At some point long ago in your past, long ago, you connected to the source of who you are, and in this came to know why you are here.  At least in some simple, untried way.  As you look back, you realise you had no inkling of what it would mean.

Right now, you’re able see your past and also your future, and know that both these dimensions define your now.

When my friend Will stayed with us  few days, I offered a little whisky at the end of the day, and I mentioned a book my youngest son had bought me about 1,001 whiskies.  Will ended up challenging me to read the book (did I mention it’s 960 pages long) and to include thoughts from it in my blog.

Here you are, Will:

‘The discovery and understanding of whisky is not something that happens overnight.  It requires open mouths, open hearts, and open minds.’* 

I feel I should mention, I only have three whiskies in the house, and two of these were bought as presents.  And the jury’s out as to whether I like whisky.  I do know it requires lots of time to mature, though – at least ten years.  And it requires experience: we can all get our hands on grain, yeast, and water, but we can’t all make whisky.

I realise life too is an open mouth, open heart, and open mind experience.  We need to taste it, savour it, and come to see just what has been happening – all that maturing and experience.

Every whisky is different – there are many more than one thousand and one.  The kind of grain and water makes a difference, but something magical happens through the distillation and maturation.

Just like your life.

When you add your uniqueness to the things of life, the energy deep within your chest, you begin something that takes a lot of time.

It’s a thrill to know so much can be accomplished in a lifetime: there’s more to you than you know.

(*Jim Murray in 1001 Whiskies You Must Try Before You Die.)

‘In one study … people judged the writers of negative book reviews as more expert and competent than the writers of positive reviews, even when the content of both reviews was deemed to be of high quality.’*

‘Unless there’s an obvious reason to do otherwise, most of us passively accept decision problems as they are framed and therefore rarely have an opportunity to discover the extent to which our preferences are frame-bound rather than reality-bound.’**

Beyond the obvious “no and …” or “yes but …” games we learn to play, there is the “yes and …” game that makes it possible for us not only to see but also feel and touch the non-obvious.

There’s a non-obvious path for each of us to explore.  The kind of understanding we usually trust will not help us find it.  Wisdom is not a head thing but develops and resides in the heart and its expressions.

Our three guides are humility and gratitude and faithfulness, enabling us to break free from our normal framing of life.

Humility allows me to accept me and accept the other.

Gratitude brings my heart into play.

Faithfulness brings my actioning of what I know and feel to the party.

Like a small country lane off a dual carriageway, it’s easy to miss our non-obvious when we’re going so fast.

(*From Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project.)
(**From Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.)

“Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.”*

‘Find your own way; innovate rather than imitate.’**

This kind of kindness is Engagement 3.0.

Engagement 1.0 is simply getting on with life without an awareness or desire to extend kindness to more than a set number of family and friend members.  2.0 is engaging with others in largely a counter-or competitive position.  3.0, though, is an open position: “yes and …”.  It’s the beginning of an infinite game: to keep open to as many thoughts as possible from as many people as possible for as long as possible.

My friend Will has been staying these last two days, and as we talked about the different things we’re engaged in he threw out some kind challenges to me – three all together.

I’ll be picking up on Will’s challenges.  Saying “yes” is about experiencing more – “and” takes me into innovation and the possibility of being changed or transformed.

I need these kind of inputs from others.

Thank you, Will.

(*Leo Tolstoy, quoted in Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project.)
(**From Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman.)

We need time to do nothing.’*

‘Autonomy is the desire to steer our own ship.  Mastery is the desire to steer well.  And purpose is the need for the journey to mean something.’**

We cannot do our life’s inner work from outside.

Yesterday, I suggested the digital world can be one of the reasons why we’re separated from our surroundings and, so, our hope.  As digital becomes all pervasive we’ll find ourselves with less time to do nothing.  In the digitalising of life, more can mean less.

We need time if we’re to identify our ship, steer it, and have purpose to our voyage.  hen we don’t have time for the inner life, these hopes become distanced.

It’s not enough just to be able to think about these things; we also need to be able to feel them: autonomy emerging from our integrity, mastery from our wholeness, and purpose from our capacity to persevere.

But when were able to be quiet and stand still, we give ourselves a chance to develop our inner world, the person we’re becoming until the day we die – we keep finding new edges:

‘It is ironic that you must go to the edge to find the centre.’^

‘Suppose old people grow down as young people grow up.’^^

We don’t expect to find what we hope for lies within but it does.

(*From Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber’s The Slow Professor.)
(**From Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler’s Bold.)
(^From Richard Rohr’s Eager to Love.)
(^^From Ruth Krauss’s Open House for Butterflies.)

“We have to be candles, burning between hope and despair, faith and doubt, life and death, all the opposites.”*

We all need hope.  I’m just so thankful for the hopeful people in my life.

‘at times, we accidentally tear a little hole in the fabric of realty so something on the other side shines through, exposing the darkness of our routine existence.’**

‘When you live in a world deadened by mental abstractions, you don’t sense the aliveness of the universe and more,  Most people don’t inhabit a living reality but a conceptualised one.’^

We need people who will blunder and fumble their way through a day with a willingness to be curious rather than judgemental, compassionate rather than cynical, and risk-friendly rather than fearful, who somehow come upon more hope than we thought to be there.

And we know, becoming hopeful people is not about how we feel but some willingness to be people who remain present in the analogue when the world is turning digital – when digital is removing us from our immediate environment including the people who inhabit it.

(*William Brodrick, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(**From Donald Miller’s Scary Close.)
^From Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth.)

Being more aware of a day means I don’t have too long to wait before trying again – when I have failed or to build on what I managed to get right.  Every day offers failure and kindness, success and possibility.

‘Meaning is everywhere.’*

‘When we watch a film, what is in the frame is only a selective view of a wider fictional world … the act of framing an action presents the film-maker with a whole range of choices, including what is revealed and what is withheld from the audience.’**

You are not the audience of your life, you are the film-maker.  There will be many things that are important and matter to you, that you are curious and interested in but they become distractions, running the risk you won’t focus on anything.  So you must be selective, guided by your curiosity and passions, your talents, and your life-experiences:

“What we need instead is “engrossment,” which mobilises one’s entire attention and resources and physical energy toward only one stimulus, which is the present-moment activity.”^

Then you are able to fail forward and open up new possibilities.

We are most human is vulnerability and possibility, and we cannot have one without the other.

‘The challenge is to accept that vulnerability is not a weakness but the “absolute heartbeat of innovation and creativity.”‘^^

Every day.

(*From a University of Edinburgh student.)
(**From Charlotte Bosseaux’s Dubbing: Film and Performance.)
(^Charalampos Mainemelis, quoted in Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber’s The Slow Professor.)
(^^From Linda Rottenberg’s Crazy is a Compliment.)

What a difference a day makes.

We measure time in all kinds of ways, but a day and a year are possibly the most useful of all.  I cannot live tomorrow, I have to wait for it to come, but I can live today and, who knows, the way I live today might take tomorrow even better.

“and if I have a heart to be contented, I think I may reckon myself as happy a man as any in the world …”*

‘time management books engender deprivation, a sense of time poverty, with less-than-desirable results … we propose we need not time management but timelessness’**

I don’t know about you but the idea and possibility of timelessness sorely challenges me – the flow that is the opposite of increasingly fragmenting my time and energy into smaller units to try to be more efficient and productive.

I need time to think and I need time to feel.  When I only have time to find a solution rather than ask a question, I know my life is impoverished.

So I’m continuing to slow things down, beginning with more observation: flow begins with looking.  It may be something on my way to work or an idea someone puts forward or to look beyond the first answer to a problem:

‘Look Look Look Look Look Look Look!  I’m running away with my imagination.’^

(*Samuel Pepys on his thirtieth birthday, quoted in Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project.)
(**From Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber’s The Slow Professor.)
(^From Ruth Krauss’s Open House for Butterflies.)

‘Curation is the ultimate method of transforming noise into meaning.*

This is it is more a direction of life you have come to than a specific action.

Identifying your talents, allowing yourself to dream, embracing and understanding the experiences of your life means you have become a curator , able to say, “That is it, that’s who I want to be, that’s what I want to be about.”

It is your emerging future and now you are stepping into it.

No longer that this is it and a new journey begins.

(*From Rohit Bhargava’s Non-Obvious.)

‘The way we pay attention – the place from which we operate – is the blind spot in all levels of society.’*

Our place of prospering involves being more aware of ourselves and not so focused on others.  Hillary Rettig warns us about  perfectionist comparison:

“[We will] always come out on the losing end of any comparison – because the point of perfectionist comparison is not to yield useful insight, but to serve as another useful club to bash yourself over the head with to try to coerce yourself into more productivity.’**

We need to be able to value what we can do.  The more important question is: What am I doing when I find myself prospering?  Including who am I working with or for, why am I doing this, and when – as in, am I beginning something, developing, or completing something,?

Where you are now – who you are, your talents, your dreams, and your life-experiences all define your unique place to prosper.

I’m just excited about what you will do when you find this.

(*From Otto Scharmer’s Theory U.)
(**Hillary Rettig, quoted in Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber’s The Slow Professor.)

‘The forward leaning posture is teachable.’*

‘Stories are powerful.   Because we all become the stories we tell ourselves.’**

Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures in the Accademia Gallery in Florence provide us with a picture of human becomings, struggling to be free.

Steve Peters, originator of the term “chimp paradox,” believes our evolutionary past still holds sway over us today.  Perhaps there’s even a connection between how male and female chimps behave with empire building. As my friend Alex McManus would say, we are the slave-making species.  It’s things like this that have led people like naturalist David Attenborough to describe the human species as a plague on this planet.

This is only part of the picture, though: Attenborough pointing this out is saying something about how we know we can be something else.  We’re the infinitely learning species, able to learn and behave in new ways, even empires learned to ‘adopt ideas, norms and traditions from wherever they found them’^  But again, this only part of the picture.

We’re capable of so much more.  Brave people have been forged as they have taken on the elements or some great human or planetary need, and we are all called by birth to be explorers of shaping a better future for all, making it possible for everyone to bring their very best not only to other humans but to the planet of which we are a part rather than apart.

In these ways we are learning to lean into the future, we are learning how to tell a better story.

(*From Seth Godin’s Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck.)
(**From Tom Asacker’s The Business of Belief.)
(^From Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.)