There are many possibilities in life.

It’s important to listen to what your life is saying to you.

Coming from deep within, your desires guide you through the possibilities, enabling you to make your choices.*

Just as their are many ways to mix a palette of colours, there are many ways to mix your passions and talents: again and again choices will come to you.  (Or, write out all your skills and passions and values and significant failures and successes on post-its, and see how many ways you can mix these.)

Here are a couple of things which struck me today about the choosings.

At first we’re excited by an attractive and exciting possibility.

Then we see just what our choosings ask of us and we wonder what on earth we’ve done.

At this point, we understand we have to absolutely commit, beyond an intellectual decision played out with lists for and against: we have to connect at a heart level.

Martin Seligman suggests we have to commit to maximising five elements: positive emotion (what we think of as happiness), engagement (when we are lost in the flow), relationships (because life is all about relationships), meaning (as it has to be for a cause bigger than ourselves), and achievement (she have to ship).**

Choosing is not about setting out on a path with a determined destination.  Choices ought not to be hermetically sealed.  It is imperative we continually open our minds and hearts to more.

I believe it’s important for each of us to identify and develop our purpose (element, voice, calling – there are many names for this), but if I do not allow for further choosings, then I starve my purpose of what it needs to be grow and take me to places I cannot imagine in this moment of time, and leading me to further choosings.

‘Yes, the cards are unfairly stacked against too many people.  Yes, there are too many barriers and not enough support.  But no, your ability to create and contribute isn’t determined at birth.  It’s a choice.’^

One of the greatest gifts we can give to others is to open up the possibility to choose and to keep choosing.

(*We’re all so different.  I never cease to find it  wonderful and fascinating to see how people are interested in, and pursue, a panoply of interests and possibilities.)
(**PERMA is his acronym for his suggested “system” of well-being.)
(^From Seth Godin’s Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?)

Not this kind:

as·cet·ic

(ə-sĕt′ĭk)

This kind:

When life becomes merely functional we lose something: the celebration life is.

To reverence is to celebrate, but there’s a problem.

I’ve worked with hundreds of people identifying their passions and talents.  When it comes to sharing their most de-energising  experiences, I have lost count of those who tell me it is when people and/or environments do not show respect or fail to acknowledge their value or worth as people with talents.

Only recently, someone shared their experience of how “systems and organisationalism isolate and disconnect and dehumanise people”; also “people who have chosen to be negative about everyone and everything else, even themselves.”

Emily Heyward warns how entrepreneurs can be so caught up in their great product idea, rather than wondering whether people want it; she offers: ‘the best entrepreneurs, the most successful ones, are those who something that was broken and had no choice but to fix it.’*  She’s encouraging us to remain focused on the problem and to deliver meaningful innovation.

I’ve been hearing the problem expressed by the folk I work with, and realise what I want is for their to be a celebration of who people are and what they have to bring, beyond respect, recognising a person’s unique presence and encouraging them to bring this to their workplace, as well as to their family and friends.

When someone recognises there’s really something wonderful and mysterious about their life, they bring this understanding to the lives of others they meet.  So much of our world is functional – we don’t have to listen to our politicians for too long before realising this is what they think we want – but when we step outside the bubble and get honest, what we value most of all is to recognised for who we are and what we do.

‘Some people never celebrate anything.  They have no time. … Some feel there is nothing to celebrate.  Such people are prisoners who slog away in a secure and predictable routine.**

Don’t be one of them.

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

You are certainly enough and have more than enough to create some art right now.

Yet we have to keep moving, exploring, discovering, creating, and moving again.

When we are at our most lucid, Humans know the safest place to be is not where we’ve always felt safest – where we can be lulled into complacency, when we come to enjoy the equilibrium.

‘You always live in a space which frames belonging but is yet unable to fully reflect your longing.  This ambivalence gives such vitality and passion to human presence.’*

Too much belonging and not enough longing is unhealthy.  As is too much longing and not enough belonging.

Martin Seligman has explores these dimensions under the “heading” of well-being, claiming Human well-being is about flourishing, measurable through these five elements: Positive emotion (including satisfaction and fulfilment), Engagement (the sense of flow which we’re only aware of after engagement), positive Relationships (in which we belong, including with ourselves), Meaning (a purpose greater than ourselves), and, Accomplishment (what we achieve, including our experiences of failing and trying again).**

Fire is a useful metaphor for well-being.^

Fires are not self-perpetuating and, without more fuel and oxygen to feed them, will expire.

In this sense we do not have enough, and (if we need to) identify and pursue our longing.

(*From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)
(**From Martin Seligman’s Flourish.  The five elements are memorable using the acronym  PERMA.  The descriptions in brackets are more mine than Seligman’s.)
(^From Stephen Pyne’s Fire.  Pyne sees Humans us quite unlike any other species in this world: ‘Fire planet had found its keystone species.’)

Making fires, too.

Being positive, because I want to encourage people to view their lives in a positive way.  We’ve probably heard of original sin, but what about original goodness?  There’re many more amazing things inside of people which don’t get a mention and need and airing.*  Perhaps this year, they will.

Dignity and “heartness,” because:

‘It is wonderful to behold a person who inhabits their own dignity.  The human body is its own language.’**

We are responsible for nurture this dignity or heartness.  We do not receive our dignity from others; neither can others take it away.  They may recognise it or not, but it is who we are at heart.

It manifests itself in honour and nobility and sageness.

Honour because we are giving expression to our values and beliefs in our dealings with others, the world, and our selves.
Nobility because we make who we are and what we have available in service to others: the original meaning of nobility.
Sageness because we connect ideas and actions in everyday practices and habits which are transformative.

Makers of Fire because we have discovered how our past experiences and memories are the fuel for some future-fire we’re igniting: failures and successes, mistakes and transgressions, what we have done and what others have done to us = fuel.^

(Following fifteen years of disappointment in my work leading to the brink of burn out, I use these experiences as fuel to do the work I love, enabling people to identify, explore, and develop the dreams their lives are whispering to them.)

The primal tools for fire making are a flint or friction sticks.  It takes focus, skill, and energy to ignite a fire.  Makers of fire are people who know how to produce fire from their primal make up.  There’s lots of fuel and plenty of oxygen, but the spark is the thing we have to introduce to these.

We become flame.  We are transformed by the experience.

(More to come.)

(*It doesn’t explain everything but there are more people who want to express goodness through their lives than there are people wanting to hurt others.)
(**John O’Donohue in Eternal Echoes.)
(^Human life has been so completely shaped by our harnessing and developing of fire-technology, it is entirely legitimate to speak of ourselves as makers of fire and of things from our past being utterly consumed to produce something new.  In Fire, Stephen Pyne points to our ability to cook our food has removed the need to have large heads and powerful jaws, together with large digestive systems: cooking food makes it easier to consume whilst increasing the calorific value.)

‘The adventure is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown; the powers that watch at the boundary are dangerous; to deal with them is risky, yet for anyone with competence and courage, the danger fades.’

Good words to take us into a new year, from Joseph Campbell‘s iconic work on the heroes of myths and legends?

Boundaries can be the lines we draw between what is and what can be.  We can draw these any time but a new year just begs us to create some lines to cross.

At the beginning of 2014, my kine to cross was the challenge of blogging every day – as long as I could add a cartoon.  It’s proven to be quite a journey.

As I begin to identify some lines for a new year, these words are catching my attention

:

‘The face is the icon where all the atmosphere, feeling and thought of an individual life assemble visually.’*

Through face-to-face encounters, we enter into one another’s lives.

Brené Brown shares how, one day, she saw several people on mobile phones not making any eye contact with those serving them: I-It encounters when someone treats another as an object.**

There’s vulnerability involved in looking into the face of another, or having someone look into our face – just take note the next time you do this, especially with someone you don’t know.

Perhaps it is this vulnerability which feeds our humanity most of all.

It is through these face-to-face experiences we best gift our art – from who we are and what we can do – to others; Peter Senge defines love as committing ‘to another’s “completion,” to another being all that she or he can and wants to be.’^

I like this, and so picked up my copy of Martin Seligman’s Flourish this morning, wondering what helping people to flourish in 2015 might look like.^^

Have another read of Joseph Campbell’s words, but this time, imagine these words being about the face-to-face encounters we have in this new year:

‘The adventure is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown; the powers that watch at the boundary are dangerous; to deal with them is risky, yet for anyone with competence and courage, the danger fades.’

(*From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)
(**Daring Greatly.)
(^From Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline.)
(^^One such possibility for people in Edinburgh is a book group exploring Seth Godin’s new book It’s Your Turn.  You’re welcome to join us, though there’re limited places.)

‘Presence is the whole atmosphere of a person or thing.’*

Which underlines what I’ve discovered over the years: all people possess a presence, and, when they create something out of their presence, this work and art is imbued with their presence too.

When offered in a non-prescriptive way – suggestions to tantalise our imagination – we’re impacted in life-transforming ways.

Presence can be hidden, though.

It can be covered over from everything from not valuing who we are to new technologies which, although promising greater presence for all users, form barriers of triviality or “unreflection.”

Paradoxically, what can remove barriers and open up our lives is a fascination with others.  People of presence notice others, catching glimpses of what others may not even see in themselves.  So when someone explores what the person of presence has perceived, connection is possible:

‘Connection is the energy that is created between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they can give and receive without judgement.’**

Erwin McManus offers us a description of a person or presence in his friend Edward “Chip” Anderson: ‘One of [Chip’s] extraordinary talents was seeing the best in people.  He spent his whole life calling out greatness in others and applauding it, even he saw it expressed in the smallest of ways.’^

I had the privilege of meeting Chip for one day almost ten years ago.  His presence changed my life dramatically and there would be no Thin|Silence or Go Live Your Strengths without him.

As I mentioned at the beginning, all people possess a presence.

What’s yours?

(*From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)
(**From Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly.)
(From Erwin McManus’s Soul Cravings.)
(My challenge for 2014 has been to blog everyday, as long as I can create a cartoon for each post.  Today’s ends the challenge and begins a new one.  More of this to come, but I want to thank Seth Godin for his daily blogs which turn into books and amazing projects, and to Hugh MacLeod for the encouragement to begin cartooning – something I’d not have imagined myself doing before reading his three amazing books, and, he also has a really neat five cartoons a week site to subscribe to.  Thank you to you for being amongst the 6,800 views in 2014.)

You have made a journey of more than fourteen billion years to get here.

Held deep within you, there exists a dream you long to live before your time here is over.

Against this backdrop, the idea of our lives being about finding some forty hour a week employment with some double-glazing, favourite TV Soaps or film, and an annual dream to get away from it all until we retire appears a little myopic.

So what is the change you want to make in the world?

It doesn’t have to be huge but it may be the thing which makes someone’s life better – it’s always about people.

We’ve been searching for ways which make it possible to live with a rhythm of belonging and longing, intimacy and exploration.  John O’Donohue offers four characters for our searching: native and neighbour, wanderer and stranger.*

Questions like these come to mind: Who do I see as being a native where I am and what do they have to teach me?  How and where do I feel and know myself to be a native, and how do these help me to belong in a good way?  What do I feel to be neighbourliness and where and to whom am I able to share these things?  Who is making themselves available to me and others as a neighbour?  Who are those who wander through my life bringing things from elsewhere?  Where do I have a hankering to, whether geographically, intellectually, or as an activity?  Who is a stranger to me whom I can get to know?  Who and where am I a stranger and what do I learn through these experience? 

There are plenty more questions suggested by these four characters, helping us to belong AND to explore.

Some of us hide from intimacy: we fear being rejected again.  Others of us hide from exploration because we fear failure or worse.

There’s no denying, belonging and longing both carry pain for us – everything of worth and value does – but as natives and neighbours, as wanderers and strangers, we can hall one another through the pain,

‘When you expose yourself to the opportunities that scare you, you create something scarce, something others won’t do.’*

And something which may never be repeated.

(*From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)
(**From Seth Godin’s Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?)

Keep walking.   Keep moving.

Each of us has a different core need, or longing, to move.  As we move, the new scenery and new people regenerates this core.

‘Because we are always in different states and stages of longing, the ways we belong in the world are always diverse and ever changing.’*

The journey-person experiences and examples that it means to open the Human heart to the Other.

There is a kind of constant moving which numbs us to the reality of life, but this is not it.

I only find, when I follow the paths and trails of what passionate about, I am led to MORE than I expect,  and I cannot imagine myself coming to the point where I say, “That’s it.  I’ve done walking.”**

What kind of people would you have shape the future?

As I write, the new year of 2015 reminds me there are small and large chunks of future waiting to be shaped.   Those who’ve stopped travelling can only bring more of what already is.   But those who find they just have to keep moving – because there is more they do not know than they know – will keep on encountering new places, ideas, and people.

Here are a couple of encouragements for us, whoever we are:

‘Stuck is a state of mind and it’s curable.’*

“No matter what, expect the unexpected.  And whenever possible, BE the unexpected.”^^

(*From John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes.)
(**Everyone has something which, when connected to, will lead them into their endless journey.)
(^From Seth Godin’s Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck.)
(^^Quoted in Make Your Mark.)

That’s S.I.G.N.

Or, taking notice of the things which you have expressed or completed successfully, intuitively, which you have grown through, and, which meet a need in you.*

I first came upon these words from T. S. Eliot in 1998; every so often they’ve returned, defining the journey I find myself on:

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.**

In 1998, they felt true for the discoveries I’d made over the previous fifteen years, but  as I think from now until then, they feel more true.

Human life is always growing up.  We see this over thousands of years, and we catch a glimpse of it even in a person’s short life-span – a microcosm of this.

We’re thinking machines and our thinking is growing up and, although we carry our old thinking which pulls us backwards at times,  we are still moving forward with this operating system of thinking and functioning (OS) which can be improved and grown and upgraded as we go.

As I ponder these things, I hold my twin needs to belong and long: my need for intimacy and for exploration.  In my explorations, or journeyings of longing, I’ve found my best belonging, although I know this can only improve as I am prepared to continue exploring – the sense of meaning in Eliot’s words for me.

I’ve found myself journeying and exploring through the things I have experienced small successes in (and where these have led), through the things I feel I MUST do because they are me, and which lead to me growing, and meeting the deep needs in me.

This is how it is for each of us, though in quite different ways – and wonderfully so.  The amazing thing is how we can often find our belonging with each other through all of our disparate journeys.

(*S.I.G.N. is offered by Marcus Buckingham in Go Put Your Strengths to Work.)
(**The full poem is Little Gidding.)