Flow tends to occur when the activity one engages in contains a clear set of goals. These goals seem to add direction and purpose to behaviour.*
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

A myth cannot be correctly understood without a transformative ritual, which brings it into the lives and hearts of generations of worshippers.**
Karen Armstrong

We need some way of getting from here to there,
Goals can sometimes be enough, but sometimes we need
a little more help to boost this …
Enters myth and ritual;
These belong to a special world,
The place we go beyond the ordinary to
explore and expand
the understanding we have of who we are, what we have, and
what we can do –
It’s not make-believe, but a place where
we can see things more clearly and focus on what matters and begin to
imagine and practise possibilities:
Where is your special world – walking alone, journaling, a certain person … , and
what your your special world practices?

*Ben Hardy’s Be Your Future Self Now;
**Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth.

But genres are merely outlines by another name.
Better to be discovering what’s worth discovering.
Noticing what you notice …*
Verlyn Klinkenborg

It’s an attempt to open our minds to possibilities other than the ones we remember, and the ones we already know we like. Something has to be done to get us free of our memories and choices.**
John Cage

There is more to discover –
About yourself, others, the world, and how these can meld into
something new for you, but
firstly, you may have to forget what you know, prefer, enjoy,
Else you may hold back and never know
what might be.

As those memories and choices come to you,
Try writing them into a book or journal, and then
close it firmly (try this whenever a memory causes you to
avoid something new or different) –
Consider these things forgotten
for now, so that you may stumble upon more –
A book, a person, an idea, a journey, an experience …

*Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several short sentences about writing;
**Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting.

You’ll never run out of noticings …
You need a place where you can practice noticing and
making sentences …
What you get in return for this gathering and releasing
Is habit, ease, trust, and a sense of abundance that sustains
your writing.
And your mind never relinquishes what really matters.*
Verlyn Klinkenborg

You never know what you might end up getting good at. Because getting good begets getting good.**
Gabe Anderson

You are of the prime species on this planet
for noticing, and you have no idea in this moment
where you will end up if you
notice your noticings, not in some
tight-fisted way, holding on firmly to whatever you come upon,
But keeping moving in an aimlessly noticing way –
It’s not that you have to do this all the time, only that
some time will provide unexpected rewards.

*Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several short sentences about writing;
**Gabe Anderson’s blog: Getting Good.

Without extraneous words or phrases or clauses, there
will be room for implication.
The longer the sentence, the less its able to imply,
And writing by implication should be one of your
goals.*
Verlyn Klinkenborg

At sixty-six years of age, one might reasonably say, “Oh, enough growth already,” but there has to be growth and change, because life is growth and change.**
Anne Lamott

You and me,
Whatever our age,
We need to live by implication,
Stripping away the unnecessary and diverting
until we find our true focus and direction;
I often invite those I work with to step out of
their ordinary world with all that overcomplicates,
Into a special world of who they are at their core,
Imagining how to be this person in the ordinary world of work and relationships
and activities – if we are unable to imagine a more
energised, talented, and re-orientated self then we are in trouble,
Mind you, I haven’t found anyone like that yet.

*Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several short sentences about writing;
**Anne Lamott’s Dusk Night Dawn.

One by one, each sentence takes the stage.
It says the very thing it comes into existence to say.
Then it leaves the stage.*
Verlyn Klinkenborg

Life transcends itself not in ‘length’ – in the sense of reproduction of itself – but in ‘height’ – by fulfilling values – or in ‘breadth’ in the community.**
Viktor Frankl

If your life were a sentence to deliver on
the stage of life, what would it say before you leave?

In this analogy, we deliver our line for the sake of others
and gain meaning for ourselves as an effect.

We also know that is not how long the sentence is but
what it eloquently says that matters.

It is a line that we ought to allow our heroic self to deliver,
Ensuring no two lines are ever the same.
You have stages you’re already performing on
and stages you might like to perform on,
and my question is: Would you like to show up there
as the heroic version of yourself?^

*Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several short sentences about writing;
**Viktor Frankl’s The Doctor and the Soul;
^Todd Sherman’s The Alter Ego Effect.

This is what creativity serves. It endeavours to brings some of our hidden life to expression in order that we might come to see who we are.*
John O’Donohue

The ability not to rush to conclusions, to keep multiple hypotheses in mind, and to remain open to new information and possibilities is key to not getting sucked into misbelief. We tend to admire and seek out conviction and confidence. But we would be better served if we learned to admire and enjoy a state of ambiguity.**
Dan Ariely

What are you doing when you are being
your most creative? –
It’s possibly not the thing lying on the surface, so
look beneath the obvious action to see what is driving this –
that will lead us to try and to discover more;
What we are doing,
To use Dan Ariely’s words, is avoiding
misbelief in ourselves, being open in an ongoing way to
there being more to find and bring of ourselves –
Then we will need to invent new ways for delivering this.

Take five minutes, and dive beneath the surface of what you do:
Write out the talents or superpowers involved,
What are the values you are seeking to give expression to?
Where are the spikes of high energy?

Don’t judge, remain open:
Spend another five minutes – today or tomorrow – and
rewrite what you have as new possibilities to explore –
It’s still you, but more of you.

*John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
**Dan Ariely’s Misbelief.

Some people wake us up.*

Of the many callings in the world, the invitation to an adventure of an awakened and full life is the most exhilarating.  This is the dream of every heart.  Yet most of us are lost or caught in forms of life that exile us from the life we dream of.  Most people long to step into the path of creative change that would awaken their lives to beauty and passion, deepen their contentment and allow their lives to make a difference.**
John O’Donohue

I am grateful to those who keep me awake,
Especially those who disrupt and disturb and unsettle –
In the best kinds of ways – what is
going on in my mind, heart, and soul.

They keep me on the alert for confirmation bias,
A stunting of the soul, which, according to Clarissa Pinkola Estés
requires feeding with asking questions, creating stories and
making things:
The craft of questions,
The craft of stories,
the craft of the hands –
all these are the making of something,
and that something is soul.
Any time you feed soul,
it guarantees increase.^

Joshua Rothman suggests that we notice
our quirks and enthusiasms towards becoming more
who we are – a feeding of our souls:
Even seemingly unimportant or trivial elements
can contribute to who we are …
We tend to downplay these sorts of quirks and enthusiasms,
but they’re important to who we are.^^

Why not take a moment to write yours down –
Always better than running them through the mind –
Or ask others to identify some for you,
And then lean into these and see what happens,
Whether you feel more awake.

*gapingvoid’s blog: Make Your Impossible Dream a Future Reality;
**John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
^Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run With the Wolves;
^^Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing blog: Life In the Details.

As an adult, I’ve come to realise that life isn’t about finding yourself. It’s about creating yourself. Books are clay for exactly that.*
Tim Ferriss

You can alter the story you are feeding your brain.**
Martin Amor and Alex Pellew

As a recovering poor-reader,^
I’ll try not to be garrulous, but
just to say that books have been an important part of
shaping my life –
Even when we turn a page a day, we may be completing the book that will
change our lives.

There are three intentions necessary, though, for
shaping our lives or altering our stories does not
take place by magic or proximity to wonder alone,
And these intentions alter more than our future and present:
When you begin actively and intentionally
moving forward in your life,
not only does your future get better
but your past does as well.
Your past increasingly becomes something happening
for you, not to you …
Your past evolves as you evolve.^^

The first intention is to wrestle with where we are and
where we want to be (reality) –
For me, this involves reading and journaling;
The second is about space to reflect and imagine –
Coming up with the ideas that provide energy and meaning (imagination);
The third intention is to put these ideas into action (activeness) –
It’s best to identify the smallest iteration so that we can
move quickly and learn and adjust.

*Claudia Bedrick and Maria Popova’s A Velocity of Being;
**Martin Amor and Alex Pellew’s The Idea in You;
^I only really started to read in my late thirties when I hit a crisis in my life;
^^Ben Hardy’s Personality Isn’t Permanent.

People of hope and faith are often unrealistic, and the realists have little faith or hope. We shall find a way out of the present situation only if realism and faith become blended again as they were in some of the great teachers of mankind.*
Erich Fromm

Every idea and every pursuit of an idea inside us is life … The lack of ideas is death.**
Thomas Bernhard

Here it is again,
Faith and hope brought into play with reality,
Echoing Wallace Stevens^ hope of bring imagination together with reality
towards a new reality, Johan Huizinga^^ reconnecting
seriousness and playfulness, and Susan Cain seeing how:
creativity has the power to
look pain in the eye:*^
Faith, hope, imagination, playfulness, and creativity all being ways for us to be
active rather than passive,
Ways to engage reality, not to escape it.

*Erich Fromm’s The Revolution of Hope;
**Peter Turchi’s A Muse and a Maze;
^Wallace Stevens’ The Necessary Angel;
^^Johan Huizinga’s Home Ludens
*^Susan Cain’s Bittersweet.

Sooner or later we must distinguish between what we are not and what we are. We must accept the fact that we are not what we would like to be. We must cast off our false, exterior self like the cheap and showy garment it is … We must find our real self, in all its elemental poverty, but also in its great and very simple dignity … .*
Thomas Merton

To know yourself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility.*
Brother Dave

The road continues
if you want it to;
You are understanding more of who
you are not and
what you do not have –
You are incomplete as the world measures it –
But you find yourself on an unfolding path of possibility,
Now that you have shed who you are not and
do not dwell on what you do not have.

There are many places to begin –
Here is one:
Name what you are most curious about and
energised by;
Identify those things in your life which
obstruct these, or don’t align:
What can you shed?

Better begins with each of us, but it evaporates when we settle for less. Settling is rarely intentional, instead it happens when we focus on other things.**

*Ian Morgan Cron’s The Road Back to You;
**Seth Godin’s blog: Can’t wait.