“It takes the form of an ancient quest: the hero journeys to a far-off place, gains something valuable, and returns.”*

‘What makes us human, and what makes each of us his or her own human is not simply the genes that we have buried in our base pairs, but how our cells, in dialogue with our environment, feed back to our DNA, changing the way we read ourselves.  Life is a dialectic. … Our human DNA is defined by its multiplicity of possible meanings; it is a code that requires context.’**

‘As you make progress toward a small goal, the bigger vision expands.’^

I can’t help it, it’s just the way I am.

I can’t do that, it’ll never work.

These are stories we tell ourselves.  They are not the way things are.  What we have discovered about our lives is that they’re like books that we read and interpret in the way we choose to.

We find our own meaning: ‘Every day each on of us is given the gift of new neurons and cortical cells; only we can decide what our brains will become.’**

Of course this provides us with a problem.

Life often proves to be more complex than we want, leaving us with complicated decisions – we really want comfortable uncomplications.  This is made worse by the fact that we don’t have to take a running leap into the unknown, we only have to take a small step in the direction of something that we’re curious about, something that begins to open before us that we feel able to accomplish.

‘In the end, all the clichés hold true.  If you can’t change the world, at least you can change yourself.’^

(*Philip Pullmann in the forward to Lionel Davidson’s Kolymsky Heights.)
(**From Jonah Lehrer’s Proust was a Neuroscientist.)
(^From Chris Guillebeau’s The Happiness of Pursuit.)

It’s 7am and someone is blowing a car horn.

A moment or two later they blow, for longer.

Another moment passes and the horn is blown a third time – even longer still.

It sounds like the driver is picking someone up and can’t be bothered to go knock on their passenger’s front door and wait.

The thing is, waiting isn’t about doing nothing.  If we want it to be, waiting is about making a space for something to happen.

Another moment passes and I hear a car coming around the corner, so I’m wondering if this is the born blower.  As the VW Passat makes it’s way past my home, I can see that the passenger is holding a white mug of something hot.

This isn’t just about impatience on the part of the driver, it’s also about relationships: the relationship between a demanding driver and their passenger, and the relationship of the driver with all the residents who were probably trying to sleep in on a Saturday morning.

I know I need to learn how to wait better.  Not to rush and push, and not to hold back for too long, either.  Whichever way I get it wrong, I have to wonder what I miss as a result – remembering, waiting is a space made for things to happen.

Patience involves relationships and relationships involve trust:

‘[I]t is through cycles of … testing and response that we build what we eventually call a more intimate relationship.’*

We’ve learned to send out test signals all the time to see how someone will pick them up and respond.  If they’re refused or missed or ignored, our next signal will be different – perhaps more formal, less revealing, superficial.  If it’s received openly or elicits some favourable response or there is understanding then we’ll share something a little more personal:

(‘This mutual process of testing continued until a level is reached where either or both parties realise that if they reveal more it might not be understood or accepted.’*

Neurogenesis is the ability of the brain to produce new neurons.  It’s staggering to think that this scientific insight is less than twenty years old.  When I began my working life, it was thought that the brain couldn’t produce new neurons, but could only add to the old ones.  Now we know the brain never ceases in its evolving:

‘The brain, far from being fixed, is actually in a constant state of cellular upheaval … the brain is constantly giving birth to itself.’**

For more than thirty years, the scientific community was unwilling to accept the findings of several scientists, including the importance of the environment for producing new neurons: ‘A drab cage produces the drab looking cage,’ reflects Jonah Lehrer, on the discovery that the more stimulating an environment the greater the production of neurons. **

The person to connect all of this work is Elizabeth Gould – who’s now become one of my heroes because I see the world she opened up is the one I work in with others.

If impatience is about relationships, and relationships are about trust, and trust is a great environment for people to evolve, for neurogenesis to take place – constant evolving is probably the closest thing we have to freedom.

What are you waiting for?  Perhaps it’s to make a space in which someone can evolve even more.

(*From Edgar Schein’s Helping.)
(**From Jonah Lehrer’s Proust was a Neuroscientist.  Elizabeth Gould connected something she had come across but thought was a mistake, with the work of Joseph Altman, Michael Kaplan, and Fernando Nottebohm.  Lehrer is connected the life and writings of George Eliot with this very recent neuroscience: ‘Eliot was right: to be alive is to be ceaselessly beginning.’)

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die at that roar that lies on the other side of silence.  As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded in stupidity.”*

ORJI: Observation, Reaction, Judgement, Intervention.

Edgar Schein’s acronym for how to test things.*

It holds the importance of our need to observe, observe, observe, opening our minds and our world to more.

In turn, this observation invites us to connect more deeply with what we’re discovering, opening our hearts and becoming less cynical and more compassionate.

Such an opening heart leads to action, firstly our imaginations birth a possibility, and then an action.

This is a deep thing, a slow journey in the same direction.  A significant element for which is to become an infinite listener.^

The infinite listener is interested in all people, not only those who are like themselves, making it possible, through a silence of wonder, for anyone to find and express their voice – everything is still to be said.

‘Please stop waiting for a map.  We reward those who draw maps, not those who follow them.’^^

On the way, we find amazing people to imagine and create with – a scenius (group genius): “a whole scene of people who were supporting each other, looking at each other’s work, copying from each other, stealing ideas, and contributing ideas.’*^

Last night I was sitting at a table with a group of people dreaming of how to make the world just a little better place with a project we’re planning together.  We were a mini-world: one person from Romania, two from Italy, another from Lebanon, someone from France, and one more, from the United States.^*  (The future is connected.)

(*From George Eliot’s Middlemarch, quoted in Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist.)
(**See Edgar Schein’s Humble Inquiry.)
(^Infinite because no matter how many questions we ask, we never reach the limits of what we are exploring.)
(^^From Seth Godin’s Poke the Box.)
(*^Brian Eno, quoted in Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work.)
(^*The event will be VOXedinburgh‘s exploration of the power of storytelling and how people’s voices change through translation and interpretation.  The event will take place at the end of November or early December,)

“I have no idea where I am going.

I do not see the road ahead of me.”*

‘If your “winging it,” you’re doing improv … Platform theatre allows for little variation’**’

‘[George Eliot] believed that the most essential element of human nature was it malleability, the way each of us can will ourselves to change.’^

A slow journey in the same direction is the other life we live.

Often unobserved, it’s who we are becoming over the long journey of our lifetime.  On the surface we’re getting educated, eating, looking for work, eating, meeting a significant other and loving and hurting, eating, failing and starting over, eating, doing sport and holidays … .

“Being busy is a form of laziness – lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.”^^

All the time, beneath the surface, or in the background, there is the life of who we are becoming, learning from everything in our past and being open to new futures.  When we observe this life, we feel we’re hardly the person we were ten, fifteen, thirty years ago – we have changed and changed more times than Madonna has reinvented herself.  And we can change again.

It’s the slow, long journey that provides hope that we can continue to learn and grow and become.  On the surface we plan – like platform theatre – and are blind to what our plans do not include.  Beneath the surface, our lives unfold – like improv; knowing our plans are too small, we’re learning to be open and present to serendipitous possibilities in a random universe.

This is about observing, being present to, and realising our other life.

(*Thomas Merton, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(**From Joseph Pine and James Gilmore’s The Experience Economy.)
(^From Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist.)
(^^Tim Ferriss, quoted in Michael Bungay Stanier’s The Coaching Habit.)

… we are one.

‘[W]e expect reciprocity in all relationships.’

Edgar Schein writes about ’embedded and ritualised economic processes’ lie within our relationships.*  We’ve learned so many and hardly notice these, even when they go wrong.

I believe the shop assistant owes me the courtesy of looking and speaking to me as I’m making a purchase.  When they carry on a conversation with their colleagued, I think them rude.  What lies beneath this is Schein’s reciprocity of relationships.

This reciprocity includes making it possible for someone to share something they feel to be important (the feel is important, but we’ll come back to this).  People don’t tend to say, “I have something important to say and I need you to listen,” but provide signals –  leaning in, beginning to form a word but not saying it, looking more energised … .

When these signals are missed or ignored too many times by too many people the person may simply give up.  Over a lifetime, they learn to fit in.  Obversely, when we notice someone and invite them to contribute by becoming their audience, it can make a big difference.  Desmond Tutu didn’t forget the time a white man stepped off the pavement for him and his mother.**

We each have the opportunity to make it possible for another to voice their life.

There’s another kind of missing signals that caught my eye.  We fail to pick up the signals (whispers) that our body and life is trying to tell us.

‘[T]he mind stalks the flesh; from our muscles we steal our moods.’^

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio noticed how some of his patients s uffering from brain damage were not able to pick up the messages their bodies were feeling.  Damasio followed up his observation with some research – a study involving risky and less risky decks of cards – in which the electrical charges in the “players'” hands were measured.  There was more electrical activity when hands picked up the risky cards – the player losing more money from one of the decks, yet their brain was unaware of what they were feeling.

What we’re discovering today, in regards to the interaction of body and mind, Walt Whitman made his life’s quest to explore through his writing and poetry.  He called this the body electric:

‘We are the poem … that emerges from the unity of the body and the mind.’^

A lifetime of being ignored or invisible may have disconnected what we feel excited about from what we think we can do – there is no rabbit trail, never mind wondering where it will lead.

Here’s something simple to try out.  Carry a notebook with you for a couple of weeks so you can keep a couple of lists.

Every time you feel excited at something you’re about to do or have just completed, write it down immediately: what you were doing, why you were doing it, who you were doing it with or for, when you were doing it?  The other list will include every time you notice you are very de-energised, less than unexcited by something.  Write it down using the same details.

Then look at these lists.  What is your body trying to tell you to do?  What is it telling you not to do?  You are discovering your body electric.

“Come said my soul,
Such verses for my Body let us write, (for we are one).^^

(*From Edgar Schein’s Helping.)
(**Here, Desmond Tutu tells the story to explain why he become an Anglican priest: “My family moved to Johannesburg when I was twelve years old. In Johannesburg, in the days of apartheid, when a black person met a white person on the sidewalk, the black person was expected to step off the pavement into the gutter to allow the white person to pass, giving the white person this gesture of respect. One day, my mother and I were walking down the street when a tall white man, dressed in a black suit, came toward us. Before my mother and I could step off the sidewalk, as was expected of us, this man stepped off the sidewalk and, as my mother and I passed, he tipped his hat in a gesture of respect to my mother!  I was more than surprised at what had happened and I asked my mother, ‘Why did that white man do that?’ My mother explained, ‘He’s an Anglican priest. He is a man of God; that is why he did it.'”)
(^From Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist.)
(^^Walt Whitman, penned shortly before he died; quoted in Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist.)

‘ Listen to your life.  See it for the fathomless mystery it is.’*

I notice my breathing, abdomen rising and falling, chest filling with air, and I am aware of something that is the way of it for each of us.  

Nature provides the same means of breathing to all.

After our first breaths, many things happen that are beyond our control, many decisions are made for us.  We finally make it to a point when we can make choices of our own, but now, our lives have been shaped and played upon many times over.

Yet, amazingly perhaps, there is within us, a sense that we’ve the possibility of doing something purposeful with our lives, there’s something we must do before we die.

We use many different terms for this, the traditional ones being calling and vocation.  Terms we use, whether we believe in god or not, that describe something that feels as if it comes from beyond us – this phenomenon is found in the stories told by humans throughout the millennia.

Chosen for what?

What must I do that no one else can, or will?

What is my help?

The thing is, no one is helpless.  We all have some special help we can bring to others.

It’s unfolding, I think.  It doesn’t come all in a flash, in a moment of enlightenment, but in an unfolding way; it’s about the whole journey in which we ‘are not prepared against but for surprise’.**  In this, we are able to celebrate the genius that exists in all of us.^

If there are those who feel helpless in our world, they’ve been made to feel so.

I breathe more deeply; I feel the breath coursing through my body.  I am thinking about the contribution I hope will be helpful.

What I am feeling is not air, of course, but is something which emerges from the relationship between my brain and my body.  I realise the call I feel has come from beyond me has come from within me.

It’s as close as this for each of us.

(*Frederick Blechner, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(**From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)
(^Check out David Shenk’s The Genius in All of Us.)

‘Helping is a complex phenomenon.  There’s helpful help and unhelpful help.*

When helping is all-pervasive, making possible all that happens or does not happen in the world, it makes sense to do it better.

When we help angrily, or resentfully, or leveragingly, it probably won’t even be perceived as help.  When I get on the bus this morning, and the driver smiles or responds in some way to my Good Morning, I’ll feel they are offering me pleasant help to get where I need to be.  But not if they ignore me.  Help becomes invisible or visible depending on the way we offer it.

In helping, I’m not only developing my capacity to help, but am given everyday opportunities to develop my character, to help more gently, more kindly, more patiently, even more joyfully and lovingly.

‘What kind of person do you want to become?’**

How do you want to uniquely help others.  My joy is to help people to become more who they are, towards them making their unique contribution.  All the time, I want to become better at helping them.

(*From Edgar Schein’s Helping.)
(*From Steve Chalke’s Being Human.)

You can’t.

(It could be a short post today.)

Helping is something we take for granted, we hardly think about how it happens, but Edgar Schein (Helping) and Michael Bungay Stanier (The Coaching Habit) have got me seeing just how complex it is.

‘Too much of your day is spent doing things you think people want you to do.’*

‘Helping is a basic relationship that move things forward.’**

When we stop to think about it, we all know how complex helping is.

We do something we think is helpful to surprise someone, but that wasn’t what they wanted us to do at all.

We don’t do something because we think it’s better to be asked, but now we’re in trouble because the other person thought that it was obvious and expected us to get on and do it.

We can buy help.

We can manipulate help from someone.

Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler remark on how ‘Billions and billions in goods and services … are now changing hands sans cost.’^

Here’s a basic kind of help.  Something is put out there for people to pick up and use if they want to.  No pressure, no-one’s watching.  This is the basic kind of help.  Perhaps a powerful example is Elon Musk’s decision to make Tesla’s patents available to those who want to use them.

A higher form of help isn’t a one-way street, though: it’s a relationship of trust.

When it comes to ongoing relationships – be they family, work, and other – things gets more complicated.  Stanier writes about the dramatic triangle we can play out as persecutor, victim, and helper.  We can demand help – persecutor; we feel put upon – victim; we come up with the helpful solution and save the day (ta-dah) – rescuer.

Schein warns: ‘We begin with the proposition that all human relationships are about status positioning and what sociologists call “situational proprieties.”‘*

Which probably means, we don’t even see we’re taking on a certain position when we offer help. Our help, then, can feel like judgement on another: You don’t think I can do this myself?

How can I help you?

Is not to presume.  Is open to being told, You can’t.  And that’s okay.  And maybe there’s more to this.

Help is how we move forward as a species, so as I begin to read Schein’s book, I’m fascinated by what I’ll discover as I begin an exploration of the taking for granted but fascinating world of help – especially what I’ll see in myself, but didn’t know.

(*From Michael Bungay Stanier’s The Coaching Habit.)
(**From Edgar Schein’s Helping.)
(^From Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler’s Bold.)

“The minute we begin to think we have all the answers, we forget the questions.”**

I’ve heard enough!

We find it really hard to keep listening.

What if you haven’t heard enough?  What if we’ve been asking finite questions rather than infinite ones?

We know the kind of things that get in the way of listening, and not listening leads to many misunderstandings:

Finite listening and finite questions lead to finite possibilities.  They’re usually concerned with finding out why you haven’t done what you were supposed to do, why we didn’t keep to the rules.

Infinite listening and infinite questions leads to infinite possibilities.  These are more concerned with knowing why you aren’t exploring your potential and flourishing, why you aren’t creating new and better rules.

The infinite listener with her infinite questions opens the way for others to find their voices, ‘through the silence of wonder, a healing and holy metaphor that leaves everything still to be said.’^

(*Madeleine L’Engle, quoted in Michael Bungay Stanier’s The Coaching Habit.)
(**From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)

“If people would but do what they have to do, they would always find themselves ready for what came next.”*

In order to move from the present to the hopeful future of greater possibilities, individuals, organisations, and societies have to cross thresholds into liminal spaces – liminal space that is unfamiliar and disorientating.  Because the future doesn’t exist, none of us can claim to be expert guides – we can be guides to one another though.

The first liminal space lies between judgement (our old ways of seeing an understanding) and openness (an ongoing attentiveness to the new and different and unfamiliar).  We cry out in frustration, “I can’t do this” because  our present ways of seeing include a too-small understanding of the self, which we daily reinforce with the familiar.

The second liminal space lies between cynicism (a basic distrust of others and their motives) and compassion (more than a feeling, compassion is a heart, soul, mind, and strength solidarity with others and appreciation of their world) which provokes action.  We admit, “I feel nothing” because we have found the lingering effect of distrust to be numbness.

The third liminal space lies between fear (we imagine the worst happening when it could well be the best) and courage (which is not a lack of fear, but a compulsion to act with others).  We protest, ” I cannot move,” because we feel frozen to the spot by the fear of what probably will not happen.

“I walk to challenge myself to be less afraid of the world.”**

These are the words of Matt Krause who set out on the quest of walking across Turkey at the slow speed of nine miles a day.  When we walk slowly, our encounters and engagement are greater than if we find some way of moving fast – at the speed of a car nine miles are covered in around ten minutes, at the speed of a plane, in less than sixty seconds.  When we move fast through life, we cannot experience life in a deep way.  Krause took six months to cross Turkey.

The point of this is to see a world that others have told us could never be, which is when we’re at our most human, exploring the one life we have:

‘That’s the point – to do what you’re not supposed to do.  To do it because it is overwhelming, because it is ridiculous.’^

When we journey together, we’re able to help one another to cross the thresholds, to be pilgrims through the liminal spaces.  On his slow journey, Krause encountered a jandarma, a security point for outlying areas, which also provide resting points and journey advice.  He was fed and the jandarma commander gave him the name of a friend in the next town, and so he set out on another nine miles.  We all have something different to offer to one another, making us jandarma people for the journey we’re all taking, enabling us to overcome “I can’t do this,” “I feel nothing,” and, “I can’t move.”

Maybe the slow journey is the most empowering journey of all.

(*George MacDonald, quote in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer, 17/6/16.)
(**Matt Krause, quoted in Chris Guillebeau’s The Happiness of Pursuit.)
(^From Chris Guillebeau’s The Happiness of Pursuit.)