We should take wandering outdoor walks, so that the mind might be nourished and refreshed by the open air and deep breathing.*
Seneca

The natural world delicately captures our attention with artefacts such as big trees, intricate plants, and small animals…It allows the neural resources that guide our voluntary attention to recharge.**
Ethan Kross

Whether we recognise it
or not,
Outdoors acts upon us
in many positive ways.

I spent yesterday indoors,
And today I must
get out into a bigger,
Less demanding, quieter world.

I have realised
for many years how
“I need a day with fields in it”^–
I-Thou.

Though today’s walk
won’t be through Country,
It will have Big Sky and Budding Trees
greeting me again and again.

*Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic;
**Ethan Kross’ Chatter;
^A phrase I found myself saying over many years.

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Most of us would like to live with wonder, grace and optimism.  Perhaps it pays to practice this in advance. When considering any given moment, is there a glimmer of good worth focusing on, even making a comment about? Our narrative of reality often becomes our reality.*
Seth Godin

Are we waiting for someone
to bring us wonder, grace and optimism?

What if we are
the ones to bring these– the chosen ones?

Perhaps those times
of mundanity, heaviness, and negativity are opportunities?

Better a story
than moving from drama to drama.

A myth, though, is mightier,
And we each have a myth within us.**

*Seth Godin’s blog: Rehearsing possibility;
**Living life as a series of dramas produces fragility, growing stories provides us with resilience, but myths are to do with life’s deep wells of being, developing antifragility – see Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile.

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So the way to live is to ignore everything new.
All of it.
Let the test of time filter everything.
Value only what has endured.*
Derek Sivers

But who you aren’t isn’t interesting.**
Rob Bell

What stands the test of time is who you are.

When I am helping others to identify their talents, we go to the past.

What you have done in the past successfully, intuitively, whilst growing and meeting your needs.

These are the things you can do more of with imagination, innovation, and grace.

I, for one, am glad for you who are and who you will be and become.

*Derek Sivers’ How To Live;
**Rob Bell’s How To Be Here.

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Out of our incompleteness and our disorientation, out of our longing and our wanderlust, arises the motive force of every love and every revolution, of our science and our art, of our creation and our self-creation. Every creative act is an act of traversal.*
Maria Popova

Someday, maybe we will have the courage to add “the communion of sinners,” too.**
Richard Rohr

I do not believe
I journey to become complete
but because I am incomplete,
I do not keep walking because
I want to be found
but because I am lost,
I do not want to come to an end
but to continue beginning;
Perhaps this is
who we are?

*Maria Popova’s The Marginalian blog: Where Love Goes When It Goes;
**Richard Rohr’s The Tears of Things; suggesting an addition to the Apostles’ Creed’s “the communion of saints.”

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To put it another way that only slightly exaggerates, green spaces seem to function like a great therapist, anti-aging elixir, and immune-system booster all in one.*
Ethan Kross

No, he explained, we need the wild places because they remind us of a world beyond the human. Forest, plains, prairies, deserts, mountains: the experiences of those landscapes can give people a sense of bigness outside themselves that has in some way been lost.**
(Wallace Stegner)

Be carried up to the skies,
Listen to the song of the river,
Watch the explorer-insect clamber the flower,
Feel the exertions of the wind–
The wilds are closer than we know.

Even when we think
that nature is doing
us no good,
It
is.

*Ethan Kross’ Chatter;
**Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places.

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Every single moment contains thousands of possibilities – and I can only choose one of them to actualise it … everything I realise through them, or “bring into the world,” … I save into reality and thus protect from transience.*
Viktor Frankl

I put a minute
on the timer
whilst I doodled
this doodle for you–
Over too soon,
The minute
had turned
into a moment
and I had to
force myself
to stop–
It’s an amazing
trick that we can
make happen.

*Viktor Frankl’s Yes to Life.

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Each time the thought to give arises, act on it. Then notice what happens, in my experience, generosity never leads to remorse.*
Joseph Goldstein

Bad things happen when we employ rational thought, because rational thoughts come from the ego. Instead, we want to work from the Self, that is from instinct and intuition, from the unconscious.**
Steven Pressfield

We may never know
the full out-workings of our moments
of generosity.

Many of these impulses
come from our deeper,
Better selves.

This is the Self we are becoming–
Where our talents and values
and energies meet.

We’re not looking for meaning
and purpose – we’re living it,
Dealing a blow to boredom.

*Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations For Mortals;
**Steven Pressfield’s Do the Work.

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We most easily see a system when the systems bend under stress.*
Seth Godin

Systems transformation involves working with time in contradictory ways: with urgency and patience, with beginning and ending, with pressing on and relaxing.**
Adam Kahane

I’m a system,
You’re a system:
When something goes wrong,
It’s probably been headed that way
for a while.

Ongoing system-development
won’t cover everything that might go awry,
But it will catch most chronic issues
and even prepare us
for many acute ones.

We underestimate the need
for at least daily maintenance;
It doesn’t appear in many TV dramas
because it doesn’t make
the necessary angsty characters.

It is an oft forgotten art
for keeping to the drama
we want to be exploring
in our lives and
avoiding the unwanted kind.

*Seth Godin’s This Is Strategy;
**Adam Kahane’s Everyday Habits For Transforming Systems.

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Neurotic fatalism is only another disguised form of escape from responsibility; the neurotic fatalist is betraying his uniqueness and singularity when he seeks refuge in typicality and courts the unalterable destiny of belonging to a type.*
Viktor Frankl

To hope is risk. It’s to take a chance on losing. It’s also to take a chance on winning, and you can’t win if you don’t try …**
Rebecca Solnit

We are inventing
more “types” all the time–
But you are not a type.

To be you is a risk
and you may fail–
But real hope has no expiration date.

We need a hopeful expression
of you around here.

*Viktor Frankl’s The Doctor and the Soul;
**Rebecca Solnit’s No Straight Road Takes You There.

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The things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.*
James Baldwin

An increase in racial diversity by just one standard deviation increased productivity by more than 25 percent in legal services, health services and finance … Diversity isn’t some optional add-on. It isn’t the icing on the cake. Rather, it is the basic ingredient of collective intelligence.**
Matthew Syed

The great oneness,
As Mohandas Gandhi named it,
Is our great endeavour.

We are wrong
if we believe this only exists
in diversity, equality, and inclusion policies.

It is, as those
who have orbited our planet know,
Our reality.

I once was lost in a smaller world,
But, thank God, I keep being found
into a larger world.

*Ryan Holiday’s Right Thing, Right Now;
**Matthew Syed’s Rebel Ideas.

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