A word I like the sound of.  It feels like being at home, at ease, comfortable.

I’m imagining repose in this way:

The life your life is telling you you’ve got to live, cannot be put on like a layer of clothing.  It must be grown from your interior until it reposes as DNA in every cell of who you are.

Know-how is no substitute, the knowledge offered by self-help books and programmes.  Perhaps these help you to get started, maybe they offer things you can absorb and make a part of you, but the truth of who we are and what we have has its own natural curiosity.

Life then becomes way more squiggly, Mitch Joel pointing ou, in his experience: ‘The most successful and interesting entrepreneurs and business people don’t have a very linear career path.  In fact, it’s very squiggly. Always bear that in mind.  Embrace the squiggle.’*

I think this is wisdom for us all.

Life at it’s best is squiggly, because everything we want to see hides something else we want to see.  We then must ask more questions because living with our natural curiosity means there’s always another question: a more beautiful question.**  I’ve mentioned before how Humans swap the important question for an easier one, such as, What is my life saying I must do? is exchanged for “What tips can you give me so I can make a quicker choice?

‘On the big questions of finding meaning, fulfilment, and happiness, we’re deluged with answers – in the form of off-the-shelf advice, tips, strategies from experts and gurus.  It shouldn’t be any wonder if those generic solutions don’t quite fit.’**

Chip and Dan Heath highlight the need for natural growth of what it is we must do with our lives: ‘in almost all successful change efforts, the sequence of change is not ANALYSE – THINK – CHANGE, but rather SEE – FEEL – CHANGE.’^

‘Art isn’t a result, it’s a journey’^^ with a squiggle in it.

(*From Mitch Joel’s Ctrl Alt Dlt.)
(**From Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.  One I spotted the title of this book, I knew I had to read it.)
(^From Dan and Chip Heath’s Switch.  This insight aligns with Otto Scharmer’s Theory U, which states we must open our minds, then our hearts, and then our wills.)
(^^From Seth Godin’s The Icarus Deception.)

The love of words.

Not being able to find the right word to describe something can be frustrating.  It happens to me more than I feel … (erm).

The words we use for things are not what they really are (and the words we describe people with do not adequately describe who they are).  Words are metaphors and mirrors which help us to grasp, utilise, and communicate the something or someone.

It’s hard to imagine what would happen to our thinking and consciousness if our words dissolved away, and we lost thinking and speaking language.

What we do know is how thinking and consciousness increases the more new words we have (even old words used in new contexts).

Thinking about this, I realise what I’m always trying to do is provide more words and new words to the people I work with – for who they are and what they can do.  This also provides more words to describe others and what they do.

You’ll probably have noticed I like using words like humility in new ways and places.  Humility is not, as often thought, having fewer words to describe oneself, rather, it is about having more.  And new words open up new terrain for exploring and discovery.

The means by which we encounter and gather new words come through reading and viewing (like TED), people, and experiences (including producing things).

When you can’t find the word you need, make one up.  All the words we use come from someone at sometime making them up.

‘The real struggle is not in knowing the world beyond us, but with knowing the world within us.’*

If we don’t know who we are, we’re exposed to what others think about us and suggest for us.  Another word I enjoy exploring is integrity; Edward Deci offers this definition of integrity: ‘acting in accord with one’s inner self.’

If you, or your community, find the words and language you use are frustrating what you want to do, why not find some new ones?

(*From Erwin McManus’s Soul Cravings.)

There are all kinds of habits, from the ones we fall into through repetition, to those we mindfully shape (what needs to be done, our ability to do this, and, our desire to do this.

Habits are basically ways of thinking, relating, and acting which allow us to do things.

John O’Donohue focuses more on the emptiness of habits which rob a person of the wonder of their life:

‘We confine our mystery within the prison of routine and repetition.”*

I appreciate his sentiment, but I love habits with creativity and purpose, providing habitats for the new to be grown and developed and sustained.

Whether religious or not, we all realise there is something different about Humans.  This can feel like a blessing and a curse at the same time.  We can look out on and wonder at the vastness of universe, and at the same time struggle with the enormity of it and hide away in mundaneness.

We see Humans to be at their best when they are making all things thrive: the lives of others, the lives of other species, the habitation we share, and ourselves.  Thriving is about the future, and the future requires we bring our best imagining, and imagining is a habit which can be developed.

Habits, then, ought to serve the future rather than trap us in the past. We need habits which will bring us to places of reflection, new learning, new connections, new experimenting, and new creating.

This responsibility to make all things thrive is our common spirituality.  A person’s sense of wholeness, it seems, comes from accepting this mantle borne of awe and wonder in life.

Each person must create their own habits or habitats for creativity, generosity, and enjoyment.  We can gain ideas from one another, but when we create our own, they are intrinsic to us.

There are public demonstrations of habit (organisations and institutions) which can give provide us with support and ideas, allowing us to explore together, but, being extrinsic, these will never substitute for our daily habitats for exploring: reflecting, learning, connecting, experimenting, creating.

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

I remember things differently as I grow older.

I don’t mean inaccurately.  Once upon a time, there were certain memories I might have remembered with embarrassment at best and shame at worst.  Now, I remember them as lessons, as points of growth.  They have become fuel for a creative life: memories are artefacts to combine, juxtapose, reimagine and alchemise.

‘If we move even the smallest step out of our limitations, life comes to embrace us and lead us out into the pastures of possibility.’*

In reality, our skills and talents are memories we call upon in service of the work or cause we pursue: practices, behaviours, activities, complete with all their failures and triumphs.  The skills and talents of others are memories we can borrow and include. Sometimes this means we don’t have to make the mistakes of others, or, better still, we open up new possibilities because others have accomplished what we’ve not begun to understand and do.

We are “mining the past” in order to create the future.

Working with people on their talents and passions,** has given me opportunities to wonder about how different skills and talents may have developed through people’s experiences.  They may not even know this is what they’ve been doing.  Even the negative experiences may provide them with special insights and skills, and, when used positively,  may well make a significant difference in the world for others: ‘every blush or flow of tears that’s ever touched you in a movie results from a performer who’s learned to mine the past.’^

None of us can make something from nothing.  We can only take something which already exists and re-imagine and form it.  I wonder about how many potential memories exist in every person.

(*From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)
(**It might be argued passions are also memories: what we have found ourselves energised by we have repeated.)
(^Twyla Tharp in The Creative Habit.)

Really?

Just checking to see if you mean business.

Many of our prisons are mental ones.  We’re incarcerated by guilt or shame or the images projected by others or our sense we should-be-better.  Brené Brown tells us, these feed upon ‘the darkest areas of our lives: disconnection, disengagement, and our struggle for worthiness.’*

Our thinking is often lazy, which means it’s faulty:

‘Our conscious information processing circuits get easily overloaded by detail complexity, forcing us to evolve simplifying heuristics to figure things out.’**

Otto Scharmer would say this leads to downloading: believing what you see is all there is – passing and failing everything else by our downloading standard.

We need to employ new ways of thinking in order to break out of our imprisoning thoughts.  It can be hard to imagine there’s another ways of seeing and understanding people and things when we’ve seen and understood ourselves in a certain way for a long time.

But, there are ways to break free.

One way is to write out your thoughts to purposeful questions.  If we don’t find it easier to write things out, try doodling them down, or use some combination.

For starters, write out all your skills as specifically as you can.

Do you get things done (maybe you love “to do” lists)?  
Do you enjoy speaking and demonstrating things (perhaps succeeding in a difficult sale, or coaching a football team)?  
Do you find yourself energised by working closely with people (supporting them, solving problems, growing connections)?  
Do you love ideas or learning new things (viewing documentaries, taking another course, or wearing out search engines in pursuit of information)?

It doesn’t matter how small or large your examples are, make sure you write or doodle it down (analogue wins over digital).  Keep on with this for a week or so; whenever you find yourself energised by something, record it.  You’ll be astonished at the number and type of things you’ve written out.^

If you’re already doing this, great.  If you don’t do anything, well, it’s why I ask if you really want to break free.

(*From Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly.)
(**From Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline.  Also see Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow.)
(^You can build on this by expressing gratitude for each of the things you’ve recorded – whether to the universe, to another, or to your god.)

In 1969 passengers on the London Underground were warned for the first time to mind the gap between platform and train.

Mind the gap is also a helpful reminder to be mindful of what fills the space between stimulus and response/initiation.

This gap is also called choice.

A quality or characteristic of choice is freedom.

When we realise we already have this it’s like awakening to a new world.

Eckhart Tolle suggests all Humans possess a “painbody.”  This is the part of our ego which wants to be hurt, upset, offended, uncomfortable, struggle.  The painbody lies just beneath the surface of our lives, waiting to be poked to react.

Being aware of our painbody removes its power over us.  Then we begin to notice the good things about ourselves, about others, and about our worlds: bright spots which inhabit each day and which can be replicated.

The gap is not fixed.  We can grow the gap by being more mindful of who we are and what we can do, and also what we have as a species able to grow and grow.  Everything we touch, then, and which touches us is a growing point for our lives.  Because of our Human genius for this, we can even take failure and negative comments and use them as growing points.  Here are a few things which fill the gap.

Name something you’re passionate about and love to do.

Name ten things which you have as resources every day without fail.

Name something you did for the first time in the last year.

(These are the tip of the tip of the iceberg.)

Time to travel to a new world.  Time to initiate the future.

‘Now, more than ever, more of us have the freedom to care, the freedom to connect, the freedom to choose, the freedom to initiate, the freedom to do what matters.  If we choose.’*

Freedom to make change.  And the amazing thing is: you already have everything you need..

(*From Seth Godin’s It’s Your Turn.  Alas, I cannot hyperlink this yet, as it’s not available in the UK beyond advance orders.)

Over our favourite flat whites, my friend Steve and I were talking through the creative things we’d be doing in the new year.*

I shared how I want to write a book.  Steve commented about everyone having one book in them.

‘There are no manuals for the construction of the individual you would like to become.  You are the only one who can decide this and take up the lifetime of work that it demands’.**

Your manual for your life is you.

Here’s one book which lies within you.

It’s an autobiography, not a biography – no one can write this for you.  Neither can it be formulaic – a copy of someone else’s story (too many want others or fate or god to tell them what to do, how to feel, who to become).

Donald Miller shares how he couldn’t control the characters when he was trying to write a novel.  He wanted them to get down to some work and they turn up on a beach drinking margaritas.  Our life manuals should have the same characteristic.

We need to find the freedom to let our lives breathe and grow and develop, and to love the person we’re becoming – our future Self.  We need to provide our stories with presence and freedom and space and hospitality and depth and paradox.

There’s the anti-manual or the horror story, too.  When we dream of escaping or hiding.  Yet, what we find, when we daily turn up to others, our world, and our future Self is, we discover we are more than we thought ourselves to be (like our world, we are is complexity and wildness to us), we have more than we thought ourselves to have (enough to gift to others), and we are able to go farther than we thought we ever could (failures don’t stop us but strengthen us).

There’s more than enough for a book in you, whether you ever write it, or, as we all must, you get on with living it.

(*Steve’s going to be making something amazing every day – he just doesn’t know what yet.  I was on the receiving end of one of these – a coffee loyalty/friendship card with tick boxes for when we meet up and talk.  Pretty awesome, not least because I’d forgotten my wallet and needed to use it straight away.)

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

First fires, or wild fires, follow a regime, comprising the types of fuel being burnt, landscape, weather conditions.

When Humans harnessed fire – creating second fires – they identified two ways in which they could organise regimes: fire fields and fire lines.

Fields were places in which animals and plants could be hunted and harvested.

Lines are the paths fires travel.

Aboriginal people in Australia have used fire as a “farming” tool, benefitting animals, vegetation, and themselves.  A fire would burn out a forest otherwise impenetrable to kangaroos; the kangaroos would flourish on the new shoots which now could emerge through the forest floor; the kangaroos then became food for the fire-farmers.

Not only did these farmers use fire in order to live, they also deeply respected their environment – they still do: ‘Far from an act of violence, the practice is a model of sustainability.’*

We live in a deeply significant period of Human history for our world and all its occupants.  Our emerging futures require us to connect to each other, to our future Self, and to our world – a world we have detached ourselves from.

‘A house can become a little self-enclosed world.  Sheltered there, we learn to forget the wild, magnificent universe in which we live.’**

Some still believe our species can set fire to the world however we wish and there won’t be consequences.  We have built our “little houses,” bubbles in which we declare of the environmental challenges: “It’s not our problem.”

Those who will lead us into the future will not only describe how really things are – our fields of fire.

They will not only lead us along a fire-line from the present into a future (discerning what we need to lose, keep, and create to make the journey).

They will primarily imagine better futures and help us discover creative lines of fire from these futures to the present.^

Humans are seekers of truth, of the way people and things really are.  We know we could not survive, never mind thrive, without truth.  And there is more truth than we know.

If we’re to create the kind of fires which respect and care for the environments we find ourselves in (I’m thinking of all environments, including the natural environments we’ve been thinking about – family, work, friends) then we must continue to search out truth.

Including the truth only our imaginations explore, the truth which does not exist yet but which we can create.

We are makers of fire.

(*From Stephen Pyne’s Fire.)
(**From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.  Last night, I could hardly sleep because of the ferocity of the wind – inside the wind couldn’t reach me, but I’d left some large flat pieces of furniture outside for disposal and had images of these being caught by the wind and causing all kinds of damage – fortunately, I’d anchored them down well.  Not far away, bridges and rail-lines had been closed by the wind.  The world is wilder than we can often control.)
(^^Extracted from Alex McManus’s triad of leadership in Makers of Fire.)
(The cartoon is not yet complete; feel free to download and include the colours of your imagination.)

She’s in her right mind.

He’s out of his mind.

Interesting how we talk about the mind being the person and the person being their mind.

John O’Donohue writes: ‘If you lost your mind, you would lose your world as well.  Your mind is so precious and vulnerable precisely because it holds your world.  Thoughts are the furniture of the mind.’*

I’ve previously mentioned how we don’t produce thinking; it’s happening all the time without us consciously doing anything.

To describe someone as thoughtless, then, isn’t to suggest they don’t have thoughts, but they are not in control of their thinking.  (The next time you’re in some sort of meeting look for moments when you catch yourself thinking things about someone or some issue, and you realise, this is not how you want to think about it – your all-the-time thinking has just swept you along.)

When we realise thinking doesn’t only have to happen to us but we can guide and to some extent control our thinking – as it were, we have thoughts about our thoughts – then we face up to one of the biggest issues facing Humans: escaping WYSIATI (What You See Is All There Is) – the downloading of limited information in a narrow and uncritical way.**

When we open our minds to more, we’re opening our lives to the daily possibility of more exciting and enlivening thoughts, new continents of possibility, new experimentations in creativity, generosity, and enjoyment.^

People who bring more to us out of their worlds are like lights in the darkness of our thinking – whether this happens individually, collectively, or as part of an experience.  Though uncomfortable at first – we squin when light appears in darkness – our “eyes” then adjust and we appreciate just how dark our thinking has been, and what follows feels nothing less than liberating and freeing.

(*From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)
(**Just follow any conversations on the UK news about immigration at the moment to spot examples of this.)
(^Three things which for me define what it is to be Human – though there are as many definitions as there are people.)

Our choosings lead us into darkness: the unfamiliar, unknown, even chaotic.

The primordial Human longing to explore means we cannot stay where we are.  We must choose and follow our paths, or make new paths.

To aid us, we have our imaginations.  Imaginations which can be developed and grown.

To put this in terms of fire: we bring our heat to the fuel and oxygen we find around us when we explore.

When our imaginations are underdeveloped, sensing what may be lost is more powerful than anticipating the new to be found.

There is also darkness within us, a blindness to what may be.

This can lead to disengagement as Brené Brown names it, or what Otto Scharmer labels absencing.  Brown warns, resistance to eagerness and enthusiasm expressed by others can lead to cynicism, criticism, coolness, and even cruelty.

When I read this, I realised how this has been my experience, pushbacks in various forms from people who did not want to move from the known to the unknown (and would not have recognised what they were doing).  As I continued to reflect on this, I asked myself how I kept going.  I realised it was with imagination and dreaming possibilities, especially pushing the boundaries of my imagination whilst prototyping the dreams with the help of others – as it were, making some fire in the darkness.

Here’s something to try.

Sunni Brown describes doodling as a way of imagining what presently lies in darkness, suggesting doodling enables cognitive power, organisational performance, and personal pleasure.  She offers options: some doodle with a pen on paper, others while walking in conversation (Steve Jobs), others whilst playing a musical instrument (Albert Einstein), and others can imagine something in detail in their head (Nikolas Tesla).

It’s not about having imagination or not; it’s all about developing our imagination.