Reboot Procedure for the Human Soul
Connection . Purpose . Belonging . Vitality . Conviction . Creativity . Meaning
This post emphasizes the core and essential role of ‘Soul’, in finding connection, purpose, and belonging, reasoning that a life lacking these elements feels incomplete.
—Exploring our shared struggles of modern life, where even those in leadership find themselves longing for what they are charged with providing, revealing a collective crisis of meaning and connection, suggesting that the journey towards a richer existence lies in acknowledging and nurturing our Souls’ needs.
Soul is the human thirst and capacity for connection, purpose and belonging, from which we derive our vitality and creativity and our ability to renew and be renewed—from where we derive all meaning.
Soul is what is missing when life feels wrong.
Have you ever had the kind of experience where you felt like you were in a play, or in a movie scene—something you usually only appreciated the fullness and depth of, some time after the moment itself had passed?
These are the kind of moments where, on reflection, it felt like a stage director had been carefully choreographing the scene, the other actors, the drama and the punchline, and all the while there was this subtle hanging tension, inviting us to wake up to the comedy and magic of it all. It happens to me when an obscure song lyric suddenly speaks to me, or I am driving along with my wife and we are debating something and right then, a slogan on the side of a passing truck magically resolves the debate in a poetic and humorous way.
If we are very lucky, we sometimes wake up to the emerging magic of such a moment, and it can feel as if the universe is winking at us, as if it heard our troubled prayers for rescue or revelation, and played a card, right under our noses, that laughed in the face of our overblown concern, or perhaps the smallness of our imaginings. And always, the joke is private, between us and the universe, and it can feel like we are in a relationship with something that keeps trying to remind us to not take ourselves so seriously. In encountering this sort of experience, we can be forgiven for thinking the way our ancestors did, that we are the gods’ playthings.
Under the same stage lighting of cosmic irony, we can notice that if we anticipate a moment, and carry expectation onto the stage, somehow, this invariably kills the magic.
How curious.
We are not all so very static and fixed as we imagine. At times we find notions like this silly and naive, preferring the cold comfort of reductionism, reaching for the firm handrails of everything literal and tangible in this world. At other times, we look for meaning in signs and symbols, in stories, and then, in deeply troubled moments, even the most sceptical among us can be pushed by dire circumstance and desperation, to reach for prayer.
When we do this, we feel troubled even in our reaching out to something beyond ourselves, because of how it challenges our sense of self, in how our identity is tied up in the fixed confidence of one mindset or another. We find our footing in life either in the paradigm of the symbolic and the ineffable, or the paradigm of cold reason. The truth is, that based on our life experiences, we can be mistrustful of science, or mistrustful of spirituality. When someone says they do not trust science, what they mean is that they have seen it practised badly, specifically with misaligned intentions. The same is exactly true for spirituality and religion.
The trick I discovered, is to straddle the paradox, with one foot in either paradigm, and in shifting our weight between the two as needed. When it comes to finding meaning in a difficult phase of my own life, I turn to the figurative—I keep the ear of my heart open to the conversation, and I pay attention to the messages that the world is speaking to me. When I get a toothache, I go straight to the dentist.
I remember being an inveterate reductionist and atheist and I remember how I felt in my sense of belonging to the world. I armed myself with an understanding of the philosophies of reason, of physics and quantum mechanics and through this, I made peace with a sense of how the world worked. I firmly rejected the notion of ‘Christian God’ and ‘fleamarket spirituality’ and I considered all of religion to be superstitious at best, and at worst a deceitful sham. Anything that could not be explained by science, was either hokum or, the human race had simply not yet discovered the science or invented the technology to adequately explain it. I still believe this actually, only I have come to understand that not all technology is physics and mechanics, and not everything that is effective can be comfortably proven in a laboratory. I have seen time and time again, simple breathwork and poetry achieve what years of medication and psychology could not.
In my late thirties and early forties, I came to a very low point—a protracted low arc of life—whereby almost all of the ways that humans can come to harm, through injury, illness, personal loss, financial strife, marriage breakdown and poor mental health, all converged and found me and my reductionist view on life woefully inadequate to provide any solutions or meaningful guidance. I remember exactly how it felt to rifle through all the knowledge and information I had, to earnestly consult philosophy, science, medicine and the orthodox wisdom of modern Western culture and to come up empty time and time again. It felt like a sandcastle where a shovel load of sand taken from one corner, can start an irreversible chain reaction, in which you have an innate understanding that you are watching entropy, live. The structure that seemed firm and tangible the one minute, steadily erodes before your eyes, in a way that cannot be put back together.
I have spent many hours since then reflecting on that earlier difficult arc of my own journey. As is so often the case, we cannot fully grasp a moment while it is unfolding, or how necessary these forms of breaking down are to enable the more authentic version of ourselves to emerge from the rubble. Only in contrast to the warmth, resonance and realness of the life I have built and the world I now belong to, that sense of wholeness, can I accurately describe that unrequited belonging I longed for so deeply, but could not find, as cold.
A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then.
Time in Ireland
More recently, in May of 2023, I travelled to Ireland to take part in a walking tour organised by the renowned poet David Whyte. (If you have not encountered his work, make the effort to do so, you will thank me deeply later!)
The trip was extraordinary. We arrived in spring, the days were fresh but mostly sunny, and the mornings were crisp. I joined twenty-four other travellers—all pilgrims of a sort, all on their own journeys in search of healing, forgiveness, grace and purpose. Leaving our lives and busy schedules behind for a time, we were folded into a space that was both familiar and strange, held in a kind of cocoon or perhaps a boat, in which we moved to the ebb of currents where the sense of time and urgency of our normal lives were suspended. In one way it could have been seen as a retreat, in another sense, the word ‘advance’ seemed more apt.
I have come to understand that it is not only the deeply troubled who are deeply troubled. If you are devoted to growth, if you have a child, a project, a relationship any loved one that you deeply care about, you are vulnerable to life. Your heart will be broken and your promises taken from you, and you will make mistakes. There isn’t another way that gets you there and delivers the deep sense of meaning that allows anything to mean anything at all.
The troubles and questions that I carried with me, which I discovered almost too late in that experience, were actually too banal for the deeper context and broader understanding that was trying to arrive. The hard-won, hard-earned identity that I was holding onto, was in fact too small to allow the more expansive version of myself to arrive.
The language I was holding the whole conversation of my life in, was too small for the territory I had already entered. This is something that is true for all of us, individually, and also as a society. Many of our notions of success, status, happiness and what might give our lives a sense of fulfilment belong to a paradigm whose time is already passing after we draw our plans. Our collective body of modern wisdom and prudence is steadily sliding into redundancy, belonging to an era and generational culture whose time has past its zenith and will not come again. We are right in the heart of enormous change.
It was in the middle of that trip that I realised almost too late, that it was an initiation. We were duly initiated, into music, local lore, myth, poetry and the land, an experience that was metered out over 10 days and happened without announcement or visible ceremony. It simply unfolded, and the experience was one of waking up at the very heart of the unfolding. The walks themselves were long treks through the ancient landscapes of North Clare, Galway & Connemara in the southwest of Ireland, buffeted by the relentless arctic winds, and drawn deeply into the green centre—where the blood horses gallop.
The themes that emerged were about disappearance and arrival, about replenishment, and the ever-present invitation of curious symmetry to be found when we come to the edge of what is familiar and known, prepared to put down our defences—our urgency to name things, to classify and categorise—so that the genius of the place, or the moment, can speak to us. The notion that kept recurring, was how in our attempt to force an answer, force a belonging, force a resolution, proved to be precisely that which was keeping what we thought we were longing for, from actually arriving. The more expansive answer is always hidden behind our small questions, inviting us to ask better questions. The more simple form of belonging is authenticity, which by definition cannot be forced. And the resolution we sought, always contrary to our limited expectations.
Invariably the understanding that arrived, was that there is a seasonality to everything, including people, jobs, projects and relationships, and that, there is a constant unfolding occurring, which means we need regular re-initiation into the unfolding truth of each other.
The myths, the stories, the music and even the meals were simply the medium through which was conveyed a sense of poetic coincidence that was experienced collectively with a shared sense of humour and delight, and also very privately by each person, whereby looking outwards at the shape of the world kept telling us something meaningful about the shape of our inner worlds.
My later reflections were captured into a short book, Stepping Through, exploring how, in our most troubled moments, other voices can speak to us. In a sense, it is the voice of our own imagination, the way we once spoke before we became encumbered by adult sensibility before life broke our hearts and forced us down the path of conformity. It is a voice we had become deaf to, that lifts the veil of complexity and reductionism and reveals a quality of truth that is best described as myth.
Myth, of course, is a way of telling tall tales that conspire somehow to point more clearly to a deeper truth. When our lives are troubled with overwhelm, sometimes the only way we can rediscover the orientation to meaning, is by letting go of the literal and embracing the wisdom of the figurative. Sometimes the symbols and metaphors can draw a much clearer map to follow when we become in this way, lost. Above all, it is the voice of our own soul, speaking very quietly from between the lines of our journals, which we overhear as soon as we can find the courage to stop picking the locks of our misfortunes. It is an invitation to drop what we are so busy doing, spoken by who we are refusing to allow to arrive while we do it. It is about the wisdom of a kind of surrender, of not being so certain, allowing ourselves perhaps even to disappear. The invitation to disappearance which the caterpillar follows without fully realising, is part of a greater invitation to emergence, the arrival of the butterfly—a transcendence that can only be accomplished through transformation, a transformation that can only be achieved through complete surrender.
The secret aim of tension, is transformation.
Our periods of difficulty and adversity always serve as invitations, to recognize that life's richest experiences and deepest understandings often elude rational explanation, requiring not only a balance between the tangible and the ineffable, but a constant tension. It suggests that embracing the paradoxes of life, being open to the poetic and the mythic, can lead us to a more expansive and authentic engagement with the world and ourselves.
What Makes Us Ill
There is a friend I met on that walking tour of Ireland, who plies their trade in the business world, consulting to and coaching some of the most influential people in the world, namely CEOs and other senior business leaders, whose extents—or limits—of imagination, courage and conviction, define the projects and outcomes which shape the entire corporate world and thereby all the people that work for them and who are touched by their activity, or by their products and services.
This friend and I shared many profound experiences together, and many deeply silly moments of laughter and levity, and on the back of that rare intimacy we began to speak about our life callings, our own senses of purpose, and our relationship to craft. That is to say, how we pursued our senses of calling. We shared how we currently practised our professions in ways that allowed us—and didn’t—to share our gifts into the world and to curate our relationships, most especially with ourselves, and how we now aimed to evolve these in light of the experiences we had encountered.
The one pivotal conversation stayed with me. It was about how these paragons of corporate industry, the leaders enthroned at the very top of our organisations, are themselves surprisingly, or perhaps unsurprisingly, deeply unwell. Almost to the last man (or woman), they were in desperate need of everything they were expected to provide and have an innate wellspring of, namely vision, direction, leadership and wisdom.
My friend had analysed years of interactions and cases, and when washed clean of corporate speak, the synopsis was one of profound isolation, depletion and anxiety. The sheer irony was that these captains of the ships secretly shared a sense of purposelessness and meaninglessness, a kind of fatigue or malaise in their own psyche that did not match, and that could not be fed by, the outer notion of drive and intentionality they were expected to exemplify, according to the expectations of the organisation they led.
We are all busy with different life projects, the shape of which we inherit from our societies and cultures, which we perhaps never expressly chose, and then certainly not with ‘eyes wide open’. As young people we are ushered through a sheep-dipping tank of education and towards the gates of employment, left totally unprepared for the world that unfolded between the time that the education systems were designed and we stepped through it. As a result, now more than ever, we arrive in adulthood, never having arrived fully in our own bodies—we arrive uninitiated. We step out onto the thoroughfare of adulthood, with no adequate tools to process the way our psychologies and nervous systems were configured by adolescence and our first calamitous encounters with the uncompromising realities of life. We wake up one morning to the dawning realisation that the tree of opportunity with its once-infinite branches we had in our youth, has been pruned right down, and that the fruit yielded by what remains is not something we are contented eating for the rest of our lives. A human life seen one way is a series of stage gates, which we become only vaguely aware of after we have crossed the threshold. Each stage gate is a ratchet clank of the gears of mortality that are steadily and relentlessly unwinding the tight coil of a spring that was loaded at birth. At each stage gate, a different sense of mortality arrives, not in a morbid sense around fearing the literal curtain call of death, but rather a regret of how the finite budget of our youth, was spent.
Youthfulness, in essence, is an innate appreciation of an abundance of opportunity.
When we are young, we inevitably have a natural sense of buoyancy born from an unconscious notion that the world is full of near-infinite possibility. Before these collapse into the fixed paths determined by the big life choices—like career, marriage, children, mortgage and immigration—we face our adversities with a very different species of regret. Every path we commit to cauterises every other path that will forever remain not just the road less travelled, but the path not taken. When you are young, your cycles seem so bountiful before you. As we get older, the commitments that bind us either contribute to our peace of mind and deep sense of fulfilment, or they detract from it.
Our daughter is at toddler age, and her notion of calamity and remorse is always amplified and centred around the failure of her parents and the world to conform to her completely uninformed and unrealistic expectations. Her sense of disappointment and devastation when she cannot eat ice cream for dinner is no less visceral than someone who is devastated over something far more consequential like losing a loved one or losing their job before Christmas. Nevertheless, as with all young people, she does not have enough context or experience yet to imagine or conceive what real regret will feel like one day.
As such, when we are younger, without proper initiation into the unfolding reality we step into, with the dated user manual of a generation that is already sliding into redundancy, but who nevertheless act as gatekeepers of our initial journeys. Before we know what the consequences of choices will be, we are deciding things that will prune the tree of our possibility and opportunity for fulfilment into a permanent shape, in whose shade we cannot find true rest. We ‘choose’ which degree to spend four years of our life on, at which college to do that, and which career to invest in for fulfilment. We ‘choose’ what kind of partner to choose as our love interest, what neighbourhood or country to live in, and thereby what kind of friends our children will grow up with or what life they will have when it is their turn to choose. We choose how we should invest in self-care and personal development—or fail to.
After years of running my own therapy and counselling practice, I came to a sobering understanding of what a midlife crisis is. It is nothing more than the biological clock of a human being, on arriving at a stage gate, becoming aware of the shape of their own tree, and finding that they don’t like what their earlier self did with garden saw and pruning shears.
Similarly, either at one of these stage gates, or more frequently, in moments of deep trouble, we wake up to another form of internal unravelling, whereby we are not assured that we have what it takes to face the full responsibilities that keep arriving, or whether we can find the conviction in ourselves to keep trying. When we encounter a deeply troubling moment, we sober up into the troubling reality, as husbands and wives, as parents, as colleagues and leaders, in roles we cannot easily step away from, which carry expectations and responsibilities that we did not exactly choose. Or better said, roles which we would maybe have chosen somewhat differently if we had known better, or at least taken the time to manage expectations.
The result—out of a sense of pride, or to avoid guilt and shame, or out of duty, necessity or even what we mistakenly believe is out of love—is that we hold ourselves to these roles and the responsibilities we believe they imply. A parent only really understands what responsibility for a child is, when the kind of trouble arrives, for which they are ill-equipped and under-resourced. As a husband or a wife, we only really understand the full gravity of that commitment when we fall out of love with the person we have sworn to honour and cherish. When you deeply care for something, like when you have a team to manage or when you perhaps have children of your own and encounter unfairness, ugliness and danger in the world, you begin to realise that we cannot live our truth and keep the peace. The discomfort and conflict are how our character is shaped, one way or another.
That is it precisely.
—We cannot live our truth while holding ourselves, or being held, to something that constricts our freedoms and our growth, especially when it impacts something or someone we care really deeply for. We either apply our defiance to the world that seeks to impress expectations on us that are antithetical to our truth of authenticity and integrity, or we apply defiance to our own truth in the service of acceptance from others.
Similarly, a leader, such as a CEO, can only really understand the full depth of their charge as a leader in moments of extreme adversity, or interestingly, of conflicting opportunity. Sometimes the sense of professional expectation, and/or duty, is so high that the leader chooses service at the expense of their own truth. Powerful individuals such as CEOs build their entire careers on confidence, charisma and an ability to project a sense of unwavering conviction, enough to warrant the investment of trust—and the welfare of—thousands of people whose lives will be affected by the quality of their choices.
We never get taught how to reshape our lives without harming our key relationships and with it our sense of belonging. We don’t know how to renegotiate the terms of our roles and the expectations and responsibilities they imply, and we don’t allow this easily in other people either. We all carry a sense of responsibility to each other, to our neighbours and fellow citizens, to our colleagues and friends. Our cultures, that is family culture, corporate culture or industry culture, are vague but nevertheless very present and demanding bodies of etiquette and decorum we are expected to uphold.
To live in the world, is to be held to many conflicting expectations at the same time, and all outcomes of depletion, anxiety and isolation in any relationship, come from the impossible task of trying to hold ourselves equally and simultaneously to all of them—or consider ourselves as flawed or failing. The moralistic preaching of religion does its own egregious harms, and now identity politics and internet culture further turn this from a quagmire into a minefield, that is constantly shifting underneath our feet.
So many of us actually suffer from what I call a lack of appreciation of our own truth.
To better explain, I don’t think it is accurate to say I suffer from a condition of neurodivergence—in the same way that I do not think people suffer from a condition of autism or ADHD, or bipolar disorder, or from depression for that matter—as much as they suffer from a lack of appreciation by everyone they are in relationship with, what the truth of that condition is. Our collective understanding of neurochemistry and psychology is so poor, and so shallow, that the result is an overwhelming state of affairs whereby—outside of situations of overt hardship, like extreme poverty, war and abuse—almost all of human suffering and dysfunction arises from an ignorance of the truth of another person’s subjective experience, and them of ours.
Our first intention, even if we are responsible for a spouse, for children, for a team or even for an entire organisation, is not actually to understand everyone else’s truth—that has to come along anyway—but first rather, as a matter of essential priority, we have to understand our own.
The Panacea of Soul
There is a word associated with alchemy called Panacea, which comes from the Greek pan meaning “all”, and akos/akaeia meaning “remedy or cure”. One of the fabled pursuits of the alchemist was to produce the Panacea—the legendary remedy able to cure all ills.
We are all on different journeys, but regardless, whatever challenges in life we face, we either need to grieve the days and years we give away to denying our own truth, or we need to endure the discomfort and uncertainty of growth and change. We are all facing challenging times, regardless of our political inclinations, or the state of our marriage, or the industry we work in, the world is troubled. The scale of war we believed once that we may have outgrown after the last two world wars, is again seeming increasingly possible. Our national apparatuses of democracy and their political anima are increasingly out of their depths to maintain a country and the welfare of its people, let alone manage global problems such as climate change and the imminent food crisis. Regardless of our age, our sexual orientation, our gender identity, or the colour of our skin, regardless of our neurodivergence, religion, personal philosophy or attitudes towards immigration or vaccination, we are all facing the same unfolding reality.
Our biggest challenge so far, has been our inability as a species, to converge on what the source of the problem is, and therefore what the remedy should entail, and therefore what coordination and future thinking might need to look like. There are as many divided opinions on this as there are Twitter accounts.
Nevertheless, whatever individual challenges or malaise we might have, we all share the same collective ailments, namely Depletion, Disillusionment, Isolation & Loneliness, Aimlessness and languishing under Meaninglessness.
As an example, CEOs are expected to define purpose, to project a sense of fidelity to their role which implies absolute belonging, like a captain tied to the fate of their ship. They are supposed to be the ultimate arbiters of empowerment within their organisations, responsible for the vitality of the business, and expected to foster creativity and growth. The burden of doing this, without knowing how to foster and replenish these resources in themselves, much less their organisations, when they are used up, is what renders a person isolated, depleted, disillusioned and anxious.
It is not that Purpose, Conviction, Belonging, Empowerment, Vitality and Creativity are finite, but rather that in the context of our modern Western lifestyles, they do not replenish themselves. Physical health is a factor of diet and lifestyle and equally Mental health is a factor of habit and life choices. Both have requirements of maintenance and investment.
In a word, we are disconnected from all the natural rhythms of life by which these would be maintained or replenished, and we are ignorant of—uninitiated into—the requisite practices. Ideas like fasting, breathwork, meditation and yoga are still largely considered to be fads for people with too much time on their hands, rather than the essential modalities of regulation whose absence we are all ailing from. Our holidays have become reduced in relevance limited to their commercial significance and the chance of a day off. We do not live close to the land, we do not fetch our daily water and thereby gather daily around the well. We do not grow our own food and with electric lighting, we do not have periods of darkness, to gather together around the fireplace and share stories.
In the language of poetry, the metaphor applied to these resources of replenishment is hearths or wells. Some artesian wells are perennial but still have seasonal cycles, which are affected by rainfall, geography and the geology of the place where they flow. A fireplace is only as warm as the fuel you burn. If the fireplace is not cleaned and cleared, it soon becomes choked in its own ash. If a well is clogged by silt and rubble or overgrown with weeds, the flow will be stemmed.
By extension then, our plight, our chances of loving well and of leading others well, of fulfilment, growth, healing, etc. are all best served by a restoration of our vitality, and creativity—by a pursuit of our senses of belonging, connection, and ultimately our sense of meaning.
In the realm of philosophy, psychology or ideology for that matter, the simplest diagnostic of suffering and dysfunction is via the following statement:
Soul is what is missing when life feels wrong.
Anything can have soul, or lack it—a restaurant, a movie, a meal, a room, a relationship or a company. Soul is what is missing when it feels wrong, or cold. Once you foster soul, there is no substitute for it. Once you become used to it being there, you feel it immediately and unmistakably when it isn’t.
The premise of all my work, of this substack, this article and the videos and programs that will follow, are all centered around this, and therefore rest on the definition which says that “Soul is nothing more than the human thirst and capacity for connection, purpose and belonging, from which we derive our vitality and creativity and our ability to renew and be renewed—from where we derive all meaning.”
To heal, repair, debug, reconfigure or restore the world, or our own careers or relationships to be the kind we deeply want to belong to—and find deep fulfilment in—we of course, need to heal, repair, debug, reconfigure and restore ourselves. We can debate philosophy, politics, ideology and religion, and semantics, ‘all the livelong day’, and nothing will ever be more efficient or more effective than treating the problem simply, as ‘Soullessness’.
I've been workin' on the railroad, All the live long day. I've been workin' on the railroad, Just to pass the time away. Can't you hear the whistle blowing? Rise up so early in the morn. Can't you hear the captain shoutin' “Dinah, blow your horn?” —Excerpt from I've Been Working on the Railroad, African-American folksong.
According to Wikipedia, Dinah was a generic name for a slave woman. To “railroad” someone means to coerce or force them into a hasty or unfair decision or course of action, often without regard for their rights or opinions—like urging them to prune their branches of opportunity, to get a degree, choose a career, get married, get a mortgage and have kids, all without remotely understanding the implications of their choices and the demands of responsibility they will have to assume along the way.
We’ve all been railroaded. We are all slaves to a system of participation in modern life that has us toiling for things we don’t feel wholly connected to, which are not being built for our benefit, or which undermine and marginalise our deep needs.
No one and everyone is to blame. We help make the mess while we attempt to navigate it.
Every parent is the cause of some form of unforeseen influence to their child, one way or another. Hurt people hurt people. We all endure, and unwittingly pass on, generational trauma to emerging generations. Before we know better, by just following the norm, we perpetuate neglect of our environment, and unkindness to each other for no other reason than that we don’t understand the implications of our choices or we do not know how else to be. The problems rearing their head in the world all seem far too large for us to make a dent in.
Philosophy would seem like the obvious answer, but here again, there are so many opinions and very little convergence, and all the energy and attention we could be investing in applying a solution, we burn by debating what the better one might be, splitting hairs ad infinitum.
The only real solution is radical self-ownership. The only real answer to full self-ownership is self-leadership and self-care. The only real way to renegotiate the roles we are held to and the expectations they carry is through vulnerability, not bravado. It turns out that what we believed to be poor mental health was actually kind of poor ‘spiritual health’ all along, not in the crystal waving, praying, or incense burning kind, but rather the kind that prioritises and practices deep self-care. The kind that implies a sincere relationship with our own personal truth, and the natural cadences and rhythms of the world we belong to. This has to include the needs of our Soul: our sense of vitality, of belonging, of purpose and empowerment in our lives, the wellspring of our vitality and creativity, and collectively then, the wellspring of meaning.
By definition, the full delivery of such medicine cannot be through dry prose alone, but rather in order to speak to the whole person, it must be also through art, through music, through reflection, through movement, through story, poetry and myth.
“Hearing a story awakens the mythic story living in each of us. It places us in a ‘mythic condition’ that reconnects us to the core imagination and living story at the centre of our soul. Being touched by myth carries us to the centre where the world is always ending and always beginning again.”—Michael Meade
Poetry is a language for which we have no defences.
David Whyte
There is an organic technology to all of this, it does not require that we abandon our pet philosophies or our notions of what is real and true in a tangible sense, but rather that we make room for holding the conversation of life in more than one language, in more than one paradigm at the same time. There is both an art and a technology to this. The thing that makes us human is how we are made of the stuff of creation, and of life, which paradoxically is subject to deterioration and decay, and ultimately to death. But, to a large extent, what can deteriorate can also be maintained, and restored. Our current limits are not our permanent limitations.
Once we begin to understand this technology, we can begin to shape our trees, graft new branches and curate a garden that we want to belong to, that gives us a sense of purpose and meets us profoundly in our sense of meaning.
We become who we repeatedly choose to be.
I look forward to sharing the series with you.
With love,
Rocco.