Does Mario Livio’s wonder create spaciousness in my sense of the possible?

Take in the mystery and majesty of being alive now — cosmically speaking, scientifically seen — and feel how this can power a reality-based, worldly hope.

It is so fascinating to think about what Mario Livio points out — that even as everything we’re discovering puts us into perspective, makes us smaller and smaller in the grand scheme of things, we are central to it all. Our minds become more important, because our minds expand even as science expands, whether we know it or not.

The invitation here is to let in a sense of the cosmic mystery and wonder of being alive right now and see how that transforms our sense of our very ordinary selves, how much space this realization opens up for imagination and possibility, and again, real transformation, not mere change.

Become a little less riveted by “critical mass.” Look for “critical yeast” — small groups of unlikely combinations of people in a new quality of relationship.

This is such a wonderful and freeing thing to be able to take in every once in a while, as Rebecca Solnit paraphrases Foucault: “We know what we do. We know why we do it. But we don’t know what [what] we do does.” We control our intentions, to some extent. We control our behavior. But we don’t control what that sets off in the world.

The other piece of what she’s saying that feels so resonant to me for us now is this notion that the earthquake shakes you awake, and then the question to live — how do you stay awake? Here we are, in a pandemic generation. Everything that we thought we knew for sure, so much of that was upended. We were called to so many questions and to learn edifying and deepening things about ourselves and others and the world. How do we stay faithful to those questions and to that learning?

“Never let anyone be humiliated in your presence.” Take that in. Carry it around. As you move through your day, notice when you default to being a spectator or a bystander. Commit to shift in some situation ahead to bearing witness instead.

It is intriguing, this conjunction of hope and responsibility, and hope and moral choice, and hope as fuel for the long-term work of social repair. But also by this granular practice that Elie Wiesel taught and that was named here: “Never allow anyone to be humiliated in your presence.” That is an instruction that you can mull over and carry around and practice. And it would shift something.

And the context of that invitation is the larger invitation to bear witness — to move from being a spectator or a bystander to being a witness. And of course, that would have external implications, but it is, again, also initially an internal reorientation.

There is a narrative of our time, a trajectory of our time, of goodness, of generativity. And this language of “witness,” of this kind of visible, courageous orientation, is a wonderful image and practice to think about how to mobilize that.

How would I start to tell the generative story of the world I know?

Notice and take seriously the good in whom and what you give your attention to across the week: what is life-giving, fruitful, creative, replenishing, healing, sustaining. Journal about what that works in you.

We are familiar with a story of our time of catastrophe and dysfunction, and that is real. But it is not the whole story of us. There is an ordinary and abundant reality in our world of people walking with forms that are broken, with a world that is in pain, with institutions that don’t make sense anymore — and finding ways to be of service, to have an edifying effect on the people around them, to be healers in so many forms, and to model and advance what it looks like when we rise to our higher humanity.

We are capable of beauty and joy and dignity and incredible creativity and community and care.

And, even with the magnitude of what is before us, we are equipped in a way previous generations of humans have not been with knowledge that can be a form of agency: to become more conscious, to become more aware, to act like the ecosystem the world needs us to be — sharing what we are seeing, finding ways to share what we are learning, joining our vulnerabilities, and joining our flourishing.

Calling out this reality, naming that there is a generative story of our time, is in fact a way to begin. Every time you take in the good, you are taking seriously the lifeblood, the raw materials of the generative story of our time. You are stepping onto that landscape more fully with your imagination and with your presence. And in so doing, you are making it more visible and more real in our world of so much pain and so much promise.

What is a question I am holding in myself and for our world now, that I might choose to live?

Begin to pay attention to the power of questions as you go through your week. Note the quality of answers they elicit and if the question invites an opening or closing.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

This passage of Rainer Maria Rilke has become a discipline woven into the community of conversation and searching and living that is On Being. Like us, Rilke was a citizen of a young century with spectacular potentials for creating and destroying. His wisdom has never felt more directly useful and relevant than in the post-2020 world — that when we are faced with questions for which there are no answers or solutions, we are called to hold and live the questions themselves.

Our love for this teaching rests also on a reverence for the gravity and power of questions in human life. In life and in science, it is a deep truth that we are shaped as much by the quality of the questions we’re asking as by the answers we’re prepared to give. Those moments when a new quality of question arises carry discovery and previously unimagined possibility.

The invitation here is to engage the adventure of a new curiosity and reverence for the questions that are alive in you, the questions alive in the world that you feel drawn to. This exercise is intimate and civilizational at once. It can become a life discipline, a spiritual practice, with tangible and redemptive effect.

What are the vocations — callings — that ground, propel, and animate me?

Imagine the Possibility of Wholeness

Open wide your imagination, your heart, your energy, your will, to the possibility of wholeness. As you do, note the emergent ecosystems and wisdom you find even amidst fracture.

Every surface of fracture in our world notwithstanding, all of life is being revealed in its insistence on wholeness: the organic interplay between our bodies, the natural world, the lives we make, the worlds we create. It is the calling of callings to make that vivid and practical and real, starting inside ourselves and with the lives we’ve been given.

How am I, or can I be, critical yeast in the world that I can see and touch?

Map your 200-Year Present

Map your 200-year present. Feel that in your imagination, and in your body.

Geological time, deep time, cosmic time, evolutionary time — all of those are interestingly akin to a religious, prophetic imagination: the long arc of the moral universe that Martin Luther King Jr. invoked. This is a way to speak of this young century we inhabit, this post-2020 world: we are in a Kairos moment as a species.

The beautiful and mysterious thing in all of this way of thinking and imagining, this way of cracking time open and seeing its true, manifold nature, is that this actually expands our sense of the possible in the here and the now. It sends us to work with the raw materials of our lives, understanding that these are always the materials even of change at a cosmic or a societal level.

This is echoed in many teachers and gifts of practice and of language: “evolutionary clusters”; “live human signposts”; the “quiet before”; “fractal emergence”; and “critical yeast.”

You might have to live the question of how to figure out what it means to be critical yeast in your world of friendship, neighborliness, work, community.

It’s waiting for you already in some part of the world you can see and touch.

The adventure is to make it more conscious.

What is joy for me? (Don’t overlook what is “common.”)

Seize opportunities in the course of your day to notice, and protect, the common, particular joys that sustain you — to say, “Oh, there it is.” And journal about what happens.

It’s hard not to be inspired by Drew Lanham. It seems he’s in such a constant state of discovery, no matter how much he knows and learns. He so fully enters that backyard world of birds that gives him joy — the sound of it, the intricacy of it.

You might treat this session as an invitation to take in the natural world in the days to come — to see it very actively as a contemplative space, and being present to it as a life-giving practice.

But the underlying invitation here is to ponder what that joy is for you that the world cannot touch, cannot take away. Contemplate that and dwell with it and work with that awareness. Treasure it. Turn it into a practice that you protect and “hoard” as Drew says — finding those moments daily. And look for those moments in what is common, examining how seeing them as “common” may diminish their deep, abiding significance and nourishment.

What is prayer? Answer the question through the story of your life.

As you move through this week, and in your journaling, say “hello” to the day, to experiences, to memories, to grief, to hope, in a spirit of curiosity and tenderness and honesty.

The invitation here is to explore the contemplative practice that is prayer, this deep spiritual and human impulse and ritual. Maybe for you this is a familiar, lifelong practice. Even if it is, give yourself a time of discovery. And as a beginning, a starting point, ponder in your journal: answer the question of what prayer is through the story of your life. What is the mother tongue and the spiritual homeland of prayer as you know it, as you’ve experienced it, if it is part of your experience, part of your culture that formed you?

Part of the impulse to pray often has to do with need, and is sometimes very present in moments of crisis, urgency, and immediacy. This is honored in prayer in a distinctive way. And the recognition of need is something that brings us to a deep, common language about what it means to be human.

This is also about awakening spiritual imagination. Not making things up, but really cultivating this intellectual, intuitive, creative, ritual orientation towards the formation in ourselves of courage and generosity and love, this inner/outer move that is always interwoven in spiritual life that is meaningful and worth pursuing.

The earthquake has shaken me awake. How to stay awake?

Start to articulate the hopeful story of our time that you can see and tell from where you sit — that the world doesn’t yet know how to see and to tell.

In another place in the conversation I had with Rebecca, she made that same case pointedly, in terms of how we don’t know what will happen or what the results will be of our own action. And this is such a wonderful and freeing thing to be able to take in every once in a while. You know, she said — she was quoting from Foucault, and she said this is not an exact quote. But here’s the thought: “We know what we do. We know why we do it. But we don’t know what [what] we do does.” We control our intentions, to some extent. We control our behavior. But we don’t control what that sets off in the world.

The other piece of what she’s saying that feels so resonant to me for us now is this notion that the earthquake shakes you awake, and then the question to live — how do you stay awake? Here we are, this now post-pandemic generation. Everything that we thought we knew for sure, so much of that was upended. We were called to so many questions and to learn edifying and deepening things about ourselves and others and the world. How do we stay faithful to those questions and to that learning?

I spent my 20s in divided Berlin, and the fall of Berlin’s wall in 1989 was utterly unimaginable, not just to me, not just to everyone I knew, but to everyone in that part of the world. The chancellor of West Germany was out of the country the day the Berlin Wall fell. And that experience that I had so directly, that there is always more to reality than we can see and more change possible than we can begin to imagine, this has formed me. I never expected in my lifetime to experience another turning like the one we’re in now, where the remaking of the world is truly upon us.