I enjoyed this reminder from Oliver Burkeman’s newsletter this morning:

To generate ideas, get better at noticing. A truth I’d already been stumbling towards was clarified for me by Rob Bell, in his excellent audio course Something to Say: When it comes to amassing a stockpile of ideas to write or speak about, or otherwise to use in your creative work, by far the most important thing is just to get into the habit of noticing things and making some record of them. That’s it. Random quotes you encounter, quirky things people say or do, thoughts or feelings that occur to you, intriguing facts that cross your radar: practice a) realising that you’re encountering them, then b) making a scribbled note, taking a phone photo, anything at all to jog your memory of the moment. Perhaps this strikes you as blindingly obvious! But it’s starkly different from a widespread focus these days on building tricked-out systems for storing or connecting your notes, getting AI to synthesise new insights from them, or storing material you encounter for digesting later on. The way Bell describes it (and the way I’ve experienced it too) is that connections and insights about the material happen spontaneously, or when the work calls for them. But first of all, the subconscious needs feeding – and noticing is how you do that.

I finished the chapter in John Philip Newell’s The Great Search on Rabindranath Tagore this morning. Tagore was an Indian writer, thinker, and artist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. I thought this was particularly profound:

It was the nationalism of Britain that had humiliated India, he said. This would not be resolved by yet another nationalism trying to counteract it. Tagore called this “the idolatry of Geography”, an absolutizing of boundaries that breeds suspicion and disrespect for those on the other side of the barriers we have artificially created.

Sadly, it feels like we’re entering a period of history where the idolatry of geography is reasserting itself.

The older I get, the more it feels like I must forgive almost everything for not being perfect, or as I first wanted or needed it to be.

—Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things

This from John Philip Newell in The Great Search, reflecting on the wisdom of Thomas Berry, offers a striking insight:

It is not just our lungs and bodies that are damaged by particle and light pollution in the cities. It is “soul-deprivation”, says [Thomas] Berry. To not be able to see the stars is a deprivation of our inner world, a loss of wonder, and thus a diminishing of our imagination and the ability to remember our origins in the heavens and to dream our way forward into new beginnings on Earth.