May you come to accept your longing as divine urgency.* John O’Donohue
Some give freely, yet grow all the richer; others withhold what is due, and only suffer want.** Ancient proverb
Each of us carries some urgency deep within us, Something irreplaceable and unrepeatable that the world needs, but without our generosity it will never have.
Perhaps it is something that you need to receive firstly, What it is shaping your purpose, and setting your path through life.
Take a moment to write it down; What must you do next? – Even if it’s the smallest iteration of this longing.
*John O’Donohue’s Benedictus: For Longing; **Proverbs 11:24
The fact that it takes longer to write things out by hand gives handwriting its cognitive edge.* Ryder Carroll
Devote the back half of your life to serving others with your wisdom. Get old sharing the things you believe are most important.** Arthur Brooks
There is no need to panic – Slow and longer are more than okay, They are good for us, Inviting us into an openness – a superpower in today’s world of fast, busy and overstimulated: The hardest state for a human being is that of open-endedness.^
There will be times when we have to play our finite games – and reach our destinations, but the open-ended person, while knowing this, also enjoys the ever-journeying of the infinite, the knowing and never-knowing.
One point of embarkation into slow and long openness is quietness and solitude: You may want to gift yourself 4’33”^^ of stillness in which to listen, and if you find yourself distracted by all that needs to be done, simply bring yourself back to listening.
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.**
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.*^
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.
alot 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.
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.
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.^
THIN|SILENCE 
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