We have more ways of being able to see and hear than ever before, but it’s possible many of us hear and see less than our foremothers and fathers did.

Wanting to arrive quickly, our seeing and hearing fall in line, but:

‘Genuine travel has no destination.  Travellers do not go somewhere. but constantly discover they are somewhere else.’*

We are travellers more than arrivers: through time, space, relationships, work, hope, love – every day.

(*From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)

How curious can we be?

It seems, when we let go of our desires and needs to control, we’re able to explore with deeper curiosity – taking us beyond the average, allowing us to be surprised by the unpredictable.

When we let go of our desire to be above or beyond something, and to enter into it,  our curiosity and our Humanity is set free.

‘I wonder if the real art comes when you build the thing that they don’t have a prize for yet.’*

The best way to “criticise” what isn’t right is to imaginatively and lovingly produce what is.

‘People don’t need new facts – they need a new story.’**

It’s a choice.  Instead of giving hundreds of reasons for why this is the worst (or the best) something can be at the moment, you can show me how we can set people’s stories free towards something more.

Yesterday, I found myself in the kind of conversation I love: one that digresses in all kinds of directions, producing new ideas, but also accomplishing why we were meeting.  We ended up imagining something to impact our city in a positive way and now have to see if we can make it happen; we’re creating a story.

‘True storytellers do not know their own story.’^

If they did, they’d be following a script.  Storytellers take us with them on a journey to we’re not quite sure where.  Prediction is just explanation from the future – more facts, more script.

What we need is an unfolding narrative which recognises we don’t know what we’re capable of, together or individually, and so can’t write or predict the ending.

We probably look a motley crew, but we underestimate what such a crowd of people – who know their superpowers and their kryptonite – can do with some passion and compassion.

No more facts, though; time to do.

(*From Seth Godin’s Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?)
(**From Blake Mycoskie’s Start Something That Matters.)
(^From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)

When I look at a road atlas covering the area where I was born (North Yorkshire), I find all kinds of symbols and lines: a broken red line conveys a national trail, a blue “sun” with rays denotes a viewpoint.

Here’s a page of symbols and signs to tell me what I will find in the area covered by the map – none of which look like this, really – well maybe the rivers.  Who’s decided this view, shown by the blue sun symbol, is better than the one ten minutes down the trail or road, anyway?

What if so many of the lines you won’t cross don’t really exist either?

Why can’t you ask questions?
Why not take the course?
Why not have employees sit with employers at break time?
Why not go beyond giving people labels?
Why not make friends at work?
Why not colour outside the lines?

Some of the greatest boundaries are those which say this is who I am, and, that is who you are.

Our better futures will require the crossing of many boundaries – those which keep us in and those which keep us out.

Forgiveness is one of the most astonishing qualities found in our universe.

As he experiences the universe, Joseph Jaworski offers this first principle:

‘There is an open and emergent quality to the universe.’*

Jaworski continues to describe this openness: ‘We can’t find a cause or reason for this emergent quality, but as we experience it again and again, we see that the universe offers infinite possibility.’*

This got me thinking.

Forgiveness is a really important connector to this “infinite possibility.”

We can live in need of forgiveness, always burdened but never free: ‘if a society does not have an apparatus for forgiveness, then its members are fated to live forever with the consequences of any violation’**

Or we can live as though we don’t need forgiveness, which may lead to repeating the violation over and over.

Forgiveness, though, makes a third future possible.  Forgiveness is not one thing, but many; it is infinitely imaginative, mirroring a universe with “infinite possibility.”

Try it out.  Give it and receive it often, in diverse and creative ways.

(*From Jospeh Jaworski’s Source.)
(**Walter Brueggemann referring to Hannah Arendt’s belief about forgiveness, in The Prophetic Imagination.)

‘Why did people make such a fateful miscalculation?  For the same reason people through history have miscalculated.  People were unable to fathom the full consequences of their decisions.’*

Yuval Noah Harari is reflecting on the serial “improvements’ our ancestors made which moved them from hunting-gathering to farming; he argues the health of the more people farming produced was worse than the of the smaller numbers of hunter-gatherers**

Harari calls this the “luxury trap,” and claims it’s still with us today.  Is there another story here, though, one which inexorably pulls us forwards?  And what does forward look like?

I wonder whether Humans are the “plastic ape,” meaning we are both shaped and shapers:

‘By practice, we mean doable habits that transform us, rewiring our brains, restoring our inner ecology, renovating our inner architecture, expanding our capacities.  We mean actions within our power that helps us become capable of things currently beyond our power.”^

It’s debatable whether we control our technology or our technology controls us.  Watch what happens the next time you’re in a cafe or similar, and someone is pulled from a conversation because their tablet-friend speaks to them.

(It’s amazing to think that we have in a standard iPhone, the technology cornucopia which would have once totalled around £500,000 when the items first came to market.^^  Is this forward?  Some would say not.  I feel we’re still learning to use our technologies in the best possible way, towards telling a story we feel impelled to both write and live, believing ourselves to be more than creatures made for food, procreation, and sheltering.)

Recently, in a place we call Göbekli Tepe, great decorated stones were uncovered, shaped by hunter-gatherers almost ten thousand years ago, over a long period of time.  Perhaps they ask a question about how these people felt the future to be calling them, some primal pull towards the future.

‘Explanation sets the need for extra inquiry aside; narrative invites us to rethink what we thought we knew.’*^

(*From Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.)
(**More babies were being born to a poorer and more vulnerable diet.)
(^From Brian McLaren’s Naked Spirituality.)
(^^From Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler’s Bold.)
(*^From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)

Here are three I was pondering this morning.

1. To see something happen we believe is right may mean we find ourselves taking on the powers that be:

‘Inversions are not easy, not without cost, and never neat and clear.  But we ought not to underestimate the power of the poet.  Inversions may being in a change of language, redefined perceptual field, or [an altered]consciousness.’*

2. Yuval Noah Harari might suggest the existence of “powers that be” are something which intensified with the Agricultural Revolution.  He offers, ‘We did not domesticate wheat.  It domesticated us.’**  An agrarian lifestyle meant people had to live close to their their food; it also meant those who wanted your food could target it more easily than in a hunting-gathering lifestyle – now some people could become a lot more powerful than others.

3. Peter Diamandis writes about how digitisation is deceptive (Kodak couldn’t see what the first digital camera would lead to – at 0.1 megapixel), and then is disruptive, demonetising the future.  Writing his thoughts down, he has paid for the computer, but his operating system is Linux, his software is Google docs, and the wifi is provided by the coffee house he’s sitting in – all free.

‘Billions and billions in goods and services … are now changing hands sans cost.’^

Claudia Altucher adds to this when she encourages us to give our ideas away: ‘give them for free, or, as currency meaning your are paying it forward, with no expectations’.^^

I get the feeling from these different perspectives on life, there’s another story we find ourselves, in which we are drawn irresistibly forward, and a big part of our future is going to be free.

“Be grateful for whoever comes,
Because each has been sent
As a guide from beyond.”*^

(*From Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination.  The words in brackets are more “perceived” correction of  ‘or unaltered consciousness,’ which doesn’t seem to fit with the rest of the sentence.)
(**From Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.)
(^From Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler’s Bold.  They include 6 D’s altogether – the last two being dematerialisation and democratisation.)
(^^From Claudia Altucher’s Become an Idea Machine.)
(*^From Runi’s poem ‘The Guest House,’ quoted in Mindfulness from Mindfullbeing.)

It’s amazing, because hope emerges from despair.  Who expected that?

Dramatic, because this cannot be scripted and acted out theatrically, but it can emerge  as the drama unfolds …

… when we open our senses to more: the divergent

… when we open our hearts to what begins to what it is that begins to take shape and form: the emergent

… when we enact and act upon what it is we realise we must do: the convergent.

This is the flow of drama.  On the other hand, the theatrical, or scripted, begins with: this is it, do it.

Where’s the surprise, the amazing, in that?

‘I realised that there could be no execution over nothing. The idea has to come first.  Idea precedes execution.’*

(From Claudia Altucher’s Become an Idea Machine.)

Throneliness is how I control my kingdom, securing and maintaining what I have.  The price I pay is in terms of thwarting the future which wants to emerge.

‘The royal consciousness means to overcome history and therefore by design the future loses its vitality and authority.*

Whilst throneliness may employ the language of imagination and creativity, it is unskilled in the alchemy of futurism.  More aware of what it does not have, rather than what it does, throneliness fails to understand, to possess is to make dead but to let go, through imaginations and creativity, brings into being the vital and new.

To get down from our thrones is to see we “have” far more out there than immediately around us, to get down allows us to connect with people and artefacts and the world in which we live, reminding us we have legs with which to move from here to there and set history free.  We become generators of more.

‘An infinite player does not consume time but generates it.’**

(*FromWalter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination.)
(**From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)

Beware professional prophets.  Those employed by the people in charge, by the institutions and organisations.  Their job is to say “We can do this, there is hope, we only need keep faith and keep doing what we’re doing.”

It is the edge-person who can see ‘only anguish leads to life, only grieving leads to joy, and only embraced endings permit new beginnings.’*

Reality must be faced and grief experienced so that an ending may occur and a new beginning found.

I’ve just come across this, from mindfulness, which offers a little more insight into what is happening when we are able to accept reality.  To accept means to grasp and understand something, allowing us to ‘respond in a skilful way,’ that is, to have choice.**  The false prophet, and their company, are more inclined to employ ‘aversion, clinging, or tuning out’^ – that is, to deny reality or hold on to their version of reality, or to let their thinking wander, maybe to their retirement.

When we are willing to face reality for what it is, and all ourselves to grieve, then we are able to free tens and hundreds and even thousands of new ideas: ‘we are in a different realm, we’ve entered the universe that is inhabited by people who dare go into unknown territory.^

(*From Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination.)
(**From Mindfulness by Mindfullybeing.)
(^From Claudia Altucher’s Become An Idea Machine.)