Sometimes we let go but wonder where is the letting come?

In her happiness project, Gretchen Rubin contemplates the research which showed how happiness and unhappiness rise and fall independently of each other – we’re not simply one or the other.

‘To be happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right.’*

Feeling right is the interesting part of this, because choosing the right way leads to growth, and growth is really important to happiness.

The right way will express itself in success and intuitiveness, but it will also produce growth in us and meet our needs.  Indeed, these are four tests for our chosen path.

My friend Charlotte Bosseaux writes about the uncanny or acousmatic effect that can be our experience from ‘a voice whose source cannot be seen, i.e. and off-camera (or off-screen) voice’ in a film or TV programme that is dubbed.**

It made me think about how our life experiences can are often the other way around: we are being translated from a dubbed version – from someone else’s idea for our lives’s (parents, partners, peers) – to an original version (our authentic voice).  The journeys of letting go and letting come are transformational to this magnitude:

‘The most important change in any transformation journey is the change of heart.’^

‘By “heart” I mean the place where the emotions meet reason, mobilise the will, and shape identity.’^^

Crossing borders and entering unfamiliar lands leads to transformation.  Those who migrate are entering the liminal space between letting go and letting come.  So too the journey from the dubbed life to an original life is a liminal experience in which transformation occurs.

The letting come, then, isn’t being waited for, it’s happening all the time: new ideas and thinking, new people and cultures, new science and understanding, new behaviours and activities.

Life becomes stronger when we’re able to give ourselves away – which is about letting go and letting come.

(*From Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project.)
(**From Charlotte Bosseaux’s Dubbing, Film and Performance.)
(^From Otto Scharmer’s Leading From the Emerging Future.)
(^^From Alex McManus’s Makers of Fire.)
(*^From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)

“It’s only when we are naked that we’re fully able to take our turn and to understand what it is to make something.  If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing this naked, this alone, this responsibly.’*

Naked isn’t about a lack of clothes.  It’s about having nowhere to hide, being seen for who you are and what you do.  It’s about courage and selflessness.

Choreographer Twyla Tharp tells of how she’d put all kinds of ideas and materials and clippings and resources for potential projects into boxes.  There’ll have been plenty of things which didn’t make it into the boxes, things she let go of.

At some point, though, everything has to come out of the box, to see what will come.  And then, you have to get naked and bring what you have in mind and heart into the light.

What have you been storing away in the box?  What will it be in the naked light of day?

(*From Seth Godin’s What to Do When it’s Your Turn.)

It’s 2040.

You’ve journeyed to a place of heightened awareness; some would call it wisdom.  Through your great curiosity and energy you’ve been open to more and more new ways of seeing and understanding; you’ve pushed the boundaries of human empathy by connecting to others, understanding your place within the universe with all flora and fauna, and to your Self with deeper feeling and grace.  All of these things have come together into a oneness, and you have found that instead of slowing down with age, you have grown faster, from idea to passion to action for the benefit of others?  Not only have you grown faster but you have grown younger, curious as a child.

Looking back to this day – the 22nd February, 2016 – you identify the discontent or itch or need or question or dream or urging that set you on a path to be an explorer of all you can be, with others, in this universe?

So, what was the thing you had to let go for all of this to come?

“You don’t learn unless you question.”*

(*Joi Ito, quoted by Warren Berger in A More Beautiful Question.)

Who are you?

I thought you’d be the best person to ask, but perhaps not.

We are each many people.  Sometimes the person we appear to be is not the person we really want to be.

Maybe, at some point in the past, we decided to hide away the person we really want to be because of how others reacted or treated us – perhaps not even questioning, just assuming it must have been our fault.

If you listen, though, carefully and kindly, when you’re not in a hurry, you’ll hear this person you want to be.

One of Alan Lightman’s stories about time describes a world in which the buildings are on wheels, powered by engines so people can get to what they have to do faster:

‘No one sits under a tree with a book, no one gazes at the ripples on a pond, no one lies in thick grass in the country.  No one is still.

Why such a fixation on speed?  Because in this world time passes more slowly for people in motion.  This everyone travels at high velocity, to gain time.’*

Whenever we’ve said, “We’ve no time for that,” we have been living in this world.

Whenever we have not allowed ourselves the time to listen to our lives, we have been living in this world.  The best stories can’t be created in a hurry.  Maybe we think, because we’ve been rushing by so many things without noticing, that our best story is lost.

This letting go story is about having time to let the person who is your most enjoyable and true self** emerge.  This will be the you who finds they have the most to give.  Wholeness doesn’t require we receive more, but give more.  We realise what we hold on to is getting in the way of who we are, and when we give, the person we wants to be steps out of hiding.

Who are you?

I’m looking forward to meeting you.

(*From Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams.)
(**Enjoyable to you, first of all, emerging from expression of creativity and generosity.)

Two of the most important actions we can use for moving through life are letting go and letting come.

There are many old things we have to let go of if we’re going to be free to receive the new.  New learning asks that I leave an old paradigm behind – perhaps that we are using the resources of 1.5 planets at the moment and something’s going to snap.  Perhaps there’s something emerging behind the nation state and we’re being asked to put down an old political understanding for a new.

On the most personal note, when we see our talents and passions and experiences in a new way, an old way of living will need to be put down in order to take up the call of a new path.

In a meditation, Kerry Hellcoat repeats the refrain “If you must,” concluding with:

‘And above all, if you must:
shine!’*

This must or must-ness is the essence of what we need to let come.

We’ll each need to find a way of making this letting go and letting come possible over and over again.  More like a vessel to transport us into the emerging future.  Answers can be helpful but:

Perhaps what emerges from our questioning is not so much an answer but a story.

A great story can frame all that we are and have and must do.

Check this out, from Seth Godin today:

‘The realest thing in our lives.  Are the stories we invent.  We live with these stories, we remind ourselves of them, we perfect them.  And, happily, if you don’t like the story you’re telling yourself, you can change it.’**

(*Kerry Hillcoat, from the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer for 20/2/16)
(**From Seth Godin’s blog for today.)

The teenager, out late with his friends, pulls someone off their bike, then spits on them and punches them in the face.

Why?

My son is okay, thankfully, and he could only think that this was some kind of dominance display by this teenager in front of his friends.

What appears to be strength is often weakness, and what is weakness is really strength.

There is an adventure in life which only comes through goodness and kindness, and the way to it is through the observed life.

‘The ego self is the unobserved self.  If you do not find an objective standing point from which to look back at yourself, you will almost always be ego-centric – identified with yourself instead of in relationship to yourself.’*

I know my biggest obstacles are those which lie inside of me. This “shadow” me, when unobserved, controls me without me even noticing.  To notice the ego is to disempower it: this me who is less than I really can be: my false self.

‘When we lack integrity, we find ourselves several people depending on the circumstances.’**

The way to my future Self opens up.  I’m able to take my turn and bring my contribution into the world.

For Edward Deci, integrity means people can ‘persist as themselves in a society that is always shifting underfoot’.^

Like our understanding of what it means to be human?

My friend Alex McManus suggests we’re being pressed from two directions when it comes to our understanding of what it means to be human: from the natural world – ‘The gap between our species and other animals is closing as we grow in our understanding of animal intelligence, emotions, self-awareness, and culture’ -and from technology – machine and human growing closer.^^

All the time, we are becoming more human.

I sent these words to my son from the beginning of today:

‘Go peaceful
in gentleness
through the violence of these days.
Give freely
Show tenderness
In all your ways.*^

Beginning with yourself.

(*From Richard Rohr’s The Naked Now.)
(**From Erwin McManus’s Uprising.)
(^From Edward Deci’s Why We Do What We Do.)
(^^From Alex McManus‘s February 2016 Dispatches From the Future.)
(*^Paul Field, from the Northumbria Community‘s Morning Prayer for 19/2/16.)

‘Wonder is a beautiful style of perception; when you wonder at something, your mind voyages deep into its possibility and nature.  You linger among its presences.’*

We’ll never be whole if what we mean by wholeness is to be complete.

But if wholeness is about knowing ourselves and bringing all that we are into the present moment then we’ll be more than enough.  When we’re able to stop reacting to the world beyond ourselves and, instead, begin to respond, we know we’re enough and we are living out of our wholeness.  When we begin to initiate and create, we’re understanding wholeness is a generative state, and we are more than enough.**

‘Wholeness (head,heart, and body, all present and positive) can see and call forth wholeness in others.’^

In the last few days, someone I’d not seen in thirty years spotted me on social media and reconnected.  Remembering painful experiences in work for me back then, they hoped I hadn’t been scarred for life.  Put another way, we understand, in extreme situations, people can be imprisoned by the past and are unable to  live in the present and conceive of a hopeful future.

I assured them, these memories are important to me in a positive way.

More than that, they’ve shaped what it is I must do and helped me to move in the direction of doing all the things I must do.  Bad experiences can lead to us closing down to others, but opening to others leads to wholeness, and wholeness makes it possible for us to embrace the other, not to worry about differences but to enjoy them.  None of us are born as little versions of who we are and we simply get bigger and older.  We are who we are through our interaction and connectedness with all that is around us:

‘The intrinsic self is not a genetically programmed entry that simply unfolds with time … . It is instead a set of potentials, interests, and capabilities that interact with the world, each affecting the other.’^^

Some live out this interacting and connectedness in amazing ways. I know a civil servant who’s taken off to Colombia to find out how climate change is affecting people there, improving her Spanish along the way, and hiring motorbikes to get to otherwise not easy to access places.

All of us, though, can learn to do this more and more – a day is a helpful unit to work with.  Wholeness can be grown day by day and we can become more than enough.

(*From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)
(**Brené Brown uses this phrase in Daring Greatly.  It connects with what Nassim Taleb is exploring when he writes about antifragility.)
(^From Richard Rohr’s The Naked Now.)
(^^From Edward Deci’s Why We Do What We Do.  David Shenk’s The Genius in All of Us is another good read when it comes to the importance of this interaction.)

Imagine your city, or town or village, frozen in time, captured in a moment.

The person caught on the wrong side of thee road by all the traffic, unable to catch their bus.  The hill covered in the late Winter snow.  The graveyard gates standing wide so early in the morning.  The young couple on the bus, she’s resting her head on his shoulder, eyes closed.  Another passenger drowses, her head against the window and a smile on her face.  The upturned waste boxes, emptied so early by invisible workers. The cat brushing against the person caring for her whilst the owner is away.  The person caught in spray as a bus hits a pool of water.  The workmen on the third floor replacing tall windows with nothing to stop them falling.  The water feature in a public space caught mid-burble.  The seagull wheeling in midair, looking for somewhere to perch.  The person passing in the street who looks like someone you know, if only they had a Mohican.  The barber arrested midcut.  The CCTV camera looking blankly down the road.  The “For Sale” sign outside a house, but who knows where the people are moving to.

Just to observe, not to want anything, just to love what is: you belong here.

‘Listening is such an underrated activity.  In fact it is deeply subversive.  Because when we listen deeply, we take in the voice of the other.’*

And then I am changed.

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

‘You don’t need a permit or a blessing or any sort of permission to decide to take your turn.  You only have to open your eyes and look.  And then choose.’*

It’s true, you don’t need permission.  You’re here; that’s enough.

There are those who journey through life seeking to bless and give permission to those they meet.  What they are doing is reminding us that we have everything we need and we don’t even need them.

We prefer to be given permission, though, because, while we’re waiting, it gives us permission to stay right where we are.

To have courage is to live inside a future that might not happen.

The best permission-givers are those who point to all the things already existing within us, the things wanting to get out.  And they know, the journey will we embark on will change us.

Who told you that you were too young or too old or not educated enough or too educated or from the wrong background or not from the right one?

Stop it.  You’re not.

You’re who you are and you are who you want to be, and today promises to be the first part of something quite amazing.

(*From Seth Godin’s What To Do When It’s Your Turn.)

My friend Alan and I were drinking cortados, catching up, finding ourselves talking about  the painful restrictions of getting older we hadn’t needed to think about once upon a time in our early thirties.

I remember the story I was assured was true, of a tennis contest for ninety-somethings.  As a ninety year old volleyed the ball past a ninety-three year old, the vanquished cried out, “Oh to be ninety again.”

Funny, as the thoughts of my contemporaries begin to turn towards retirement, I’ve just identified what I really want to do.

I think about the weird fruits I can bear in this season of my life.

Whatever our particular kind of fruitfulness, here are six reasons why we can engage the future no matter what our age:

We’re reflective creatures: able to deeply ponder what we see and what we cannot see.
We’re anticipating creatures, able to understand what will happen not only as a result of what we see but also sense coming towards us from the future.
We’re imaginative creatures, able to see the future possibility of something which doesn’t yet exist.
We’re synchronising creatures, able to bring many things together in our lives which ordinarily wouldn’t meet.
We’re designing creatures, able to move something from in our heads, to paper and computer and teams.
We’re creating creatures, able to make the future happen.

The universe has done it again.

Who wants to retire while it remains our turn?