The people you know: Your starting point for inspiration

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Ask around and you will find profundities of the highest order have been lived by those around you. Just as you have keen insights when plumbed, so too do others. I’ve found inspiration not from afar — though yes, I seek it there too — but from individuals all around me.

I’m easily impressed by people. It doesn’t take much to uncover some facet of greatness in each person you meet. If you ask, you’ll find private experience to rival anything you’ll ever read about.

Just hearing that others picked their way through the brier patch . . . or into their dream vocation . . . or wound their resourceful way through misadventure . . . or dreamed some thing into existence . . . to be witness to a living example of someone easing into the jetstream of life . . . is exhilarating. It gives you a sense of the possible. If one person can do it, so can you.

Ask

The people you know — and can know — will awe you.

The people you can know are those within reach, those you meet, those you hear about through friends, acquaintances. Seek them out.

Simply taking the time to excavate the triumphs of those around you elevates all, especially, most especially you. 

Oh, and especially, most especially them, too.

I was on an intense work trip with the artist David Langley once. Though the work was engaging, most memorable were the conversations. 

Here’s just one snippet David said in passing:

That saying “Treat people the way you want to be treated” is wrong. Everyone’s so different. You’ve got to find out what people want and go from there.  

Treat people the way they want to be treated.  

Isn’t that a perfect extension of the Golden Rule for this millennium?

People will astonish you if you dig. You don’t even have to dig, really, just listen. What I’m frequently surprised about is how often issues resolve themselves in the most magical ways and — once resolved — it is as if there was nothing special about it.

You know, that money showing up just when you needed it most, or how that person critical to the next step in your life appeared as if constituted from your imagination, or any of life’s plot lines that read as if the deus ex machina in a Greek play came in and whipped up an improbable resolution.

Dictionary.com: deus ex machina
(in ancient Greek and Roman drama) a god introduced into a play to re-solve the entanglements of the plot.

Anywayyyyy, what I’m saying is this: If you desire the electricity of humanity’s genius, listen up, it’s all around you.
Posts inspired by those around me (it’s starting to look like all my good material comes from others, doesn’t it?)
There's a way
Yoohoo, thrivers -- thank you