‘I would say that the demand for the perfect is the greatest enemy of the good.’*

What if good lies on the far side of perfection.  That life lies on the far side of an answer, in another question.

Dan Ariely points to how we label something once we believe we know it, how these labels become ‘anchors,” and how anchors influence our future decisions. In education, we use these anchors to teach children things they aren’t asking questions about.

Life isn’t so much about destinations or conclusions but in the ongoing interplay of the adventure of many things.  We are children asking many questions leading to greater creativity and more curiosity.  Warren Berger writes about children:

‘If they are permitted to do that research – to raise and explore their own questions, through forms of experimentation and without being burdened with instructions – they exhibit signs of more creativity and curiosity.’**

We let go of our anchors to move deeper into he adventure of goodness.

(*From Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward.)
(**From Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)

‘It does not naturally occur to us that standing still – or in some cases, even going backward – might be the best way to advance.’*

Our talent helps us to rush forward so quickly that our character can struggle to keep pace.

To wait awhile, to even take a step backward to reflect and develop who we are becoming turns into a freeing experience as we journey into an adventure of universal proportions.

“Heroes Wanted for an epic quest to hack the universe.  Starting with Earth. Safe return doubtful.”**

Here is a cause for those who don’t worry about failing or losing or looking foolish.

When I’m not so much concerned with status, title, or position, I’m enabled to get things wrong, ask the stupid questions, and needing the help of others – all of which has an unexpected sense of freedom about it.  I’m reminded of Carol Dweck’s research^ which has shown that people who have a fixed mindset begin to protect their achievements, whilst those who know they can grow more are open to trying and failing and trying again.

We’re invited to ungrasp who we want to appear to be before others to let come an endless adventure.

(*From Ryan Holliday’s The Obstacle is the Way.)
(**From Alex McManus’s Makers of Fire.)
(^Carol Dweck’s Mindset.)

Impressionists are enjoyed for their ability to impersonate all kinds of celebrities.  I was brought up on Mike Yarwood who’d end his Saturday night show singing a song in various guises, finally saying “And this is me.”  I can’t remember anything he sang, although I do remember the one liners he created for his characters which they never said but he made us believe they did.

Impressionists in everyday life aren’t so enjoyable. As writer Rob Bell was told by his counsellor, “The world doesn’t need a second someone else, it needs the first you.”

Finding our own voice, to say “and this is me,” syncing us with our day, is not as straightforward as it sounds. We can end up sounding like our parents, our friends, our employers, but not ourselves.

And what if the people we try and copy are, or were, themselves copying someone else?  Pixar’s Ed Catmull tells of how he felt a fraud when he took up his first job in management at New York Tech, because he wasn’t aggressive and extremely confident like the other managers – he admits that he believed these to be the traits necessary for success.

But the fraud is the person who isn’t prepared to find their own voice and really change something with it.  Voice is about character as well as personality.

‘Integrity is formed in the heart of the humble.’*

Humility, not pride, allows us find our voices.   The quality of our voice will be determined by the extent to which we interact with new ideas and new people and new places.  When we close ourselves to others, we’re effectively saying, “You know nothing I need to know,”  “You are someone I do not care or need to connect with.”

The tragedy is that the isolated life becomes an inflexible life.  Unable to climb down or ask for help or learn new ways, it is a life stealing from itself the possibility of creatively employing talents and resources to find a voice the world wants to hear.

(*From Erwin McManus’s Uprising.)

‘Here was an invention that quantified the passage of time, that laid ruler and compass to the span of desire, that measured out exactly the moments of life.  It was magical, it was unbearable, it was outside natural law.  Yet the clock could bot be ignored.  It would have to be worshipped.’*

In another of his short stories about time, Alan Lightman imagines a world where pilgrims journey towards the “Great Clock,” each, in turn, taking one of twelve places around the clock and chanting in turn.

Stockmarkets open and close at precise times.  Time is money, we say.  We ask one another if we have time.

“Punctuality is the soul of business.”

“Preparedness and punctuality are two of the most important qualities of a leader.”

Time brings order, alignment, control.

It’s too easy to confuse control with freedom.

We think those who are in control are free to do what they want, but perhaps they find themselves trapped, having replaced the important for the urgent.

‘Every action, no matter how little, is no longer free.’*

Erich Fromm says psychoanalysis is “to know oneself.”**  The truth will set us free, he says.

To not know ourselves is not to be as free as we thought, or as in control.  But where is the time to “know oneself” when there’s so much to do?  How free are we to do ‘the right thing in the right way at the right time with the right spirit’?^  Something like this sounds more hopeful for the world – people who know how to move through time and with time wisely – not seeking to control only to find themselves controlled by it.

Perhaps Peter Senge would call such people animateurs:

‘An animateur (from the root animer) is someone who “brings to life” a new way of thinking, seeing, or interacting that creates focus and energy.’^^

(*From Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams.)
(**From Erich Fromm’s The Art of Listening.)
(^Alex McManus.)
(^^From Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution.)

‘[I]t is important to see the patient as the hero of a drama and not to see him as a summation of complexes.  And, actually, every human being is the hero of a drama. … Here is a person born with certain gifts, and usually he fails, and his life is a tremendous struggle to make something out of which he is horn with, firing against tremendous handicaps.’*

Everyone is potentially a large world to share with others.  It’s only selfishness or pride that causes this world to shrink, leaving it only large enough to support one person.  When we journey outwards, though, towards something beyond ourselves, the world that we are grows larger and we make other world flourish too.

Paradoxically, this is about valuing ourselves properly and finding our capacity to value others, too.  When we overvalue or undervalue ourselves, we struggle to value others.

”Wholeness is not found through receiving, but through giving.  This is why wholeness and generosity are inseparably linked.’**

Everyone lives an interesting life.

David Marquet writes about the “everyday superhero within,” asking how great it would be if we could ‘create an environment where people feel they can embrace the superhero within and achieve great things”^

These environments may be very simple – one person offering to another the opportunity to explore their dreams and talents.  Others are more complex – people finding each other and creating spaces for themselves and others to create and make their hero’s story.

Erich Fromm, whose words lead in today, sees rightly how this is a struggle, not glamorous, and Jonathan Gottschall highlights this further when he writes of things stories have in common: ‘if there is no knotty problem, there is no story.’^^

Here are four journeys of letting go and letting come for this big world or hero’s story living.  We must journey from consumption to contribution, from transaction to trust, from isolation to community, and from scarcity to abundance.*^

(*From Erich Fromm’s The Art of Listening.)
(**From Erwin McManus’s Uprising.)
(^David Marquet, from 99U’s Make Your Mark.)
(^^From Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal.)
(*^From Nipun Mehta’s TEDx talk Designing For Generosity.)

“If you don’t have that disposition to question, you’re going to fear change.  But if you’re comfortable questioning, experimenting, connecting things – then change is something that becomes an adventure.  And if you can see it as an adventure, then you’re off and running.”*

Rehearsing and practice are good; we all have to learn the basics.  But at some point we have to step outside of the classroom or “rehearsal studio” and produce our art.  This is a naked moment with nowhere to hide.  It’s a deeper form of questioning and experimentation.  It’s about iterating fast to see what flies and what doesn’t.

Learning and practicing is never the final goal; it’s always about what will happen with an idea, dream, hope, when it makes contact with people, when something new happens.

The daily habits and practices are always in the background, bringing us to where we need to be everyday, where we need to begin.  But every new twenty four hours is different because of the last twenty four hours of iteration.  Every day I am letting go and letting come.

“If you double the number of experiments you do per year, you’re going to double your inventiveness.”**

(*John Seely Brown, quoted in Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)
(**Jeff Bezos, quoted in Jim Clifton and Sangeeta Bharadwhaj Badal’s Entrepreneurial StrengthsFinder.)

‘The journey to freedom is paved by the substance of our character.’*

Everything that is meant to prevail needs foundations.

A product has to pass many tests before going to market – the more complex the product, the more tests.  A story disappoints if a lack of research and plot structure becomes glaringly evident some fifty or sixty pages in.  A fantastically imaginative multi-storey building isn’t going to stand on the foundations of an average home.

And so it is with our lives.

The more we work on the foundations of our lives, the more our creative and innovative possibilities.  When we rush these, we limit and restrict our futures.

To live a courageous, generous, and wise life – and most of us like the idea of such a life – the greater will be the need for foundational work.  Unlike a building’s foundations, which have to be put in place before anything else happens, we’re able to add to the foundations of our lives every day.

There are many who struggle to “build” their lives as they want because of foundational problems: stumbling to accept who they are, unable to see what they have, failing to understand the power of habits and practices for affecting change.

‘The soul is always wiser than the mind, even though we are dependent on the mind to read the soul for us.’**

All of us are are more than our thinking, more than we think we are – better.  Edward Deci identified how people who perceive their environments to be autonomously supportive (supporting the decisions and choices we make), they grow and move:

‘They can elicit from the social context more and more support for their autonomy.  Their personality and social context are synergistic, and together they affect people’s experiences and actions.’^

This is an environment that is for you.  It is a place where, if our stories aren’t working for us, we can tell ourselves a better story.

(*From Erwin McManus’s Uprising.)
(**From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)
(^From Edward Deci’s Why We Do What We Do.)

‘Let me start with a fundamental observation: most people don’t know what they want unless they see it in context.’*

“Come and see.”

Movement and the ability to see, but how free are we to check something out when the invitation is made?

We value freedom, but our freedoms can become our prisons.  We choose this way, but when we want to change direction and go that way, we may find we cannot.

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

Alan Lightman tells a story of a world without future:

‘Imagining the future is no more possible than seeing colours beyond violet: the senses cannot perceive what may lie beyond the visible end of the spectrum.’**

Judgement, cynicism, and fear inhibit our ability to move and see.  Especially judgement early on, as we make quick decisions about the new from the perspective of the old.  Now, we don’t have to move, we don’t have to look.

There’s hope, though, in the effort of openness.

Questions are a good sign of things opening.  Not closed questions which are trying to close down possibilities, proving the other wrong and ourselves correct, but opening questions: “there’s never been a better time to be a questioner”^

Failure is another sign of openness – failure reimagined, becoming something we can learn from so we gain forward momentum.

A third sign, is struggle: when we have found a struggle, we have found our story.

(*From Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational.)
(**From Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams.)
(^MIT’s Joichi Ito, quoted in Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)

‘Aliveness is different from existence.  The latter is a struggle to survive; the former, a thirst for life.’*

Both are expressions of life, and both contain their own ways of measuring.   Most of us, I guess, live in aliveness or existence at different times.

But, do I have a stronger aliveness attitude, or existence attitude?

Aliveness always overcomes existence when our strengths take the lead over our weaknesses, where our superpowers overcome our kryptonite.

We’re altered at the nuclear level.

We become more connected – to others and our world, as well as ourselves: integrated life rather than disintegrated.  We become more whole when wholeness is the ability to hold and value and use all we have.  And it involves perseverance, rather than stalling – beginning and keeping going.

There’ll still be problems – life is full of them – but aliveness is about facing these in our strength rather than our weakness.

The decision to let go of an overarching narrative of existence in order to let come a greater story of aliveness is ours and ours alone, and, if we do, we’ll be explorers of Úaisleacht.

‘The Irish word ‘Úaisleacht means nobility; it also carries echoes of honour, dignity and poise.  A person can be wild, creative and completely passionate and yet maintain Úaisleacht.’**

(*From Erwin McManus’s Uprising.)
(**From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)

Foolishness can be found in very clever people and places.

As we look at the refugee crisis affecting Europe, there’s a lot of foolishness around in the beliefs that the old ways can be maintained, that something new isn’t taking place which will shape life on earth for generations to come.

Foolishness, then, looks after itself and struggles to engage with the needs of the one or the minority.

The refugee risks everything in order to live.  She reminds us that we’re all involved in a quest to find life, even, please, life in all its fullness.

‘I walked away remembering that passion was a rare commodity.’*

Erwin McManus had just been unsuccessful in his pitch to a millionaire for funding.  The donor had noticed, though, Erwin’s passion and remarked on how rare a thing he found passion to be.

Wisdom isn’t some stately, pious, dignified way of knowing.  It is a passionate, heart-beating-wildly expression of life which takes risks in order for something new to emerge for everyone.  Wisdom knows that a person’s values aren’t sealed into them by the accident or the planning of procreation, but is conceived in a dream and birthed through persistence, resilience, and generosity.  Wisdom knows that life offers each of us the opportunity to take responsibility for how we will live it.

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

What must you let go of to let your passion come?

‘The starting place for change is accepting oneself and taking interest in one’s inner world.’

(*From Erwin McManus’s Uprising.)
(**From Alex McManus’s Makers of Fire.)
(^From Edward Deci’s Why We Do What We Do.)