It's a Meaningful Life

meaning-making as a pathway to CoFlourishing - fourth in the series on PERMA
posting by Jana

What's meaningful? What does it mean to have a meaning - full life? Whatever the actual content of what makes a meaningful life, which is no doubt unique to each person, the fact and act of making meaning is an important part of human flourishing. One could argue that the rest of the structure of what positive psychologist Martin Seligman has identified as components of human flourishing - Positive Emotions, Engagement, Positive Relationships, and Accomplishment (the P, E, R, and A of PERMA) constitute Meaning (the M). 

In the fourth week of the year's first journey into CoFlourishing: people, place, and planet ... together, the daily Cosmic Quotes, rather than suggest what meaning to make of life, offer simple reminders that meaning is there to be made, whatever that 'means' to each of us. 

Monday 22 January 2018
A quote from Alice Walker began the week's focus on meaning and the medium ended up being the message for this one. I was surprised to discover on watching the clip on the YouTube playlist to prepare this summary that the cicadas in the background almost obscured the audio. Good thing the quote was about surprise:

“Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise. ”

— Alice Walker

Tuesday 23 January 2018
It was a noisy nature night again for this quote but being about affiliating with trees a little 'extra communion' with nature seemed fitting. This from Walt Whitman invites reflection on giving attention to what 'is' rather than what 'seems' as a pathway to meaning-making.

One lesson from affiliating with a tree — perhaps the greatest moral lesson anyhow from earth, rocks, animals, is that same lesson of inherency, of what is, without the least regard to what the looker on (the critic) supposes or says, or whether he (sic) likes or dislikes. What worse — what more general malady pervades each and all of us, our literature, education, attitude toward each other, (even toward ourselves,) than a morbid trouble about seems, (generally temporarily seems too,) and no trouble at all, or hardly any, about the sane, slow-growing, perennial, real parts of character, books, friendship, marriage — humanity’s invisible foundations and hold-together? (As the all-basis, the nerve, the great-sympathetic, the plenum within humanity, giving stamp to everything, is necessarily invisible.)

Wednesday 24 January 2018
What are the attitudes required to make meaning? Perhaps an important one is courage. It takes courage to reflect, to question, to experiment, to find out the hard way what matters - what fills us up and what empties us out. Today's quote on courage as:

... a kind of tenacious willingness; an attitude of being willing to try something
from psychologist Peter Fields in a Huff Post blog on 'How to Live a Meaningful Life'
 

Thursday 25 January 2018
Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929–January 22, 2018), 'a fierce thinker and largehearted, beautiful writer who considered writing an act of falling in love', was celebrated this week on one of my favourite meaning-making resources: brainpickings.org

I love the idea of questioning what is 'spare' time when life can be 'fully and vitally occupied'. 

“An increasing part of living at my age is mere bodily maintenance which is tiresome but I cannot find anywhere in my life a time or a kind of time that is unoccupied. I am free but my time is not. My time is fully and vitally occupied with sleep, with daydreaming, with doing business and writing friends and family on email, with reading, with writing poetry, with writing prose, with thinking, with forgetting, with embroidering, with cooking and eating a meal and cleaning up the kitchen, with construing Virgil, with meeting friends, with talking with my husband, with going out to shop for groceries, with walking if I can walk and traveling if we are traveling, with sitting Vipassana sometimes, with watching a movie sometimes, with doing the Eight Precious Chinese exercises when I can, with lying down for an afternoon rest with a volume of Krazy Kat to read and my own slightly crazy cat occupying the region between my upper thighs and mid-calves, where he arranges himself and goes instantly and deeply to sleep. None of this is spare time. I can’t spare it....  I am going to be eighty-one next week. I have no time to spare.”

— Ursula LeGuin

Friday 26 January 2018
American poet, critique, essayist, and novelist Laura Riding on thinking rather than just doing.

People who for some reason find it impossible to think about themselves and so really be themselves try to make up for not thinking with doing.

Saturday 27 January 2018
Letting nature do the talking - how a long horizon invites meaning making, offering breadth for thinking about the self apart so that our doing has depth of purpose.

These were all the quotes for this week on Meaning. What meaning making practices do you employ? Who are your meaning-making companions (in person, in books, in nature?)

Enjoy the journey!

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The purpose of these journeys via the Cosmic Quotes is to explore what it means to be a Cosmic Person, to live with sensitivity to and conscious awareness that we belong to the universe and that our lives are governed by interdependency, connectedness, and emergence. To be a Cosmic Person is to let this awareness support our wellbeing and direct our decisions and choices such that our lives become about participating in the flourishing of the whole community of life on Earth. It's about living a bigger story, a better story, and a beautiful story, the one about falling in love with the Earth over and over again. 

Walking with a Friend

exploring a third pathway to flourishing - positive relationships
posting by Jana

I suppose it's possible to imagine a genuinely flourishing solitary life, but (almost by definition) I don't know anyone who has accomplished it. It seems rather fitting that the centre point of the PERMA flourishing scheme by Martin Seligman rests on Positive Relationships, given the central role relationships play in most human lives. (Click here for an early journal article about the focus of positive psychology and its connection to human flourishing.)

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
-Raymond Carver 'Late Fragment'

Feeling beloved; be-loving others ...there is a magnitude of flourishing here that is difficult to surpass. And so we journey this week along the pathways of positive relationship. 

Monday 15 January 2018
The week began with a very quick quote but one that stirred a bit of reaction: is there an implied discounting of solitude? Does it seem to suggest that individuation, or being able to find our own way in the world, is not of value? Or, given the source of the quote - Helen Keller - maybe it is simply a remark on the experience of one woman who knew much more viscerally than most how dependent we all are on each other, every step of the way. 

I would rather walk with a friend in the dark then alone in the light. 

Tuesday 16 January 2018
When I think about what 'flourishing' means it has something to do with 'enough', with a sense of having or being enough, of being satisfied. Walt Whitman offers a second stepping stone along the positive relationship path to flourishing that highlights the role of friendship in the sense of 'enough.'

I have learned that being with those I like is enough.

Wednesday 17 January 2018

The mid-week quote featured a couple of proverbs on friendship, one from Turkey and one from Sweden. 

No road is long with good company.

Shared joy is double joy and shared sorrow is half a sorrow.

Thursday 18 January 2018
Traveling a little deeper into the notion of friendship, here's something from John O'Donohue that's alive with contemporary Celtic poetics. 

A friend is a loved one who awakens your life on order to free the wild possibilities within you.

Friday 19 January 2018
Every once in a while it's fun to let nature do the talking and this Cosmic Quote for a week on positive relationships as part of flourishing features human friends in their natural habitat - Friday night drinks and nibbles. 

Saturday 20 January 2018
For the second time this week, a quote is offered that sparks some reaction. What CS Lewis says about friendship may ring true in the sense that friendship does add value to life, but is it really true that it is not necessary for survival? I wonder. 

Friendship is unnecessary like philosophy like art like the universe itself it has no survival value rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

Sunday 21 January 2018
Returning to the contemporary Irish poet John O'Donohue for our closing remark on positive relationship, this last quote for the week describes a concept of the soul friend, or Anam Cara. 

Love allows understanding to dawn and understanding is precious. Where you are understood you are at home. Understanding nourishes belonging. When you really feel understood you feel free to release yourself into the trust and shelter of the other person's soul. This art of love discloses the special and sacred identity of the other person. Love is the only light that can truly read the secret signature of the other person's individuality and soul. Love alone is literate in the world of origin. It can decipher identity and destiny.

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The purpose of these journeys via the Cosmic Quotes is to explore what it means to be a Cosmic Person, to live with sensitivity to and conscious awareness that we belong to the universe and that our lives are governed by interdependency, connectedness, and emergence. To be a Cosmic Person is to let this awareness support our wellbeing and direct our decisions and choices such that our lives become about participating in the flourishing of the whole community of life on Earth. It's about living a bigger story, a better story, and a beautiful story, the one about falling in love with the Earth over and over again. 

Getting engaged ... in life

summing up a second pathway into flourishing - engagement
posting by Jana

It was our second week focusing on Martin Seligman's five points of human flourishing as pathways to Co-Flourishing of people, place, and planet ... together, which brought us to 'Engagement' as a theme. 

Here's Seligman in a 2011 article talking about engagement: 

The second element, engagement, is about flow: being one with the music, time stopping, and the loss of self-consciousness during an absorbing activity. I refer to a life lived with these aims as the “engaged life.” Engagement is different, even opposite, from positive emotion; for if you ask people who are in flow what they are thinking and feeling, they usually say, “nothing.” In flow we merge with the object. I believe that the concentrated attention that flow requires uses up all the cognitive and emotional resources that make up thought and feeling.

There are no shortcuts to flow. On the contrary, you need to deploy your highest strengths and talents to meet the world in flow. There are effortless shortcuts to feeling positive emotion, which is another difference between engagement and positive emotion. You can masturbate, go shopping, take drugs, or watch television. Hence, the importance of identifying your highest strengths and learning to use them more often in order to go into flow.

'Hence the importance of identifying your highest strengths and learning to use them more often in order to go into flow.' This defining aspect of 'engagement' sent me on a quest for inspiration from people known to have honed their highest strengths: famous writers and elite athletes, for example. 

Monday 8 Jan 2018
As a launch pad for exploring engagement, we started the week with musings on the term's etymology. The word 'engage' comes from the French word for 'to pledge,' which is of course the basis of its association with betrothal and marriage. More generally, however, the word means 'to occupy or attract (someone's interest or attention)' and synonyms include engross and absorb. 

For positive psychologist Lynn Soots, engagement as a component of human flourishing can also take a more generic form:

Engagement can be deep states in which we purposely create an extended period of time that includes a passion such as a hobby, a technique or a skill, and commitment to performance. This is just one aspect of engagement as engagement is not limited to long-term binding activities. Engagement can be a choice to engage in life ... 

I wonder about the mutually enhancing relationship between the two states of engagement: the deeply immersive is a concentrated version that serves as an invitation to imagine how life in general can attract our attention and absorb us in its details, beauties, challenges. And to cultivate engagement in our lives without the pressure of developing an all-engrossing hobby or vocation. As Soots reminds her readers at The Positive Psychology People, flourishing through engagement can also be about being 'open to and willing to initiate, create, and savour experiences that fuel our inner (and outer) wellbeing.'

Tuesday 9 Jan 2018
In the first part of the week, we focused on the immersive sense of engagement, the flow notion of being deeply absorbed in some one particular activity. The first quote of the week was from author of National Velvet fame, Enid Bagnold, who speaks of writing in ways that communicate the sense of being engrossed and absorbed. Interestingly, her craft absorbs her in life. 

Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything ... It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus.

Wednesday 10 Jan 2018
Athletes are quintessential exemplars of 'flow', and sports philosopher Michael Novak describes the moment of unity (another aspect of definition of engage is to join together or unite as regards parts in machines, which raises interesting points to ponder about the machinery of marriage and the athlete as machine).

This is one of the secrets of sport. There is a certain amount of unity within the self, and between the self and the world, a certain complicity and magnetic mating, a certain harmony that conscious mind and will cannot direct ... the discovery takes one's breath away. 

Thursday 11 Jan 2018
Too engaged (in whatever I was doing?) to post a quote! Practicing what I preach and all that ...

Friday 12 Jan 2018
Near the end of the week we moved into the more generalised sense of being absorbed in life. Walt Whitman is perhaps the great ambassador of such:

This is what you should do:
Love the earth and sun and the animals,
despise riches, give alms to every one that asks,
stand up for the stupid and the crazy,
devote your income and labour to others, hate tyrants,
argue not concerning God,
have patience and indulgence toward the people ...
re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book,
dismiss whatever insults your own soul,
and your very flesh shall be a great poem. (Leaves of Grass)

Saturday 13 Jan 2018
Today's quote was short and sweet:

I intend to live life, not just exist. 
- George Takei

Sunday 14 Jan 2018
To close the week's focus on engagement, we switched from an implicit understanding of how our own flourishing through engagement enables, conspires with, co-incidences the flourishing of the whole community of life on Earth into an explicit naming of this symbiotic relationship: as we are part of life, so our flourishing participates in the flourishing of the whole. 

Mythologist Joseph Campbell invites us to imagine our heroic role in bringing vitality to life by living our own story of vitality: 

The influence of a vital person vitalizes ... People have the notion of saving the world by shifting it around and changing the rules and so forth. No. Any world is a living world if it's alive and the thing to do is to bring it to life. And the way to bring it to life is to find in your own case where your life is, and be alive in yourself. 

Living questions and invitations
arising out of this week's journey into engagement as part of flourishing (as part of co-flourishing of people, place, and planet): 

• What do you find absorbing? 
   
• You are invited to imagine your experiences of flow as part of the overall vitality of life. 
   
• Being engrossed in something you enjoy can feel quite self-indulgent, like a turning away from greater responsibilities and caring for others and the Earth. What do you embrace and what do you resist about the idea that your own vitality is essential to the world's vitality?

What other questions and invitations arise for you when you reflect on engagement? You're invited to share your thoughts and get some discussion going in the comments section. Or here.

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The purpose of these journeys via the Cosmic Quotes is to explore what it means to be a Cosmic Person, to live with sensitivity to and conscious awareness that we belong to the universe and that our lives are governed by interdependency, connectedness, and emergence. To be a Cosmic Person is to let this awareness support our wellbeing and direct our decisions and choices such that our lives become about participating in the flourishing of the whole community of life on Earth. It's about living a bigger story, a better story, and a beautiful story, the one about falling in love with the Earth over and over again. 

Feeling our way to flourishing

summing up a week on cultivating Positive Emotions as a pathway to co-flourishing
posting by Jana

The daily Cosmic Quote program on YouTube is off to a fresh start this year with a five-week focus on human flourishing. Due to the inherent interdependency of the universe, human flourishing is integral to the flourishing of the whole community of life on Earth (or as we like to call it around here: co-flourishing of people, place, and planet ... together). 

Positive psychologist Martin Seligman identifies five components of human flourishing; flourishing being something beyond happiness and unrelated to 'having it all.'

It might be a good idea at the outset to check in on a dictionary definition of the term 'flourish':

flourish /ˈflʌrɪʃ/
verb

1. (of a living organism) grow or develop in a healthy or vigorous way, especially as the result of a particularly congenial environment.

healthy * vigorous * congenial environment - that's what we're talking about! 

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The five components of human flourishing identified by Seligman create the acronym PERMA, which is pretty fun given the association with permaculture, a system of looking after people and land with the intent of mutual, permanent flourishing. 

P - positive emotion

E - engagement

R - positive relationship

M - meaning

A - accomplishment

Here is the 'study version' of the journey we undertook in our first week of exploring the theme 'flourishing': positive emotions. You are invited to follow the links for a deeper journey with the theme. 

Monday 1 Jan 2018
After introducing the theme of flourishing and its components, the first positive emotion under the spotlight was gratitude. Gratitude was chosen from a 'top 10' list compiled by Dr Barbara Fredrickson, author of Positivity. 

Gratitude is the fairest blossom that springs from the soul. Henry Ward Beecher

The question for living as a Cosmic Person arising from this focus is, 'How do you express gratitude in your life as part of your own flourishing? What's your gratitude practice?'

Tuesday 2 Jan 2018
Here's a good one: joy. Read more from Rollo May on the vital difference between happiness and joy.

Joy is an overflowing of inner energies and leads to awe and wonderment. Joy is a release, an opening up; it is what comes when one is able to genuinely 'let go.' Joy is new possibilities ... It is an unfolding of life. Rollo May

Wednesday 3 Jan 2018
Taking up a different tone, the focus for mid-week was on serenity. 

Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity that nothing is. Thomas Szasz

One of the best lines in the Australian cult classic The Castle forms the question of the day, 'How's the serenity?' 

Thursday 4 Jan 2018
It turned out to be impossible to find a quote about the positive emotion of amusement. It was belittled by most as some sort of lower order emotion. How dull! Why not be counter-cultural and cultivate amusement as a pathway to co-flourishing of people, place, and planet?!  Thanks to Community members for your reports from the field on what amuses you! (scroll the FB group to explore)

Friday 5 Jan 2018
From the Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, Lewis Thomas describes with a certain poetry how the Earth is a source of endless, begging the question for flourishing: What interests you? What keeps you 'awake and jubilant with questions'? 

Saturday 6 Jan 2018
It seemed appropriate to choose the closely linked emotions of awe and wonder for Epiphany, a Christian holy day commemorating the visit of wise men from the East to the infant Jesus, evoking awe and wonder (Who is this child? What are these gifts of frankincense, gold, and myrrh?)

Awe and wonder can be responses to what is revealed; revelation being the common use of the term epiphany as in 'to have an epiphany'. 

The more clearly we focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe, the less taste we shall have for destruction. Rachel Carson 

The connection between human flourishing and the flourishing of the whole community of life on Earth is evoked in this simple note of sagacity by one of the most famous female scientists, known for her close powers of observation of marine ecology as well as her detailed exposé of the harmful effects of the pesticide chemical DDT throughout the entire food chain. 

Sunday 7 Jan 2018
all you need is love ...

The Journey this Week
has been about cultivating positive emotions.  We belong to the universe with such interdependency that your wellbeing is interwoven with the wellbeing of the whole community of life on Earth. You are invited to flourish! 

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The purpose of these journeys via the Cosmic Quotes is to explore what it means to be a Cosmic Person, to live with sensitivity to and conscious awareness that we belong to the universe and that our lives are governed by interdependency, connectedness, and emergence. To be a Cosmic Person is to let this awareness support our wellbeing and direct our decisions and choices such that our lives become about participating in the flourishing of the whole community of life on Earth. It's about living a bigger story, a better story, and a beautiful story, the one about falling in love with the Earth over and over again.