‘One measure of the progress of human civilisation is the increasing scale of our maps.’*

‘Here is summertime truth, abundance is a communal act, the joint creation of an incredibly complex ecology in which each part functions on behalf of the whole and, in return, is sustained by the whole community doesn’t just create abundance – community is abundance.’**

UDFj-39546284 is one of the farthest points in space we are able to see, a galaxy lying some 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles from Earth.

Another measure of our progress as human becomings is the decreasing scale of our maps, bringing places closer, like Aleppo and Haiti.

(*From Alan Lightman’s The Accidental Universe.)
(**From Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak.)

*Please insert your name within the brackets.

“Take me down to the spring of my life, and tell me my nature and my name.  Give me freedom to grow, so that I may become that self … .”**

Every person’s life is a garden of possibility.

I’m working on the garden around our house, and nature keeps teaching me that there’s always a possibility of newness just a season or two away.

Yesterday I was imagining with a small group an entrepreneurial experience in its broadest sense, a space in which people can expand their understanding and experience in a co-creating way.  As I was thinking about this today, I was remembering a definition for being entrepreneurial: to take responsibility for.

It’s as if we look into the depths of our lives and notice more: “That gives me an idea.  I can do something with that!”  In this way we are all entrepreneurs.

In the 18th Century Denis Diderot led the collating of an Encyclopedia which alphabetically listed the work of different craftsmen and craftswomen, democratising the skills and talents of all those listed – whilst in Berlin salons of the bourgeois witnessed people dressing up and imitating some famous character from literature or history:

‘In Paris, the Encyclopaedia aimed socially lower and asked readers in salons not to imitate but to admire ordinary people bustling at work.’*^

Zooming is a word Seth Godin uses to describe how we take the things we can do even further.  Now we’re gardening.

It’s not about being someone else; it’s about being more who you are, who I am; we only need the right environments of learning, opportunity, and experience to expand this understanding and experiencing of who we are, to be able to zoom.

So I am being Geoffrey.

(**George Appleton, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(^From Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem God’s Grandeur.)
(^^From Otto Scharmer’s Theory U.)
(*^From Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman.)

‘In fact, in human-made art, especially in painting, its seems a light bit of asymmetry is desirable and found to achieve a higher aesthetic satisfaction.’*

‘Money comes to money.  Education to education, and ignorance to ignorance.  Those once victimised by history are likely to be victimised yet again.  And those whom history has privileged are more likely to be privileged again.’**

Can people change?

Symmetry and cycle is something life falls into, including human life.  For a few, this is good news.  For most people, it is bad news.

So we have to be thankful there’s also an asymmetry to life.  Some hope to change things by imposed order; others by an emerging order.

Asymmetry needs symmetry to be noticeable; indeed they need each other.  We appreciate both the roundness of the earth and also the irregularity of the mountains standing upon the irregular shapes of the continents.

When it comes to a human life, we all need something we’re not, something we don’t have, in order to be break out of recycling the same old same old, into a narrative, a journey, a drama.

(*From Alan Lightman’s The Accidental Universe.)
(**From Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.)

‘Symmetry leads to economy, and nature, like human beings, seems to prefer economy.’*

‘The only essential is this: the gift must always move. … There are other forms of property that stand still, that mark the boundary or resist momentum, but the gift keeps going.”**

I found myself playing with ideas when I read these two things earlier.  Here’s what happened.

I am no mathematician, but neither do I need to be for the equation of a circle with radius R as R:x²+y²=R² to be true.  As I’m thinking about this, I’m interrupted and feel some mild irritation.  I notice this and tell myself its okay.  I return to the maths, but while I’ve been away in my thoughts, nothing has changed.  Even when the axes change to w and z, the maths stay the same: w²+z²=R2.

Then I notice my “to do” list is building up, and the symmetry of maths which would exist without any of us being here, does not help me with the asymmetry that consciousness, especially the human kind, introduces.

This symmetry we see in the natural order of things has evolved to minimise energy: bees form their hexagonal cells because it not only allows many bees to work simultaneously on their design with no wasted space, but it also reduces their energy output for wax to eight ounces of honey to one ounce of wax.*

Humans then come along with the ability to focus large amounts of energy on really difficult tasks, making it possible to overcome problems that should make us give up, if not wipe us out.

My natural tendency is to say “I can’t do this,” “I haven’t got enough resources,” “It’s too hard,” but I know I can put these thoughts aside, use up huge amounts of energy, and bring some asymmetry into existence.

Of course, it’s easier to do nothing, or as little as we can, but the human story suggests life is most meaningful when we get a little asymmetrical with it.

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

‘It takes roughly a trillion collisions between protons to coax on Higgs [particle] into existence, and,once created, the particle hangs around for less than a billionth of a trillionth of a second before changing into other subatomic particles.’*

‘The larger the world we live in, the larger our lives develop in response.’**

It seems to be that it is in the relationship between the small and the large that life exists most fully.

Everything that is exists in relationship to itself and to all things.

From our perspective, every relationship could be better too, but flawed can be more beautiful than perfection.  There’s hope for all of us:

‘All the hero has to do to make the story great is struggle with doubt, face their demons, and muster enough strength to destroy the Death Star.’*

It isn’t beautiful without effort.  The larger the life we live depends on the smaller the life we cultivate – the source of who we are, understanding why we’re here and what we must do, and, of course, in relationship to everyone and everything else.

And just this little thing may have changed you.

(*From Alan Lightman’s The Accidental Universe.)
(**From Eugene Peterson’s Run with the Horses.)
(^ From Donald Miller’s Scary Close.)

“She always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.”*

We are wanderers, never arriving, always between here and there.

It may not look like this on the surface.  We know exactly where we’ve arrived within certain borders – family, work, interests, nationality, friendships … .

These appear to be the critical borders, but they’re clumsy and clunky compared to the many others we cross or avoid every day: when we allow a relationship to deepen, or we spend time getting to know a stranger, when we encourage our children to pursue the things that interest them rather than look good on a report card, when we give time to explore a new idea, or stop to notice something we so often pass without paying attention.

Here we are prepared to accept that we are, in the truest sense, all ‘strange-appearing, strange-acting and strange-sounding people.’**

As Seth Godin suggests, we are all weird.^

Everyday we get to play in borderlands like these, the places that exist between people, ideas, and species and the natural world.  There is always more to life than we see.

We live physical and spiritual universes with their many borders, and we are ever explorers:

‘Each universe has its own power.  Each has its own beauty, and mystery’^^

(*Virginia Woolf, quoted in Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project – one of Rubin’s personal koans.)
(**From Rohit Bhargava’s Non-Obvious.)
(^See Seth Godin’s We Are All Weird.)
(^^From Alan Lightman’s The Accidental Universe.)

“Seek solitude.  Listen to the silence.  It will teach you.”*

“Oh do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.”**

Each of us has our personal koans, words and ideas and images we have collected through our lives which speak to us most loudly in the silent moments and places.

Making it possible to touch the wonder or promise of what is but cannot be seen, they remind us there is another world, more than this one.

Pulling us from the over-trodden path, away from the scant world that has become so many heuristics, they bring us to ‘the things others miss.’^

(*Frances Roberts, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(**T. S. Eliot, quote in Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project.)
(^From Rohit Bhargava’s Non-Obvious.)

We continue to witness the developing of human consciousness and imagination and practice.  This is not something we observe from the sidelines; we are right in the middle of it.

I see the development of faith and belief within this, as a heartbeat to the great human story.

This is the adventure we are called to, an adventure with others who are like us and others who are not.

My friend Alex suggests one of the most important questions of the 21st Century is, What does it mean to be human?  We come together to ask the question, What does it mean to be human like Jesus?

To make sense of how he lived his life to be able to do what he did.

Too often people have seen the wrong side of faith, like Richard Dawkins when he says:

“Faith is the great cop out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence.  Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.’*

Faith is a future sensing capability.  It’s about bringing in the future, the things that haven’t been discovered yet, or don’t yet exist, but they will if we act on what we believe:

‘Faith is the belief in things larger than ourselves.  Faith is the ability to honour stillness at some moments and at others to ride the passion and exuberance that is the artistic impulse, the flight of the imagination, the full engagement with this shimmering world.’**

Surprisingly, these words were written by another atheist.

We are capable of imagining and creating new possibilities for communion and love, for creativity and generosity and enjoyment, and this in a universe where chaos lies just beneath the surface, where circumstances are never perfect, the timing is not good, and we’re anything but ready:

“You’re a pioneer.  It’s supposed to be hard.  If it were easy, someone else would have done your side before you.”^

You may be thinking, I need to become someone else; I can’t do this.  But the truth is, you need to be more yourself, and, to know yourself at the core of your being, and you will open up possibilities for the future you cannot imagine in this moment.  Even making this journey will change how you see and what you see.

How often our organisations change the people we are, but we do not notice, asking us to perform some task or join some programme that we’re not really good at or interested in – we call it volunteering and we say that if people were really committed then they’d just do it.

When we find something we want to take responsibility for then something interesting happens, we begin producing an abundance of thinking or relating or behaving to be shared with others.  When a community of people are exploring life in this way, they don’t so much have abundance but we are abundance.

One of the greatest things a community of people can do is help its members to become more who they are, identify their responsibility, and join together in abundance for others.

This is possible, but it isn’t easy:

‘It’s easier to tach compliance than initiative.’^^

(*Richard Dawkins, quoted in Alan Lightman’s The Accidental Universe.)
(**From Alan Lightman’s The Accidental Universe.)
(^Beto Sicupira, quoted in Linda Rottenberg’s Crazy is a Compliment.)
(^^From Seth Godin’s Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?)

“if you surrender completely to the moments as they pass, you live more richly those moments’*

‘I suggest the word “inhumane” is a sign that we are discovering a meaning to life.  Our purpose to reject inhumanity and build a civilisation that is consumed by love.  In other words our purpose is to become human.’**

Hurry can make a mess of what we hope our life can be.

Sometimes we find ourselves negotiating life with what Steve Peters^ calls our Chimp – fighting, flighting, or freezing in reaction to the rush and push we encounter.

Other times we get a grip on things by turning Vulcan, being super-logical and strategising our way through all the hurry.

In-between, there is a way of fuller engagement and knowing with a universe of possibilities.

We are noticing animals.

We thrive when we slow things down and feed not only the mind but also the heart.  Zen koans are sayings intended to enable the student to move out of their logical way of thinking: “What sound does one hand clapping make?”  In a U.Lab coaching circle three or four people learn to listen with their hearts to someone delivering an issue in which they are stuck in the form of a short case study.  Recently, I shared my experience of flanering (wandering with curiosity and intent) in Washington D.C., which I used to notice more, about myself as well as the world around me.  There are many ways around making it possible to invent something that is our own.

This way of noticing more, is also a way of becoming human, and we do not know what we are capable of.

‘In science, no knowledge about the physical universe is off-limits or out of bounds.’^^

What is true of our minds is also true of our hearts.

(*Anne Morrow Lindbergh, quoted in the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer.)
(**From Alex McManus’s Makers of Fire – eBook version.)
(^See Steve Peters’s The Chimp Paradox.)
(^^From Alan Lightman’s The Accidental Universe.)

‘It is fashionable to espouse the latest cynicism.  If we live in hope, we go against the stream. … It takes courage to act in hope.’*

‘Creating the future does not begin with a plan.  It begins with a dream,  And when someone actions a dream, it begins with a spark.’**

Spaces for hope are never easy or salubrious.  It often is a difficult and hopeless place, yet more than being a physical space, hope is found in action.  Hope loves to try but struggles with boredom and ennui.

Hope is action because it connects us with who we truly are, a connecting with the energy our life is comprised of:

“It was deep calling unto deep – the deep that my own struggle had opened up within being answered by the unfathomable deep without.^

Hope is found, then when we join the inside and the outside of life, my unique “me” with the absolutely everything, creating a field of possibility for what want to emerge: ‘more comes to those who look for the adjacent possible, the asymmetrical.’^^

“The beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them.  Each new combination opens up the possibility of new combinations.”*^

Sounds hopeful.

(*From Eugene Peterson’s Run with the Horses.)
(**From Alex McManus’s Makers of Fire – eBook version.)
(^A clergyman from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, quoted by William James, and quoted in Alan Lightman’s The Accidental Universe.)
(^^From Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile.)
(*^Stephenb Johnson, quoted in Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler’s Abundance.)