Question 1 of 2.I know, you're stuck on a crowded bus, in a boring meeting, in a traffic jam, washing the dishes, doing your expenses, waiting for the cashier.I know, from here, life seems pretty boring, mundane, lifeless even. I know, it seems like what matters is happening somewhere, to other people right now.I know how often I am caught in seeing life that way.But perhaps that's mostly because we imagine, or at least feel like, we're going to live forever.But if you were dead, if you were no longer around, if you were offered just one minute more of life, and it had to be this moment in the queue, in the bus, in the meeting, with the dishes, would you take it?I'm sure I would.Then you might see this humdrum moment for the absolute wonder that it is - filled with enormous possibilities for curiosity, discovery, and purposeful action. Or for just looking in amazement. And if your answer was yes, is there any chance you might start seeing things this way, at least occasionally, in the life you already have?
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With thanks to David Pearl, who brought up this question today as a way of explaining the origins of the Street Wisdom project. Thanks to their work I spent the afternoon walking the streets of central London, seeing them - and myself - through new eyes. More on this to follow.
Photo Credit: Sr.Nefasto via Compfight cc
What is 'the news' anyway?Is 'the news' just that account of events in the world that we see on TV or read on the web?What about the way a young woman tucked her children into bed last night with such grace and kindness? The volunteers from churches, synagogues and mosques who this week provided warmth, food and overnight shelter to people otherwise sleeping on London's streets? The reconciliation between brother and sister, long separated and estranged, with hugs and tears? The words of guidance and wisdom shared between teacher and student that bring a new possibility into view? The volunteers who planted life-giving trees on a dry hillside providing shelter not for themselves but for the generations who will come after them? The music composed, books written, scientific discoveries made, art created? The acts of great compassion, kindness, and dignity that happen in ordinary lives, day by day.When we think of 'the world' as if it's the same as the highly selective narrative of events we see on 'the news' it's no wonder our fear and isolation are what we mostly get to feel. And no wonder that we feel our hearts hardening, our despair growing, and our deepening sense that nothing can be done.But while the many shocking, frightening, disturbing events that are in the news do happen, and require our response, what's 'new' in the world each day is not just that. It is barely that.And remembering this might help us respond with our own dignity, kindness, compassion and love right when the world most seems to need it from us.
What’s your understanding of the cause of your actions and other people’s actions?Mostly we’ve been taught to think that it’s something within that produces what we do. We talk about motivation, or goals, or drive, or inspiration. We think of ourselves as separate from the world and that our actions and relationship to everything comes from inside us out into the world. And, of course, there’s some truth in that.But I don’t think it’s the whole story.We’re not as separate from the world as all that. Much of the time what’s happening is that we’re being drawn towards situations, equipment, or possibilities that we meet.So, when there’s a chair in the room we’re drawn to sit down when we’re tired. Or when it’s time to go out of the room we’re drawn towards the door and reach for the handle, which draws us too.This is different from the way you might think you relate to doors and chairs.It’s not so much that before we act there’s a thinking process by which we first decide to find a door and then reach for the handle in a series of discrete steps. In the middle of everyday human life all of this just flows out of us, from the everyday familiarity and skilfulness in being in the world that we’ve embodied over a long time.The philosopher Martin Heidegger called such features of the world that draw us out in particular ways affordances.Being around different kinds of affordance draws us out of ourselves in different ways. Perhaps you’ll see this most clearly if you start to watch for a while what you’re drawn into – what you find yourself automatically doing, before you’ve even thought about it – in particular places.
We're born with such power and promise and creativity folded deep within us.Such beauty.But we so quickly forget.Perhaps among the most important activities of any human life is to look into the darkness so we can recover that which has been lost to us.And bring it back, again, into the light.
Here's a way to categorise the things we work with (from 
Tucked in a corner between two major roads in North London, a path framed by trees drops steeply out of view and joins the London Loop, 150 miles of walks through parks, woods and fields in a ring around the city. Only a short distance from where I have lived for eighteen years, today is the first time I find myself walking the route, and soon I'm in a damp, green, frosty world only feet from the concrete paving and thundering traffic above.It's quieter here, a little misty, and what startles me most is how the physical geography of the city is brought into view. Alongside the path runs the Dollis Brook, these days hemmed in by concrete and brick banks. It's clear to me from here that it is the brook that has opened this valley in the soft London clay.Seeing that it is a valley at all is a surprise. Under the covering of tarmac and housing the swells and hollows of the landscape are disguised, appearing as part of the purposeful human development of the area. But here in the quiet by the brook I can see how the forces of the natural world, over timescales much longer than each of our lives, have shaped the place in which I live. I live on the slopes of a small river valley. This is a new place from which to look at where I dwell, a different take altogether from seeing myself as living on this-or-that street in a suburb in the north of a busy metropolis.After about a mile, the brook passes under the brick arches of a bridge, six lanes of cars rumbling above. I take a winding path up the valley side, emerging on the pavement of the North Circular Road, built in the 1920s to connect industrial communities while bypassing central London. I have driven this road thousands of times and have never noticed what I can see now in a narrow band on both sides of the road - that the wooded valley continues, flanked by suburban houses, their chimneys poking out from between the trees. It would be possible to walk, drive, and live in this area for years and not see that this is where we are - on the banks of a river that soon joins the River Brent and, a few miles on, becomes part of the broad valley of the Thames which has so profoundly shaped the development of London in the centuries since it first became a city.I'm struck by how pervasively our capacity to construct has hidden the contours and foundations of the landscape upon which we live and walk. And grateful that there are those with enough foresight and courage to preserve the narrow bands of green that thread their way through the city, so that we can turn from the familiar path and encounter it from a different perspective, and with different eyes.And it has me wondering about all the other ways we pave over the contours of human life. How we hide the mysterious, life-giving rivers and valleys of meaning and longing and despair and hope and love under concepts and frameworks, procedures and policies, under the shiny, hard surfaces of professionalism and consumerism. And, too, under the ever-growing plague of busyness that seems to have taken the place of a deep encounter with anything as mysterious, or quiet, or ancient as a river valley threading its way through the city to the sea.
Sophie Howarth's wonderful 
Years ago, a good friend taught me to look up more as I walked the streets of London.There is exquisite and fascinating architecture hidden, in plain view, above us.I remember how important it was to discover that I look at my own city in a very particular, habitual way that hides surprising and important features of the world. And if it's true for the way I look at a city, it's equally true of the way I look at people, including myself, and at life.There's so much that I miss, and so much I choose not to see. And when I'm bored, or stuck, or frustrated, or desperate, or exasperated with people, the surprising, exhilarating, troubling, mysterious features of the world that could liberate and illuminate are invisible to me.Not because they're not there, but simply because I'm not looking. 
There are, I was reminded this morning, really only two orientations to the world.One is fear. The other is love.And everything follows from which we choose.There are endless reasons to live from fear if we so wish, and almost anything can be its source. Our fear that we will lose people, property, identity, and all the ways we know ourselves. Our fear of illness. Our fear of growing old. Our fear of dying. Our fear of not being loved. And of losing love. Our fear of not having enough. And, this Monday morning in the cities of Europe, our fear of the world's instability and our own insecurity. And all the fear that arises when we see that we cannot control the world or what happens to us in it.I think it's necessary to allow ourselves to feel fear when it comes. To do otherwise is to deny our care for what matters to us. Our fear shows us our care for our lives, and for our society, and for the people we love. Our care for our lovers and partners and friends and children. Our care for our freedom.To deny our fear is to push part of ourselves away, into the shadows, where it can have much more of a grip over us than when brought into the light. When we don't feel our fear we easily find ourselves living from it, constructing our lives from the midst of its constricting, narrowing grasp and all of the reactivity and self-obsession it brings.I've come to understand that when I'm in the grip of unnamed fear, there's so much that I don't see. I don't see the stability and resilience of the society in which I live. I don't see what a blessing it is to sleep in my house at night safe from the terror of shelling and bombing. I don't see what a gift it is that I can meet with whom I choose and where I choose, and have the freedom to express my thoughts, feelings and commitments openly. That my children get to go to school. That we have food to eat, and water to drink, and systems to bring it all to us from across the world. That I have wide open choice about what work to do, and how to do it. That my family are cared for by health systems, and transport systems, and by a system of law and order that is so easily part of the taken-for-granted background. I forget that this is true even when terrible, frightening things are happening in a city only a few hundred miles away and, perhaps, in time, in my own city too. And I forget that in many parts of the world none of these blessings are a given.When I'm in the grip of my fear I forget how much more there is to bring to the world than worries about my own safety. From fear I hardly have any sense of the power and possibility of my own contribution. From fear my world shrinks to the tiniest of proportions.On this Monday morning in the cities of Europe, I am reminded how afraid I can be and how easy it would be to live this way.And it's for all these reasons, it seems to me, that it's our responsibility whenever we can, not to turn away. To feel our fear, and talk with one another about it. To see what it shows us about what matters to us, and then to respond as fully and as generously as we can - to ourselves and to those we meet - from love.