In Judaism, it's traditional practice to attach a small ornamented fixture to each doorframe, a mezuzah, inside of which is a scroll handwritten by a scribe who's dedicated themselves to their craft.One reason for this, among others, is to mark out transition places, the thresholds between one space and another, with a call to remember. You can see people touching them as they walk past, honouring this and reminding themselves - remembering - their deepest commitments.Mostly we don't give thresholds the attention they're due. How often we sleepwalk from activity to activity, meeting to meeting, work to home, taking what hooked us or preoccupied us from one place to to the next, reacting to each situation from the frustrations of the last. It's as if, for many of us, we're never quite here in what we do and neither fully in contact with the people we encounter. And we miss the opportunity to use the liminal spaces - the transitions between one place and another - to return to ourselves and to what we most care about.Thesholds - in space and in time - are sacred places in the way that they invite us to pause on the brink, before moving on. They call on us remember ourselves, to drop our preconceptions, judgements and our self-absorption so we can fully meet the situation that awaits. They call on us to be open and impressionable, ready to encounter something new.Approached in this manner, thresholds are an opportunity to wake up to this situation, to these people, to stop rushing all the time so we can be in it all afresh, present and responsive to whatever's coming.When you walk into your house at the end of a long day, can you pause in this way to mark the magnitude of the transition from one world to another that you are about to make? Then you can meet the people waiting there for you with your own genuine face, and with your love for them, and they in turn can meet you with theirs.
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Convergent problems are the kind for which diligent, patient and repeated efforts produce answers we can trust. Many problems in mathematics, for example are convergent, as are the vast majority of engineering problems. Such problems are convergent because a suitable methodology and sufficient effort allow us to converge on a single, practical, true answer to the question at hand.Convergent problems lend themselves to solution by technique and process. And once we know what to do with a convergent problem, we can repeat the technique and expect to find a reliable answer, every time.Divergent problems are those for which, with diligent, patient and repeated efforts, we could expect to find many different answers. For example, in sentencing someone who has committed a crime, is justice or mercy more appropriate? Or, in the midst of many competing financial pressures, should we centralise our operation, seizing control of all the details, or should we decentralise, allowing the people with the most local expertise the opportunity to bring their own insights to bear? Is discipline or love more important in learning to do something well? Should we dedicate ourselves to conserving tradition, or supporting change? And in organising a society, is freedom to do what we each want most important, or responsibility to the wellbeing of others?Divergent problems are divergent precisely because it is possible to hold so many different perspectives. The more we inquire - if we are prepared to do so with sincerity and rigour - the more possible responses we discover. And such problems are inherently the problems of living systems in general, and human circumstances in particular - circumstances in which our consciousness, values, commitments, cares and many interpretations enter the fray.Divergent problems do not lend themselves to easy answers, to platitudes, or technique. Instead, divergent problems require us to make a transcendent move, in which we step out of the easy polarities of right or wrong, and good or bad. Such a move, which is clearly a developmental move in the sense that I have described previously, calls to the fore our capacity to live in the middle of polarities and complexity, uncertainty and fluidity. In the case of justice and mercy, this move might well be called wisdom. We run into enormous difficulty whenever we treat divergent problems as if they were convergent - as if there were some reliable process, however complex and sophisticated, by which to arrive at a correct answer. When we do this, we treat human situations as if they were mathematical or machine-like. And we strip ourselves of the possibility of cultivating discernment and genuine wisdom, reducing ourselves to rule-followers and automatons.It can never be justice alone - for strict justice is harsh, and unforgiving, and has no concern for the particulars of a human life. And it can never be mercy alone - for mercy's kindness without justice can be cruel and damaging to many in its wish to take care of the few. And it is never sufficient to say 'well, it must be mercy and justice' as if there were some simple, easy to understand combination or position between the two.And all of this is why paying attention to development 
I started my 49th year of life this week. Around 160 years ago (less than four of my current life spans laid end-to-end) a full third of my contemporaries would already have reached the end of their lives, and less than half of us could have expected to live beyond our late 50s (see source [1] below).Today, at least in the UK, two-thirds of us will live into our late seventies and many into our eighties. What a blessing, if we'll choose to appreciate it while we can. And what possibilities, if we'll find a way to use our chances of vastly extended life in service of those around us and those yet to come.Readers of my work here will know of my interest in ongoing adult development, which takes place through marked increases in our capacity to make sense of the world, to inhabit longer time horizons (knowing ourselves as inheritors of a deep past and contributors towards a long future), to be less 'had' by impulsivity and narcissism, to understand the world of others, to exercise more autonomy, and to take action in systems and contexts which are bigger than our own immediate concerns [2].Such development is very natural, if the opportunities come our way and if we're courageous enough and have enough support to take them. But it is quite different from the rote-learning, keeping up appearances, and getting ahead that so many of us are taught at school and in our workplaces. It typically requires facing into difficulty rather than turning away, welcoming back the parts of ourselves that we've disowned, failing and falling and getting back up again. It's not served by looking good, or knowing the facts, or keeping it all together, or learning just what's comfortable and familiar, or comparing ourselves with others.And it's probably the most important work we can do with the gift of these extra decades, if we're lucky enough to have them. Because the world faces challenges of a complexity our ordinary way of speaking, thinking, acting and relating to one another are often ill-equipped to face. And perhaps we have been given these decades - through the long slow evolution of human beings as a species - precisely so that we can work on the problems our shorter-lived ancestors never got the chance to tackle.References:[1] Modal Age at Death: Mortality Trends in England and Wales 1841-2010, 
It's a small shift, but a potentially profound one.What if you choose to see what you're in the middle of right now from the point of view of a year ahead? Or ten years? Or a hundred?Or if you were to watch this moment in life from the viewpoint of the moon? Or from the far edge of the galaxy?From here, what changes?Do your worries and fears have the same hold?Do the same things seem important?From what are you freed?What's called for, now?Sometimes, we need the perspective of a billion miles and an aeon in time to see what we've got caught up in that's trivial. And that what really matters is quite different from what we've taken it to be.
Once again the feeling in my body is as it was 
It's not just that 
Walking among tall oaks in London's Hyde Park, my thoughts turn towards the end of things. Leaves are falling, their curled crisp edges crunching beneath my boots. There are still many trees clothed in green. The end of this will come soon, I can see, leaving the dark shape of curling branches clear against the sky.One day, each of these trees, too, will be gone.It is a relief to know that this is how it is. That things come to an end. Quite naturally. Quite ordinarily. And that it is true for us too.How many mornings I have awoken with such deep lonely sadness at all this. That I will lose myself. That I will lose all of my faculties. That I will lose everyone I love, and they will lose all this too. That all this has already begun.But here, among the trees, I am gladdened. Losing it all is not my fate alone. It is not a gross unfairness visited upon me. It is not something I always need to mourn. It is the way of life, and always has been. It is the condition of humanity, and always will be.I am joined in this path by every living thing that has ever existed, and every living thing that will exist. I am unified with all of life, indivisible from it.Yes, deep sadness at how all of this ends has its place, reminding me how I long to live and how much there is to lose. But equally appropriate is joy, and wonder, exhilaration and radical amazement that any of this is happening. That I get to take part. That I am, for now, here.My heart quickens and my eyes widen at the beauty and fragility of life, at its preciousness, at how fleeting it is. I see that there is no time to waste. There is so much to do, so much I can do. Whatever contribution I am here to make, now is the time. Every moment until now has been preparation for this. Every moment to come, however many or few, calls with the promise and possibility of participation in life's grand, beautiful, tragic, surprising, endlessly creative unfolding.It is time, as it always is, to begin.
We can't help it. We're sense-making beings, us humans. And so you and I are always living our lives from a sense of story.The story profoundly shapes our interactions with other people, and with ourselves. Watch how you'd relate to your sister, your colleagues, from the narrative of 'the burdened one' - the one who has been handed too much to carry, and who can't find any place to put it down. See how much busyness it breeds, how little time to rest, how much resentment, how much of a sense of being in life alone.And see how differently you'd encounter all of life from the narrative of 'a healer' - the one whose responsibility it is to heal herself by taking care of her own body, mind and heart so she can take care of others. Or 'a painter' - looking for the hidden light and beauty in everything. Or 'a bestower of blessings'. Or even 'an ordinary person'.The stories we're living seem so compelling, so true, especially as they seem to account so coherently for everything that's happening. But any story is only one out of many possibilities, and each story conceals much even as it reveals.And so it's important to ask ourselves what other stories we could imagine, particularly those that would bring forward our virtues - patience, kindness, courage, imagination, integrity, compassion, love, commitment, steadfastness, playfulness - qualities that allow us to meet the world more generously, more creatively, and let more of life through.