The revolutionary force in this century is the awakening of a deep generative human capacity – the I-in-now.*
Otto Scharmer

But what I was trying to say is that we may ultimately find that, to our surprise, our creative endeavours are not the defining element of our lives. They are perhaps a means to an end. That’s what I’m trying to find out.**
Nick Cave

The other capacities are
I-in-me – when I am at the centre of my own world and views,
I-in-you – when I step out of my story and step into your story in order to serve,
I-in-us – when we serve each other, and the greater world:
If you have come here to help me,
you are wasting your time.
But if you have come because your liberation
is bound up with mine,
then let us work together.^

I-in-now – together we serve what is wanting to emerge,
The future that is wanting to come into being;
In such a place as this,
None of us are the final product,
We are all becoming,
And in the end,
This “I” may be our most beautiful achievement.

*Otto Scharmer’s Theory U;
**Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan’s Faith, Hope and Carnage;
^Lilla Watson, from Rohit Bharhava and Jennifer Brown’s Beyond Diversity.

And when playing a game, the question is not how to overcome that structure, but how to subject oneself to it … the play is in the thing not in us.*
Ian Bogost

The hunger will give you everything. And it will take from you everything. It will cost you your life and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. But knowing this, of course, is what sets you free.**
Hugh Macleod

Actually, you did sign up for this,
It’s the tough reality that follows the
inciting imagination;
Your desire to pursue your must requires deep immersion,
When we want to hold back, we must lean in
with our skills, knowledge, and heart –
Counterintuitively, this forward, galloping tilt is what brings us
freedom, as Dan Ariely personally testifies:
My dark sense of helplessness receded a little.
In its place,
like a glimmer of light,
was an old friend: curiosity. After all,
I’m a social scientist.^

There will be more to learn, more enabling along the way,
But first of all you must trust what brought you here:
If it’s your truth,
you can’t not do it, and
that knowledge
carries you through.^^

*Ian Bogost’s Play Anything;
**Hugh Macleod’s Evil Plans;
^Dan Ariely’s Misbelief;
^^Parker Palmer, from Krista Tippett’s Becoming Wise.

sui géneris (a) a class alone, unique, peculiar

If you keep telling people who they are, who their best selves are, if you keep reminding them of their true identity, there’s a good chance they’ll figure out what to do.*
Rob Bell

You get to decide your uniqueness,
Beyond,
More than,
Biology, sociology and psychology:
Thus Karl Jaspers calls the being of man a
‘deciding’ being,
not something that simply ‘is’ but something
that first decides ‘what it is.’**

We are discerning this today
more comprehensively than ever, but, perhaps,
There is more understanding to come, helping us to
avoid jumping from one labeled box into another;
And who we are is never to be separated from
what we do, the
unique and peculiar beauty each person
brings into the world.

*Rob Bell’s What is the Bible?;
**Viktor Frankl’s The Doctor and the Soul.

Must needs solitude.*
Elle Luna

Alone is my before and after.

*Elle Luna’s The Crossroads of Should and Must.

You have your own stories, the dramatic and more ordinary moments where what has gone wrong becomes an opening to more of yourself and part of your gift to the world. This is the beginning of wisdom.*
Krista Tippett

I’m really glad it didn’t work;
I’d been trying for sixteen years in three different places, but,
finally,
I stopped the striving –
Maybe, if I’d have got it to work, I would be still in that role,
But that would be a shame, because when I embraced getting it wrong, I was
set upon a path that has carried me to
the most fulfilling service I have been able to make, and the path
continues to unfold.

*Krista Tippett’s Becoming Wise.

Worldly limitations impose a new and welcome humility, for they force us to treat things as they are rather than as we wish them to be … Every playground has two basic properties, which are two sides of the same coin: boundaries and contents.*
Ian Bogost

Poetry takes something that we know already and turns it into something new.**
T. S. Eliot

When there are no boundaries.

Limitations make life richer –
When we see something for what it truly is, then
we can begin to play, to use our imagination, to
make something different, so
we pay humble attention:
Our life experience will equal
what we pay attention to.^

As a player, we may feel that what we do
is quite ordinary, but our everyday and obvious
may appear to others as freshness and originality,
Non-obvious and hopeful.

We begin the play by embracing the limitations, including
our own.

*Ian Bogost’s Play Anything;
**Madeleine L’Engle’s Walking on Water;
^William James, from Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing.

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.*
Mary Oliver

There are things that we avoid looking at too closely. If we looked, really saw what was happening, we’d have to change our minds, admit we were mistaken, refactor our priorities or take action.**
Seth Godin

See deeply,
Be wowed more often,
Have something important to share;
Mary and Seth are likely thinking of
a superabundance of subjects
and objects,
In this moment, I’m pondering the
interaction we have with each other.

*Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing;
**Seth Godin’s blog: Avert your eyes.

Askesis (n) a place of confinement without which there can be no energy or purpose*

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is the power to choose your response.**
Viktor Frankl

We expand the space between
stimulus and response through
humility (who I am, not who I am not) and
gratitude (open to all I have, though may not own) and
faithfulness (small offering of who I am and what I have) –
These are my discoveries in
the twenty eight or so years following the provision of
my first askesis, wherein
I faced my shortcomings, but also
the deeper longings for my life;
I realise that I have since fashioned a daily confinement
in which I seek to embrace energy and purpose –
The hope being to emerge with
integrity (a connectedness to all and everything), with
wholeness (enoughness rather than completeness) and
perseverance (to complete whatever the distance is before me).

It’s not so much a place of magic, but,
I hope,
Centring and grounding.

*A definition from Eugene Peterson’s Under the Unpredictable Plant;
**Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing.

As soon as humans had completed the evolutionary process, they found that a longing for transcendence was built into their condition.*
Karen Armstrong

There’s nothing you can do that’s more important than being fulfilled. You become a sign, you become a signal, transparent to transcendence; in this way you will find, live, and become a realisation of your own personal myth.**
Joseph Campbell

Moses Mendelssohn confessed:
There lies in me an
irresistible drive towards
completeness and perfection.^ –
I understand this longing, though
I concluded that I’d probably choose
beauty over perfection.

I do want to be the best me
I can be, though, and to make the best
contribution that I can bring, and
I enjoy the thought of Viktor Frankl that
we are each an unrepeatable imperfection
without whom the world is the poorer –
A thought to play with on our
transcendent journeys.

(Thank you to those who have recently subscribed to thin|silence; I hope I encourage you to share the beauty of your unrepeatable imperfection.)

*Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth;
**Joseph Campbell’s Pathways to Bliss;
^Alan Lightman’s The Transcendent Brain.

Heroism permeates ordinary life, in repetitions far smaller and weirder than the flow of the seasons and the years.*
Ian Bogost

I do believe in the materiality of the mind, but I confess that I am still mystified by the nature of consciousness.**
Alan Lightman

Another word for selfless moments?
Heroism?
I’d like to take all of the consciousness
that I have, and be more
present,
Using it less to worry about yesterday
or tomorrow, and more to
enjoy the beauty all around me, to
read and doodle, to
be with people and
do them some good, to
bring beauty and harmony to those in
stress and discord,
Rather than being the source of
the latter to them:
The source of all art
is the human psyche’s primal need for
the resolution of stress and discord through
beauty and harmony.^

*Ian Bogost’s Play Anything;
**Alan Lightman’s The Transcendent Brain;
^Robert McKee‘s newsletter: The World Is Ready For Your Story.