The palest ink is better than the best memory.*
Chinese Proverb

stop believing everything you think**
Campbell Walker

I was recently being regaled by my oldest sister
about accidents I had experienced as a child:
Being thrown across a room by the force of a lightening strike,
Hair all standing on end (this brought back the vaguest of memories for me),
Falling into a quarry when with my dad (I have no memory of this whatsoever) –
Christine say these stories explain a lot.

There are lots of things I do remember, memories that embarrass me, or worse, they
taunt and torment, and for the worst, I am glad I can write them down –
This being harder than it seems, shows me how, often,
I am not remembering the thing itself but some
memory of a memory of a memory;
When I see it laid out, I realise a thought is just a thought and I can leave it there;
I am enabled to rewrite the story in a more positive way –
“I may have royally messed up but I learnt from what happened, changed some things, and
I’m still here!”;
I can also organise the important things and the clutter in a way
that I can’t in my head, so that I see what to pursue and what to discard –
And sometimes I see that it is the tough stuff that is the real gold.

There are many ways to journal – pen and notebook, tablet,
Longhand, bullet points, mind-mapping, illustration, commonplace –
What matters is that we have a means of laying out in front of us all that is usually
crammed inside our head;
Personally, I never do this alone – today I have been accompanied by
Ben Hardy, Campbell Walker, Nick Cave,
Mary Midgley, Seth Godin, Gabe Anderson, some scriptures, and always
my personal myth or story (reminding me of what matters most to me).

I felt like the chaos of my head had flowed through my fingers and into that document – and that I didn’t have to carry it around with me anymore. I even discovered new insights, hiding in the lawless wall of text: epiphanies previously unknown were now glaringly obvious.**

*Ryder Carroll’s The Bullet Journal Method;
**Campbell Walker’s Your Head is a Houseboat.

You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.*
Annie Dillard

*Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing blog: Olfactory Work.

Importantly, building a connection to your Future Self requires seeing your Future Self as a different person from who you are today.*
Ben Hardy

Later I discovered that you have to have this sense of faith that what you’re moving toward is already done. It’s already happened.**
John Lewis

We travel to the future to be able to imagine what might be,
Returning to the present to be able to activate what we have seen –
It is a special world available to each of us for exploring possibilities,
Returning with these to our ordinary everyday worlds of the present;
We then set about creating patterns of behaviour – habits –
To contain our hopes and dreams.

Like building muscle, we need to train our intentions to make them resilient and strong.^

We move to the future along different paths,
Usually a mixture of these three –
Trends (the future will be more of what has already been),
Events (the future will be affected by good or bad things outside our control),
Choices (the future can be what we imagine) –
Often underestimating the power of personal choice …
And choice is becoming more important to us every day when it comes to
being clear about who we are, what we have, what we must do.

The world is changing faster every day –
Another way of saying this is
the future is coming at us faster than ever …
And it can be overwhelming.

The bad news is, with all that information, we now have a deficit of mental clarity … In addition to our own compromised brain space, there is a compounding effect from the attention deficit of everyone around you. Being mentally cluttered is the new normal.^^

On the other side of this lies the decline of the old ways for
gaining clarity towards meaningful action –
Religions, myths, and meta-narratives*^ –
So we’re on a mission to find new ones,
Something humans are good at finding,
if we make the time, so,
Instead of waiting for the tsunami wave of the future to come to us,
We travel to the future through
identifying our strengths, connecting with our energies and passions, and
naming our values.*^

*Ben Hardy’s Be Your Future Self Now;
**Krista Tippett’s Becoming Wise;
^Ryder Carroll’s The Bullet Journal Method;
^^Campbell Walker’s Your Head is a Houseboat;
*^0 I Let me know if you need some help – this is what dreamwhispering is all about.

To be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart – that’s what life is about, that’s its task.*
Fyodor Dostoevsky

You should be good now. Instead you choose tomorrow.**
Ryan Holiday

These words remind me of my friend Alex‘s question –
Which I have mentioned here many times –
What does it mean to you to be human?

There are as many answers to this question
as there are people breathing on this planet right now, though
my own response has been: to live with creativity, generosity, and enjoyment.^

When Ramez Naam writes about becoming more than human,
He lists technological, surgical, and pharmaceutical solutions;
When Brian McLaren writes about being human it’s about love.

How much better could I be as a human? –
I have to admit I don’t know;
All I know is how easy it is to put off finding out.

*Brian McLaren’s Faith After Doubt;
**Ryan Holiday’s Discipline is Destiny;
^Enjoyment as the result of creativity and generosity.

a lot of people were raised to believe that they need to fix their weaknesses but their talents would take care of themselves*
Mary Reckmeyer

May you have the grace of encouragement
To awaken the gift in another’s heart,
Building in them the confidence
To follow the call of the gift.**
John O’Donohue

We’re not trying to become balanced in our skills-set –
That’s an individualistic view of things;
Our strengths are what they are because –
Consciously or unconsciously –
We have poured time and effort into them …
And not into other abilities;
There’ll be others out there who have
totally the opposite talents and strengths to us, and
that’s a good thing –
This is how the balance should be.

Doing the things we must will be
hard enough, but
we find ourselves drawn back to them again and again;
There are other things that we never have
the energy for, that we never want to return to –
We must stop doing these things – we’ll never be really any good at them – and
focus on what really matters to us.

*Mary Reckmeyer’s Strengths Based Parenting;
**John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: For a New Position.

What we call the beginning is often the end. 
And to make an end is to make a beginning. 
The end is where we begin from.*
T. S. Eliot

*Ben Hardy’s Personality Isn’t Permanent.

Whether it’s splitting a check, getting a project done or making an impact on the culture or a cause, if you want things to get better, the only way is to be prepared to do more than your fair share.*
Seth Godin

Scientists have … found that to reach a state of flow, a task must be roughly 4 percent beyond our current ability.**
James Clear

We may want to rethink things if
we’re trying to get away with investing the least effort,
Remaining in our comfort zones,
Or letting others take most of the strain;
We may be running the risk of staying delightfully unburdened by
the most energising, personally developing, planet-contributing,
Life-transcending opportunities we will ever come upon.

*Seth Godin’s blog: More than your share;
**James Clear’s Atomic Habits.

Whatever our gift, we are called to give it and to dance for the renewal of the world. In return for the privilege of breath.*
Robin Wall Kimmerer

Why are we not better than we are?**
Eric Threthewey

We have been given a wonderful gift,
Each breath we take is a reminder;
We have a great gift to bring –
If we can overcome the many voices for
holding back:
“This is good enough”
“I have nothing better”
“I have nothing to bring”
“Nobody would want it”
“I’m just thankful I’m still here”
“The world owes me more”
…

Figuring out our gift and
bringing it into the world is
the best way towards everything being
better.

Good things seem to take a long time. Bad things seem to happen all at once. And while there’s some truth to these broad strokes, not being able to calculate when the bad things might happen all at once isn’t a good enough reason not to build good things. Even if it takes a long time.^

*Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass;
**Maria Popova’s The Marginalian blog: Why Are We Not Better Than We Are: How Poetry Saves Lives;
^Gabe Anderson’s blog: Good Things, Bad Things.

Staying open-handed, treasuring but not grasping, is critical to the contemplative stance.*
Krista Tippett

Here is my secret. It’s quite simple. One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.**
The Little Prince

How long can I remain open – to something or someone or myself
or god –
Without judgement or sifting or exposition?;
This is the hardest work:
Contemplation as openness leading to love –
Not some romanticised notion of love, but
love that is steadfast in its openness and treasuring
without possessing.

*Krista Tippett’s Becoming Wise;
**Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince.

Imitate, that you may be different.*
Edward P. J. Corbett

Won’t you be walking in your predecessors’ footsteps. I surely will use the older path, but if I find a shorter and smoother way, I’ll blaze a trail there. The ones who pioneered these trails aren’t our masters, but our guides. Truth stands open to everyone, it hasn’t been monopolised.**
Seneca

First of all you explored the field,
Learnt the domain,
Grateful for the paths of others that have made it possible
to have a life that works for you;
Now, beyond the field, without the domain, you sense there is
more beyond the terminus – a whole world of more to be discovered,
And you hesitatingly take your first lost step.

If you are comfortable with where you are, you will never know how far you can go. If you refuse to change, then you refuse to grow.^

*Annie Murphy Paul’s The Extended Mind;
**Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic;
^Erwin McManus’ The Way of the Warrior.