What I have gradually learned is that it is not your strengths, but your combination of strengths that set you apart.*
James Clear

a gift is also a responsibility**
Robin Wall Kimmerer

I love having conversations with people about their
superpowers,
But their noticing these talents is only the beginning;
The abilities are not an achievement list
but a story to be developed,
They’re not the “done deal”
but the whispers of possibility,
They’re not effortless
but effortful:
We don’t rise to the occasion,
we fall to the level of our training.^

*James Clear’s 3-2-1 newsletter: On the hidden costs of success, how to deal with challenges, and the joy of shared experiences;
**Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass;
^Ryan Holiday’s Discipline is Destiny.

Eventually, I came to realise that doubt was a companion, every bit as resilient and persistent as faith, and she wasn’t going away. I realised that she had some things to teach me, and I decided that since I couldn’t shut her up or drive her away, I might as well learn from her.*
Brian McLaren

Whence all creation had its origin,
he, whether he fashioned it or whether he didn’t,
he who surveys it all from highest heaven,
he knows, or maybe even he does not know.**
Rig Veda

Certainty has been a good and helpful friend,
But sometimes a dangerous ami,
Whilst doubt has become the companion that embraces openness
and questioning, leading me to change.

Change is life –
I have my doubts to thank for this;
Though I must be careful to mind that doubt can overdo it,
I have come to see that certainty has sometimes manipulated and impeded me.

*Brian McLaren’s Faith After Doubt;
**James Carse’s Breakfast At the Victory.

This larger doodle in progress is for sale.

It’s a boutique design on a deep 12×16″ (30.5×40.6cm) canvas. Drop me a line if you are interested.

If to be human is, as we have said, to be conscious and responsible, then existential analysis is psychotherapy whose starting point is consciousness of responsibility.*
Viktor Frankl

We don’t turn to story to escape reality; we turn to story to navigate reality. And there’s no escaping the fact that much of our reality is shaped by other people, all of who have their own story.**
Lisa Cron

Seth Godin writes,
Humans are not a resource.
We are not a tool.
Humans are the point.^

A responsible story not only provides resilience
towards the irresponsible stories that are out there,
It buoyantly ad encouragingly announces that we are made to be
Creators, imagineers, alchemists, magicians, makers, and innovators.

*Viktor Frankl’s The Doctor and the Soul;
**Lisa Cron’s Story or Die;
^Seth Godin’s The Song of Significance.

The work of significance embraces the very things that industrialism seeks to stamp out.*
Seth Godin

The beauty of a blessing always issues from a deeper place in time … The dream of prayer and art is to come nearer , even to slip through to dwell for a while in the vicinity of the essence.*
John O’Donohue

It’s not a catchy title, but
it is the important part of the brain when it comes to processing
information about the self;
What we feed the vmPFC is critical, though –
There’s a difference between a self-enhancing self (ego) and
a self-transcending self (true self),
And it is the latter that Viktor Frankl encourages us to nurture
when it comes to exploring the fullness and potential of our humanity –
The unfathomed depths we know exist within us,
The joy of our responsibility:
Only to the extent that someone is living out
this self-transcendence of human existence is he truly human
or does he become his true self.
He becomes so,
not be concerning himself with his self’s actualisation,
but by forgetting himself and
giving himself,
overlooking himself and
focusing outward.^

One more thing:
Writing things down really helps the vmPFC,
So journal on.

*Seth Godin’s The Song of Significance;
**John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
^Victor Strecher’s Life on Purpose.

But that working within the limits of your moment in history, and your finite time and talents, you actually got round to doing – and made life more luminous for the rest of us by doing – whatever magnificent task or weird little thing it was you came here for.*
Oliver Burkeman

When we open ourselves to the world and pay homage to that which is larger than ourselves, we receive a blessing from the outer world. We get something back. We are ourselves enriched by the larger understanding of the cosmos and our place in it.**
Alan Lightman

I leave the magnificent task for others –
Maybe for you,
Mine is the weird little thing –
Small, bespoke, boutique;
Opening one’s self to the greater world is
a good place to begin,
To be able to notice what others do not and
to lean into what is more noticeable than other things –
And at first, we may not even know why,
But we must bring it into the world,
Not to everyone, but those who will know
it is for them.

*Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks;
**Alan Lightman’s The Transcendent Brain.

Dignity flows from agency, allowing us to be treated as humans, not cogs.*
Seth Godin

When people truly discover some aspect of their vision and have the opportunity to dedicate themselves to working on it, when they can tell the truth and focus on aspirations instead of on “being less bad,” when they can be themselves, then something changes.**
Peter Senge

Some know from an early age what they want to do with their lives,
Others come to what it is they must do later –
I wanted to be a hairdresser on leaving school, but only lasted three months;
A few years later,
I wanted to be a Methodist Church minister, and this lasted for decades,
But this wasn’t it, there was still something I wanted to be –
I didn’t know what it was and I didn’t have a name for it;
I have since come to call it dreamwhispering,
Because it’s about hearing and
uncovering the hopes and purpose people have for their lives –
It’s the small print to everything I write and doodle;
It’s not a cog-description, and we all have one of these
I-don’t know-what-it-is-and-I-don’t-have-a-name-for-it things,
And they’re all wildly and wonderfully different,
We can’t lay them down at retirement –
They are what we are, and we are what they are.

To live fully, experiencing each moment, aware, alert, and attentive. We are here, each one of us, to write our own story – and what fascinating stories we make.^

*Seth Godin’s The Song of Significance;
**Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution;
^Madeleine L’Engle, from Victor Strecher’s Life on Purpose.

We too are always falling … spinning into someplace new and unexpected. Despite our fear of falling, the gifts of the world stand to catch us.*
Robin Wall Kimmerer

Without mythic keys we have neither culture nor religion, no art, architecture, drama, ritual, epic, social customs, or mental disorders. We would have only a grey world, with little of anything calling us forward to that strange and beautiful country that recedes even as we try to civilise it.**
Jean Houston

When we are lost, or in a place
we do not want to be,
Our stories will guide us.

Whilst we are surrounded by stories,
The most important one is
that which forms at the centre of our lives.

A story for honour, nobility, and enlightenment
will never fail us, or others –
And if we are dismayed by our story, we can reform it.^

*Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass;
**Jean Houston’s A Mythic Life;
^Let me know if I can help; this is what my work of dreamwhispering is about.

(For some reason, my post and doodle for the 30 June, 2023 didn’t appear, so I thought to post the doodle now as “just a doodle”)

Life is the story you tell yourself.*
Bruce Feiler

*Bruce Feiler’s Life Is In the Transitions.

My hunger for freedom is my hunger for myself, my hunger for my creative initiative.*
M. C. Richards

The less you desire, the richer you are, the freer you are, the more powerful you are.**
Ryan Holliday

It’s about desiring the right things;
When we have less desire for the wrong things,
We find we have more desire for the right things
(especially the thing we want to be remembered for) –
I put it this way because it’s not
once-and-for-all, but, rather,
Ongoing.

Marginalising the ego, abandoning it to the circumference, is a way of entering the soul. In fact it might be more accurate to say that marginalising the ego is precisely the work of the soul.^

*M. C. Richards’ Centering;
**Ryan Holiday’s Discipline is Destiny;
^James Carse’s Breakfast at the Victory.