My god! These quotes below by Walter Lippmann are like a symphony of thoughts that resonate so deeply with my own life’s work. Not just in its struggle to tell but in the experience of its emergence as well.
The best things of mankind are as useless as Amelia Earhart’s adventure. They are the things that are undertaken not for some definite, measurable result, but because someone, not counting the costs or calculating the consequences, is moved by curiosity, the love of excellence, a point of honor, the compulsion to invent or to make or to understand. In such persons mankind overcomes the inertia which would keep it earthbound forever in its habitual ways. They have in them the free and useless energy with which alone men surpass themselves.
Walter Lippmann
This resonates with why I perceive and believe play is the crucial missing element in our lives today. Not play in a conventional, trivial sense, which is seen as the opposite of work, but play at a deeper level than we can possibly imagine. This deeper play is the development work of our lives.
Such energy cannot be planned and managed and made purposeful, or weighted by the standards of utility or judged by its social consequences. It is wild and it is free. But all the heroes, the saints, the seers, the explorers and the creators partake of it. They do not know what they discover. They do not know where their impulse is taking them. They can give no account in advance of where they are going or explain completely where they have been. They have been possessed for a time with an extraordinary passion which is unintelligible in ordinary terms.
Walter Lippmann
This singular, amazing quote embodies the emergent experience of my life’s work so far in a nutshell. In effect, how can you plan and move towards something that is an unknown domain of knowledge, something that you can explain emotionally more so than you can explain rationally to others?
In effect, whenever I say it feels monumentally difficult to describe my life’s work, I always feel like I’m just deluding myself and standing in my own way. But what if I’m not? What if it is as monumentally difficult as it is described above and…it is an inherent and natural part of the experience itself? If so, that would mean I’m not “broken” and I’m not doing anything “wrong,” even though that’s what most of us believe we are.
In other words, it’s all a natural part of the process, even though it feels unnatural (which is how I’ve described the process before).
No preconceived theory fits them. No material purpose actuates them. They do the useless, brave, noble, the divinely foolish and the very wisest things that are done by man. And what they prove to themselves and to others is that man is no mere creature of his habits, no mere automaton in his routine, no mere cog in the collective machine, but that in the dust of which he is made there is also fire, lighted now and then by great winds from the sky.
Walter Lippmann
This perfectly resonates with the lifelong experience of transitioning from a Socialized Mind to a Self-Authoring Mind and then from a Self-Authoring Mind to a Self-Transforming Mind.
At the first transition, the person realizes and becomes aware of how they were blindly following society’s cultural programming to fit in and survive, thus they learn to recode themselves and “self-author” their own scripts for life, thus allowing them to step out and thrive.
At the second transition, one even grows tired of one’s own personal scripts and learns to let go of them completely. In doing so, they discover their True Self (as the “player”) behind their previous constructed selves (as the “character’s” one was playing).