so much sense when we fall upon what we feel we were born to do.  It’s as though we are coming back to some great knowing and cause, out of which we produce some gift or contribution for others.

These are the strange things we’re seeking to make sense of throughout our lives.

‘We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.’^

There is always something new for us to discover, though the best of the new comes with a struggle.

Jonah Lehrer suggests that, ‘Music only excites us when it makes the auditory cortex struggles to uncover its order.’^^  This provides us with a metaphor for lIfe.  We’re seekers of the patterns that make sense to us.  It’s all in the journey, though not any journey.  Again, using the metaphor of music:

‘Pretty noises are boring.  Music is only interesting when it confronts us with tension, and the source of tension is conflict.’^^

Try reading that again, inserting life for noises and music.  I’m not suggesting chaos.  We can’t survive chaos, but we can overcome more than we know, as we reach towards the note that will next come.

And finding ourselves back at the beginning, we start to explore once again.

(*From Eugene Peterson’s Run With the Horses.)
(**Horace, quoted in Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project.)
(^From T. S. Elliot’s Little Gidding.)
(^^From Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist.)

‘[A]lthough I’d never thought of myself as particularly spiritual, I’d come to see that spiritual states – such as elevation, awe, gratitude, mindfulness, and contemplation of death – are essential to happiness.’*

She was young and out of control, aggressive, abusive, and breaking things.  I couldn’t help but wonder what the future looked like from her perspective, whether she had a sense of how she gets to shape the future was and her personal happiness.

In the overwhelming immediate, we all struggle, though, to have a sense of these things.

I’m not sure where the line between the future and eternity (endless future) blurs, but I know it is not only out there but also within us.

There’s also the question about whether both too little happiness and too much numbs us to future possibilities.  Both can lead us to a place of banality and tedium – like the piece of work Igor Stravinsky created from two traditional folk tunes being played at the same time.  Aiming to make a point about bitonality, his intention was to lead audiences to atonal music:

‘The result is unresolved ambiguity, the ironic dissonance of too much consonance.’**

We appear to be at out best as a species when we’re searching, asking questions, knocking on unopening doors.  When we do, it’s as though the universe provides us with a space of requirement, not unlike the one that made itself available to Hogwarts’ scholars when they were in dire need.

We find ourselves most alive when the future and eternity open up to us.

(*From Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project.)
(**From Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist.)

Life has a habit of getting stuck.  Cultures, organisations, and individuals can all find themselves in a rut.

With the right kind of help, these places can become some of the most hopeful places.

It can be that we only need to share our story with someone who is really listening – the best listeners will ask us questions to clarify things along the way.  Simply listening to ourselves speaking our circumstances out loud can help us become unstuck.

We may need, though, to be asked the kind of questions that dig deeper into some of the things we’re describing – these are questions we hadn’t thought of asking.

Beyond questions about some details in our stuckness, further help comes from the person who carefronts us with possible scenarios and situations in the future – stuckness can produce the symptom of being unaware of the future.

A fourth way of being helped is to focus on what is happening in this conversation – how there is a dynamic at work that is already moving thoughts on and even feelings.

I’ve shared this in terms of conversations, but there could be drawing and even theatre involved.

We have each other so we don’t have to stay stuck.

‘Names not only address what we are, the irreplaceably human, they also anticipate what we become.  Names call us to become who we will be. … A personal name designates what is irreducibly personal; it also calls us to be what we are not yet.’*

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

We are the naming species.

As far as we know it, no other species has our preponderance for giving names to all flora and fauna, and absolutely everything: What is it?

When it comes to naming our children, it is with hope for the future: this baby will grow up to be a name-giver, too: reaching out in curiosity, finding out more truth than we have now, and becoming more who they are on the way.

A name says, I am more than my parent’s genes, more than a matriculation number, more than an employee reference.

The paradox is, we can too easily slip into the kind of life that gives all of this up.

(*From Eugene Peterson’s Run With the Horses.)
(**T. S. Eliot, quoted in Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist.)

‘[B]ecause there are no light sensitive cones where the optic nerve connects to the retina, we each have a literal blind spot I the centre of the visual field.  But we are blind to our own blind spot: our brain unfailingly registers a seamless world.’*

I’ve just lost a contact lens down a plug hole.  Ugh.

It seems that this is the least of my worries as there are ten times more fibres running from my brain to my eye, than from my eye to my brain, meaning I am lying to my eyes about what they are seeing.  Furthermore, if I were able to remove my self-consciousness from this relationship of eye and brain, then I’d ‘see nothing but lonely points of light in formless space.’*

Our unique worldviews mean we all see something different.  It’s why listening to you speak about what you see is so important to me.

These worldviews are our stories, and we’re telling stories all the time – so much so that we often don’t even notice we’re doing it.  The bus driver in shades.  The woman walking with an elbow crutch.  The two fire engines passing each other as they travel in different directions.

I’ve just begun to read Steve Peter’s The Chimp Paradox because I’m wanting to see more through his eyes.  He names “seven planets in a psychological universe”: understanding self, understanding others, communicating effectively, living in your world, maintaining your health, being successful, and, being happy – all things we’re trying to figure out as we put together our stories in the best possible way.

Even with my contact lens, I only see a tiny part of what life and the universe is about.  People show me far more.

It is in seeing more together that I suspect some of the most creative things we’ll be about as humans will come into being.

‘The critical point is not to stereotype the situation, even if it looks like something familiar.’**

(*From Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist.)
(**From Edgar Schein’s Helping.)

Me? I am Geoffrey.

‘Any time that we move from personal names to abstract labels or graphs or statistics, we are less in touch with reality and diminished in capacity to deal with what is best and at the centre of life. … For a name addresses the uniquely human nature.  A name recognises that I am this person and not that person.’*

When we find ourselves living increasingly within our roles and titles and functions, or the expectations of others or of self, we become less than who we are.

A long time ago my parents named me.  Many years later I was named again, by a group of people who had come to know me well.  The way it worked, I could not name myself, but could accept or reject the group’s name for me:

“To be called by his true name is part of any listener’s process of becoming his true self.  We have to receive a name by others; this is part of the process of being fully born.”**

We all need moments when we are able to simply rest in who we are.  And when we are who we are, then we can know what we want to make:

‘[Cézanne] knew that the mind makes the world, just as a painter makes a painting.’^

(*From Eugene Peterson’s Run With the Horses.) 
(**Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, quoted in Eugene Peterson’s Run With the Horses.)
(^From Eugene Peterson’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist.)

‘Some people as they grow up become less. … Other people as they grow up become more.’*

This is a choice we make.

Today I become 57 years young, and I am moving on.  Out of the organisation I’ve been with for 36 years and into dreamwhispering and doodling.

A number of people think I’m retiring – I certainly I know people my age who are doing just that, but this is a beginning.

I have come to know what I must do and am moving forward.

All those 57 years ago, my parents Marjorie and Jack gave me a name, and life got personal.  And I remember when Christine and I named our own children: Matthew, Charlotte, and Luke.  This was a thing of hope.

My work with others is on first name terms, journeying together, something hopeful lived towards the future.  About life being more, not less.

How we go about it is our choice: it’s personal.

‘Life is a continuous exploration of ever more reality.  Life is a constant battle against everyone and anything that corrupts and diminishes it’s reality.’*

(*From Eugene Peterson’s Run With the Horses.)