In art, so in life: resistance prompts us to think.*
Richard Sennett

Inauthentic means effective, reasoned, intentional. It means it’s not personal, it’s generous.**
Seth Godin

Perhaps the resistance you meet
will aid you towards a better response or
answer –
Different, inauthentic –
that ease would not have
uncovered.

Here are five major resistances to
contemplate:
Life is hard,
You are not as special as you think,
Your life is not about you,
You are not in control,
You are going to die.^

*Richard Sennett’s Building and Dwelling;
**Seth Godin’s The Practice;
^Richard Rohr’s Adam’s Return.

This is a fascinating, perhaps distinctlvely iGen idea: the world is an inherently dangerous place because every social interaction carries the risk of being hurt. You never know what someone is going to say, and there’s no way to protect yourself from it.*
Jean Twenge

The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow stronger.**
William Butler Yeats

Is the world a dangerous place?
Yes:
Is the world a magical place?
Yes;
Perhaps, as we grow the depth
and wonder and glory of
who we are, we may see and name this world,
This life,
Sacred:
a way of seeing that is
based on what the soul
already knows, that both
the earth and every
human being are sacred^.

This life will not
come to us,
We must go find it,
As Viktor Frankl proffers:
Life no longer appears to us
as a given, but
as something given over to us,
it is a task in every moment.
This therefore means that it can
only become more meaningful the more
difficult it becomes.^^

We must be vulnerable to life,
To the danger as well as the magic –
Though not the chaos – as poet
David Whyte helps us to see
as he writes:
We try and construct a life in which
we will be perfect, in which we will
eliminate awkwardness, pass by
vulnerability, ignore
ineptness, only to
pass through the gate of our lives
and find strangely that
the gateway is vulnerability itself.
The very place were are open
to the world whether
we like it or not.*^

*Jean Twenge’s iGen;
**Jonah Paquette’s Awestruck;
^Philip Newell’s Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul;
^^Viktor Frankl’s Yes to Life;
*^David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea.

Individuality can only be valuable when it is not individuality for its own sake, but individuality for the human community.*
Viktor Frankl

This is what the best journals look like. They aren’t for the reader. They are for the writer. To slow the mind down. To wage peace with oneself.**
Ryan Holiday

Alone at the beginning of the day,
Pen and journal slow
time, and peace
breaks through.

(You’re welcome to print this doodle off and colour it in – another way to slow time down; there’s around two hours of colouring here, though you don’t have to do it all at once.)

*Viktor Frankl’s Yes To Life;
**Ryan Holiday’s Stillness is the Key.

And now to the question of the meaning of our imbalances: let us not forget that each person is imperfect, but each is imperfect in a different way, each “in his own way.” And as imperfect as he is, he is uniquely imperfect. So, expressed in a positive way, he becomes somehow irreplaceable, unable to be represented by anyone else, unexchangeable.*
Viktor Frankl

If you are going to describe a person as an artist, you must describe the person with ruthless objectivity. It is the imperfections that identify them. It is the imperfections that ask for our love … a person who can give humanity the images to help it live … recognises the imperfections around him with compassion.**
Joseph Campbell

And we can all be an artist …
Of some kind or other,
Gathering and manipulating
ideas or materials for the
benefit of others, some thing or other that,
As we lean into it, becomes
quite unique –
And, more likely than not, because we have
not avoided our imperfections, nor
denied having them, but
allowed them to be
transformed along the way, even
into something beautiful.

*Viktor Frankl’s Yes To Life;
**Joseph Campbell’s Pathways To Bliss.

This slide towards average sands of all interesting edges, destroying energy, interest and possibility.*
Seth Godin

What is there without you?
What seeds unsown?
What will not spring?
What is left unknown?
Lemn Sissay

I’m not interested in overall average –
That doesn’t concern me;
My curiosity lies in what is possible
when a person decides
not to settle in the middle of
who they can be, but sets out
to explore the above average of
their being and doing.

*Seth Godin’s The Practice;
**Lemn Sissay’s let the light pour in.

I get that it’s important to be safe, but I worry about the consequences of making that a priority. If you don’t take chances, how can you invent yourself? If you aren’t comfortable with instability, how can you create change?*
Jean Twenge

If we’re afraid or benefitting from feeling trapped, we start to eliminate the handles.**
Seth Godin

Whilst Jean Twenge is concerned
for the iGeneration’s^ desire for safety, it is possible that
we all recognise the disposition that avoids risk, and
can find our way into it’s soporific clasp,
So resisting committing and investing, moving, exploring and experimenting, attracting criticism,
And yet experience tells us, this is exactly where we find the possibilities …
And the guides –
We will also become guides to others:
The world to a guide, is larger than themselves and
their personal story. 
Guides care … The guide passes down more than wisdom;
they pass down compassion and empathy.
They have been defeated themselves and have
climbed back; they know how it feels to be tempted by
helplessness. They have been misunderstood, so they seek
to understand. They have been abandoned, so they are
loyal.^^

*Jean Twenge’s iGen;
**Seth Godin’s blog: Looking for a handle;
^iGen is Twenge’s name for the generation who have grown up with and have been shaped by the iPhone, born after 1995 and entering university around 2013;
^^Donald Miller’s Hero On a Mission.

If you want a breakthrough, or something at the top of the rankings, or a skill that few have, or a chance to build something you’re proud of … it doesn’t pay to also require it to be convenient.*
Seth Godin

In the so-called Hero’s Journey, the “call to adventure” is followed in almost all cases by the refusal of the call … There’s almost no accomplishment that is possible without courage. The courage …to take a risk … to be uniquely you … to challenge the status quo … to do what looks strange to others … to run toward while others run away … to do what people say is impossible.**
Ryan Holiday

It will require effort
to be repeated,
Probably each day;
There will be other
things to be done, but
we will have to decide
if they are really
more important –
The life story you’re writing
will help you decide:
It can be the convenient that
gets in the way of life.

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not whither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.^

*Seth Godin’s blog: And also inconvenient (source lost);
**gapingvoid’s blog: Courage is calling;
^J. R. R. Tolkien‘s All That is Gold Does Not Whither, from William Sieghart’s The Poetry Pharmacy.

Don’t aim at success – the more you make it your target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue … as the intended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself.*
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

As you reflect on how your actions flow outward, creating a cascade of goodness around you, you may experience a feeling of awe.**
Jonah Paquette

The very readable Dan Ariely shares how,
human motivation is actually based on
a timescale that is long, sometimes
even longer than
our lifetime^ –
With such a destination, it is likely that
we are creating quite a journey, one that is
concerning itself with content and form –
What we have and how we shape this for
others:
Story is about originality,
not duplication. True originality is
the meeting of content and form^^ –
These are elements our triple focus of
humility and gratitude and faithfulness allow us
to play with,
Leading to some surprise results.

I don’t remember where I picked up
the following four tests for the kind of cause
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes of,
But they remind us of its bitter and sweet:
Success is not guaranteed;
There will be those who hate it;
It is more important than life itself;
It will be personally transformative:
Time to play.

*Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow;
**Jonah Paquette’s Awestruck;
^Dan Ariely’s Payoff;
^^Robert McKee‘s newsletter: Why We Must Strive For Originality.

Somewhere, something amazing is waiting to be known.*
Carl Sagan

Technology is miraculous but so too is nature – and this aspect of the world’s wonder seems under threat of erasure in children’s narratives, dreams and plots.**
Robert Macfarlane

Towards saving our world,
A good place to begin could be
to include more
natural awe in our day –
Gazing at a tree and attempting to draw it may hive
one place to begin,
Spotting and listing the birds or bugs,
Or bugs and birds around our homes is another;
I’ve just picked up
Jacqueline Freeman’s Song of Increase to help me discover
the wisdom of honeybees.^

Natural awe is our fuel for what
we must do.

*Jonah Paquette’s Awestruck;
**Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks;
^And anything from Robert Macfarlane makes for awe-filled reading.

You step into the portal to discover what you didn’t know you were looking for.*
Austin Kleon

Nothing changes until someone cares enough to build an alternative.**
Seth Godin

A portal isn’t only a door,
It’s an opening into a previously unimagined or
unvisited world:
Austin Kleon is describing the place of writing
in just such a way, something Henri Nouwen further emphasises
when he writes:
Writing is a process in which we discover
what lives in us.
The writing itself reveals to us
what is alive in us.
The deepest satisfaction of writing is
precisely that it opens new spaces within us
of which we were not aware before
we started to write.
To write is to embark on a journey of which
we do not know the final destination.^

A conversation is another kind of portal,
And dreamwhispering is a conversation that is
an alternative to coaching and mentoring –
Not better, just
different, and I created it
for you.

*Austin Kleon’s blog: Stepping into the portal;
**Seth Godin’s blog: Build a new one;
^Henri Nouwen’s Spiritual Direction.