‘In infinite play one chooses to be mortal inasmuch as one always plays dramatically, that is, toward the open, toward the horizon, toward surprise, where nothing can be scripted.’*

There is no Human script.  Life is not theatre; it is drama.

Drama is opening, developing, engaging.  As opposed to theatrical, which is defined, scripted, observed.

Yuval Noah Harari describes our ancient ancestors in an somewhat idyllic way:

‘Foragers mastered not only the surrounding world of animals, plants, and objects, but also the internal world or their own bodies and senses.  They listened to the slightest movement in the grass … . They carefully observed the foliage of trees … . They moved with a minimum of effort and noise, and knew how to sit, walk and run in the most agile and efficient manner. … They had a physical dexterity that people today are unable to achieve … .’**

Why would we want to step outside this script?  Yet we did.  We knew there was more.  We still do.  Knowing there is more is different to saying this isn’t enough.

So, for Humans, life is drama, not theatre, and we have moved on.  The drama is asking us about whether the future lies in greater Human connectedness – something we’ve hardly begun to explore.

‘Our futures enter into each other.  What is your future, and mine, becomes ours.  We prepare each other for surprise.’*

Because life is drama, and drama is surprising, it’s hard to judge what’s right, or what should be happening, if it’s what we want or not.^  To move into surprise, we must suspend judgement – how we see and understand things – in order to enter into more.

Surprise is not easy but it’s still possible.

(*From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)
(**From Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.)
(^I am not thinking about things we agree are harmful; valuing, above all, lifestyles which seek to express qualities such as love, gentleness, and kindness.)

I love finding ideas I can run with and explore: ideas which open up my thinking, play upon my heart, and I can turn into some new activity or behaviour.

Sometimes there’s a flow of ideas, but not today.

I decided I needed to write things down, to get them onto paper.

First of all: someone’s reflection on having concern for others.

Just about everything we get up to can be traced to, and connected with, a concern for others, so, next, a question:

How can we develop concern for others?

Then this description of humble inquiry:

‘The kind of inquiry I am talking about derives from an attitude of interest and curiosity.  It implies a desire to build a relationship that will lead to more communication.’*

I decided to change direction.

Michael Heppell encourages his readers to make a list of the things they want to be brilliant at, but adds this warning:

‘A word of warning – the level of passion, enthusiasm and the amount of work you are going to require to be brilliant will mean you need to narrow your list down to just two or three things at most.’**

Hmm, I ask people to make a list of the things which really energise them (I also ask people to make the equally important list of things which de-energise them).

A question: What about more of this in the future?

Then something fromSeth Godin.  Godin wonders whether someone trying to get the funding they needed had really “tried everything” as they’d claimed:

‘by which we mean we’ve tried a few things that everybody else has done, as long as they didn’t involve anything different from what we normally do’.^ 

I then read Heppell’s description of how he was determined to obtain two tickets for the opening ceremony for the London 2012 Olympics – it reads as if he went into training for this.**

All of this adds up to: Don’t give up.

All of this added up to some encouragement for me: Take what you are interested and curious in and keep moving it, developing it, taking it to places you’ve never been before, expressing it with people you’ve never met before, and who knows whose life you’ll change.

(*From Edgar Schein’s Humble Inquiry.)
(**From Michael Heppell’s How to be Brilliant.)
(^From Seth Godin’s Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?)

‘A “horizon of possibilities” means the entire spectrum of beliefs, practices and experiences that are open before a particular society, given its ecological, technological and cultural limitations.  Each society and  each individual usually explore only a tiny fraction of their horizon of possibilities.’*

There’s something tragic when an individual, group, or tribe stop short of what they can be and do.  When curiosity, inquiry, and exploration are truncated because of some imagined limit.

In a conversation recently, I was trying to encourage people to bring their ideas for a joint venture.  I was told nothing had come from such initiatives before.  So I tried again to describe the commitment involved this time, and was told I was wrong.

I am not right yet, but I am not wrong.  Wrong in this context says, Stop this, nothing will come of it.

Take a step, the horizon changes, take another and it changes again.

Some words from Edgar Schein caught my attention alongside all of this. Schein was describing three ways of understanding humility, towards encouraging humble inquiry.  There’s basic cultural humility, optional humility (when we place ourselves in the presence of someone who’s achieved more than us), and here-and-now humility, which means we’re dependent on someone else at some time or other because they can do something better than us.**

We’re in a time of raising the bar for basic dignity – everyone has something significant to bring; when a person believes this they need only be themselves in the presence of someone who’s achieved what they haven’t; and, when a person brings their gift, their art, their contribution to others, they lead.

To say, We can’t do this, appears, on the face of it, to recognise our true limitations, but as Harari points out, we often stop short of what we are capable of.  Humility expressed in curiosity, inquiry, and exploration moves us beyond what we have so far know as possible.  Humility is not trying to be more than we are, neither is it hiding who we are.  Humility is bringing who we are and offering it in the present.

‘It is a cause of joy when a guide comes along who can help us discern our way.’^

(*From Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.)
(**From Edgar Schein’s Humble Inquiry.)
(^Robert Jonas, quoted in Henri Nouwen’s Discernment.)

For millions of years before the dawn of the Agricultural Age Humans were hunter-gatherers.

Perhaps we miss some of this – though not the uncertainty of food and the amount of time spent hunting and gathering.

A comment on the radio this morning caught my attention.  About the rising numbers of relatively young people having strokes and the possible link with the stress of modern living.

There’s certainly a lot being written about how the most affluent generation is seeing rising figures for depression.

(I’m playing with an idea here.)

I wonder about the relationship between curiosity and asking, and healthier living.  What if we could be hunter-gatherers in a different way?  Not expected to come up with the answers, but rewarded for asking questions:

‘The missing ingredients in most conversations are curiosity and willingness to ask questions to which we do not already know the answer.’*

We miss so much to wonder about.  Every day we are presented with clues and possibilities in the happenings, meetings, situations, and conversations we find ourselves in.  To become more present is what our cognitive, agricultural, industrial, and digital revolutions have set us free for: “Liberté, égalité, fraternité.”

The infinite player lives this possibility of shaping a different future, whilst the finite player plays to get the same results as the past:

‘A finite player is trained not only to anticipate every future possibility, but to control the future, to prevent it from altering the past.’**

The infinite player opens up the future by the means of curiosity and questions, to increase wellbeing for as many as possible:

‘GDP is blind when it comes to whether it is human suffering or human thriving that increases the volume of goods and services.’^

(*From Edgar Schein’s Humble Inquiry.)
(**From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)
(^From Martin Seligman’s Flourish.)

The line between the two is difficult to define.

Objective is the way things are.  We imagine and when things work – not everything we imagine happens or works – we become creators of objective reality.

In the beginning there was physics, and physics begat chemistry, and chemistry begat biology, and somewhere in all the biology there was a cognitive revolution so that biology begat history, and history begat cultures and societies: artefacts and worldviews – or fuel and oxygen for firemakers.  And firemakers ask, How much more can we imagine?  Not just the next step but the step beyond the next?

The impression this leaves us with is, we’re moving both towards something and away from something:

‘The whole of history takes place within the bounds of this biological arena. … However, this arena is extraordinarily large, allowing Sapiens to play an astounding variety of games.  Thanks to their ability to invent fiction, Sapiens create more and more complex games, which each generation develop and, elaborates even further.’*

Where’s the future in this?  In our imaginations.  Now we not only are we children of the past, but because of our imaginations we are children of the future too – an art which produces infinite games:

‘To be playful is not to be trivial or frivolous … . On the contrary, when we are playful to each other we relate as free persons, and the relationship is open to surprise …’.**

(*From Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.)
(**From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)

How do you keep up to 150 Humans bonding together?

Gossip.

According to Yuval Noah Harari, gossiping is what makes it possible for larger numbers of Humans to stick together than other ape groups.

To keep even larger numbers together we resort to myths and stories to believe in together:

‘Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another.’*

Harari doesn’t differentiate between myths which have an initiating event and those which do not, but when he mentions stories he highlights something crucial to Human life:

‘As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that we have never seen, touched, or smelled.’*

Who wants to live in an unimaginative now that we have been intoxicated by the possibility of life getting bigger and better: a story we’re gossiping every day.

Who are we becoming when we pursue and live out our stories?
What about stories which allow us to love the stranger?
How do we become creatures which make all of life thrive?
Which stories will we pursue alone and together?
Where will the stories we participate in take us as a species in the two hundred or five hundred years?
Where will our evolutionary journey (which is one we hold in our own hands because of the stories we have lived) take us next?

(*From Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.)

Somewhere between seventy and thirty thousand years ago something happened to the wiring of Human (Sapiens) brains: a cognitive revolution.

This thought from Yuval Noah Harari is influencing my thinking today.

Harari’s words are in a book I’m reading at the moment, yet another person who’ll never step inside my home but will influence me with his words.  I’m surrounded by hundreds of such people as I write.

The power of words: the power of language.

We might take this amazing Human development for granted: our worlds are full of language form, content, and meaning.

‘The most commonly believed theory argues that accidental genetic mutations changed the inner wiring of the brains of the Sapiens, enabling them to think in unprecedented ways and to communicate using an altogether new type of language.’*

Words open up possibilities for life not as we know it.**

“Tell me, what is your plan to do/With your one wild and precious life?”^

Perhaps flourish?

(*From Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.)
(**Sorry for the Star Trek allusion.)
(^From a poem by Mary Oliver, quoted in Mindfulness by Mindfullybeing.)

It’s one of the biggest finite games.

As I write, the United Kingdom is coming to terms with the results of the 2015 Election.

What if more people played an infinite game?:

‘Finite games can be played within an infinite game, but an infinite game cannot be played within a finite game.’*

An infinite game includes as many people as possible for as long as possible, and when the rules threaten to exclude from or conclude the game, they’re changed.

A finite game, though, is played by an exclusive group of people and has a sharply defined goal, and the game must be played by the rules.

We have to wait until 2020 for another political election for the United Kingdom but each day we get the chance to play an infinite game.  Each day we get to connect who we are and what we have with our imagining for what we can do with these:including people, changing things for the better.

Every infinite player brings something unique and beautiful things, and is encouraged to play in a heart, soul, mind, and strength kind of way.

As people were voting yesterday I began a course on mindfulness.

The aim of mindfulness is to help people live more in the present moment and to be more aware and alive to their lives, rather than going through life on automatic pilot = downloading, WYSIATI (What You See Is All There Is), SOSO (Same Old Same Old).  If it’s one more way to help more people play the infinite game because its empowering, great.

The finite game disempowers; only a few people win and even they lose if they can’t see the infinite game is the bigger one.

‘Mindfulness is not about trying to get anywhere – but simply being aware of where you are – and allowing yourself to BE there and AS you are.’**

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

Good news.  Humans are no longer in the middle of the food chain.  One of the major contributors towards this has been the harnessing of fire.

The world changed:

A lack of powerful muscle no longer disadvantaged our species.
Food, when cooked, became easier and faster to eat, and more nutritious.
This reduction in time needed to catch and eat drastically left us with time on our hands to, well, think about things – including thinking about what we could do with fire.  

With rapid brain development comes with the question about how far we can progress (see Lucy as a modern take on this).  Some suggest we are Human Becomings.

We can do so many things, and no doubt will continue to progress our technologies, but we’ve always struggled to keep up with our being or character.  (Twitter trolls are able to use the technology but we feel something else is struggling to catch up.*)

Humans have been around in different forms for millions of years.  As our knowledge of genetics now provides us with the ability to step outside of natural selection, we enter a period of incredible Human development.

What if this were to see our being and doing coming together in ways which allow us to identify and express the idea that to be Human means all we touch and make can thrive and flourish?

The most important question, as we explore these early years of the twenty first century, appears to be What does it mean to be Human?

(*Check out this article by AJ Jacobs to see what we have to negotiate in our thinking every day.)

Could Human life be expressed more powerfully in a question than in anything else?

There is a restlessness to life, as though, if we were to find the answer, life would be less.  Some live as though they are only waiting for death:

“All around you, people will be tiptoeing through life, just to arrive at death safely.  But dear children, do not tiptoe.  Run, hop, skip, or dance, just don’t tiptoe.”*

There is so much we don’t know, about each other, about our world and universe, about ourselves.  It has provoked author Stuart Firestein to ask, ‘What if we cultivated ignorance instead of fearing it?’**

Our questions cause us to reach out to one another and to keep moving in a healthy and life-provoking pursuit – so we might not be overtaken by apathy or cynicism.

‘Questions learn to love that great unknown – it’s the land of opportunity, in terms of creativity and innovation.’^

Yuval Noah Harari points out how Humans, having bigger brains than other species,  have, through natural selection, favoured smaller heads and comparatively premature birth for their young because of the hazards of child-birth.^^

Human youngsters, then, have been left with years of development outside of the womb, not only being dependent for longer but expressing great adaptability and plasticicity as we interacted with our environments – a plasticity we can continue throughout our lives.

So it would seem our questions are the ideal way of exploring this big world and universe.  They existed in our lives in their hundreds every day when we were younger; we’ve just forgotten how to ask them.  The good news is, this essentially Human ability can be recovered and developed.

Have you identified your beautiful question yet?

(*College professor, quoted in Shane Claiborne’s The Irresistible Revolution.)(**Quoted in Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)
(^From Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)
(^^From Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.  Harari describes the problem of large heads is compounded by Human females requiring narrower hips in order to stand upright resulting in a narrowing of the birth canal.)