We all have more agency than we dare to admit.*
Seth Godin

a myth- that is a partial truth based on imaginative vision fired by a particular set of ideals, a dream which can help to shape our enterprises, but will mislead us if we trust it on its own**
Mary Midgley

Myth is an imaginative narrative which
makes it possible to act upon and
alter our reality;
Life is more than reality alone.

*Seth Godin’s blog: A transformative summer;
**Mary Midgley’s The Myths We Live By.

Successful outcomes often follow unpredicted actions. If we allow ourselves to do things that might not work, we’re far more likely to discover the things that do. And then we can repeat them.*
Seth Godin

Now God said to Abram and Sarai, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.’**

I don’t know this way, this
may not work, I prefer to
stick rather than twist, though didn’t
Abram became Abraham, and
Sarai became Sarah as a result of
their journey into the
unknown, beyond the familiar?:
An idea, experience, challenge, person –
A different me waiting, a
different you.

Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.^

*Seth Godin’s blog: Repeat happy accidents;
**Genesis 12:1;
^T. S. Eliot.

To be human is to live suspended between the scale of gluons and the scale of galaxies, yearning to fathom our place in the universe. That we exist at all — on this uncommon rocky world, just the right distance from its common star, adrift in a galaxy amid hundreds of billions of galaxies, each sparkling with hundreds of billions of stars, each orbited by numberless possible worlds — is already miracle enough.*
Maria Popova

We need to change our way of thinking and seeing things. We need to realise that the Earth is not just our environment. The Earth is not something outside of us. Breathing with mindfulness and contemplating your body, you realise that you are the Earth. You realise that your consciousness is also the consciousness of the Earth. Look around you – what you see is not your environment, it is you.**
Thich Naht Hanh

We can get caught up in recycling hard plastics,
Taking one-use plastics back to the supermarkets,
Wondering about whether we should try for an
electric vehicle, but in a universe like ours,
There’s always a bigger picture,
And we may want to take a few steps back to
take it all in, perhaps finding ourselves undone, or
is it recovered, by what we find? –
And it’s very special.

The verb God used when he asked Moses to remove his shoes was the ancient word for an animal shedding its skin. God said, “Shed your shoes.”^

*Maria Popova’s The Marginalian blog: The Universe in Verse 2022: What Is Life? (no longer available);
**Seth Godin’s The Carbon Almanac;
^Hasidic student, from David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea.

Here’s a little bit of fun that I’m running for half-term on the estate where we live, open to children and their parents. You’re welcome to join in.

Identify one of your superpowers, create a logo, and either colour in the superhero or create your own.

Here’s a simple one that I offered as an example:

When we play, we engage fully and intensely with life and its contents. Play bores through boredom in order to reach the deep truth of ordinary things.*
Ian Bogost

Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all.**
Thomas Szasz

Play
and
learning
provide
me
with
movement,
Direction
doesn’t
matter
at
first,
But
it
will
emerge;
I
also
get
to
grow:
Win –
Win.

*Ian Bogost’s Play Anything;
**James Clear’s 3-2-1 newsletter: Four questions for life, how to learn like a child, and seeing things in a generous way.

Isn’t it odd. We can only see our outsides, but nearly everything happens on the inside.*
Charlie Mackesy

The starting place for change is accepting oneself and taking an interest in one’s inner world.**
Edward Deci

How do you tend to
your inner world?
How will we know that
you have?

Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the centre of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world.^

*Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse;
**Edward Deci’s Why We Do What We Do;
^Joseph Campbell, from Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers’ The Power of Myth.

Complex systems create unexpected and unpredictable outputs. They’re probabilistic and unstable, not deterministic the way we expect.*
Seth Godin

And we are amongst the most complex systems in existence.

*Seth Godin’s This Is Strategy.

That’s how we get.  Not by asking, but by offering.*
Seth Godin

There is in the universe a higher kind of beauty.  It is the beauty of sacrifice or giving up for others, or suffering for others.**
Frank Laubach

*Seth Godin’s blog: The generous ask;
**Frank Laubach’s Letters By a Modern Mystic.

If you stick with writing, you will get better and better, and you can start to learn the important lessons: who you really are, and how all of us can live in the face of death, and how important it is to pay attention to life, which is why you are here.*
Anne Lamott

One word follows another,
Sentences queue into lines of meaning,
Lines stacking themselves into
verses or
paragraphs, even
• bullet-points,
Organising in ways the words
resist in our thoughts.**

When we write,^
We are endless,
Not in some fictional way, but
transcendentally:
We can find our
humility, gratitude, faithfulness:
Who we are,
What we have,
What we can do,
And previously unimagined
possibilities tender themselves
to our day.

*Anne Lamott’s Almost Everything.
**Check out Seth Godin’s blog Time well spent, as an example of stacking words;
^Here are some resources: Austin Kleon’s journaling blogs, Julia Cameron’s morning pages, Ryder Carroll’s The Bullet Journal Method, commonplace book-writing.

You have travelled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.
Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.*
John O’Donohue

what you’re desperate for is not the time to do it; it’s the energy to do it**
Katherine Morgan Schafler

My predilection is towards
slow and energy, but I wondered what might be observable if
I set these as one end of x and y axes:
It happens that I found myself active in each of the quadrants,
Though perhaps the quantity or quality were off –
Something for me to work on.

How about you?^

*John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: For One Who Is Exhausted;
**Katherine Morgan Schafler’s The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control;
^Some helpful questions?: Am I successful at this? Does it help someone else? Am I being intuitive? Am I recovering energy? Do I grow as a result of this? Is it meeting a need in me? Am I always meeting someone else’s needs … or demands? Do I waste time? Do I always do as much as possible … or as little? Do I “crash” a lot? Do I notice more than others? Am I always doing the same thing? Have I always got a reason for not spending time on something different? Do I struggle to be? Do I struggle to do? Do I play it safe? When was the last time I explored? Do I struggle with the unfamiliar? Am I open to awe? Do I aim to be with people who are like me or different to me? Am I comfortable or uncomfortable being alone? Am I comfortable or uncomfortable being with others?