Explore!

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T. S Elliot, `Little Gidding,´ Four Quartets

The purpose of life is to live it, to taste it, to experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.
Eleanor Roosevelt

The way you look at things is not simply a private matter. Your outlook actually and concretely affects what goes on. When you give in to helplessness, you collude with despair and add to it. When you take back your power and choose to see the possibilities for healing and transformation, your creativity awakens and flows to become an active force of renewal and encouragement in the world. In this way, even in your own hidden life, you can become a powerful agent of transformation in a broken, darkened world. There is a huge force field that opens when intention focuses and directs itself toward transformation.
John O’Donohue

As children, we all knew how to explore in a new way, experiencing great curiosity and fascination in discovery…
Shirzad Chamine, founder/author of `Positive Intelligence´

During a conversation this week, questions concerning the power of exploration arose. My client and friend asked me to describe, using practical examples, how exactly this `Sage Power of Explore´ (a key component of the PQ Mental Fitness Programme) manifests in daily life.  

Knowing that my friend is very fond of his little niece and her older brothers, my first question was how they typically behave on a day spent on the shoreline in Sardinia, where they like to spend their holidays.

`Well, they sometimes spend hours simply gathering shells or turning over every rock, and delight in what they find´, he mused. `They seem to be driven by a combination of curiosity, openness, fascination, and wonder at what is being explored, without being distracted by analysis, prejudice, or judgement´.

We had now begun to recognise this power in a relatable manner. My own memories of childhood holidays spent in the West of Ireland bubbled to the surface. At around the age of ten, my father began to take me with him on angling day trips after heavy rain had drenched the mountainous boglands sufficiently for the rivers to swell.

Our large holiday home was the most downstream of three fishing lodges located on the Owenduff River, two miles from Blacksod Bay. A day would begin before dawn (that’s early in July) with a hushed breakfast in the cavernous kitchen downstairs while the rest of the family slept above. Sufficient food for a twelve-hour expedition was then packed in our fishing bags. As the day began to dawn, we would depart quietly in his old car to drive several miles upstream towards the mountains, to the junction where the two main rivers met. From here onwards we would spend the rest of the day on foot.

The first thing Dad would do was to find a white stone which he would put down as a marker. The logic behind this move was that the salmon and sea trout would only begin to take after the water has stopped rising after the night’s rain. Until that happened there was no point in casting a line. Markers were put down on both rivers and we then spent half an hour searching for field mushrooms in the verdant triangle between them. Once it was clear how the water levels were unfolding, a decision was made as to where to go to begin the process of fishing, one pool after the next. If the water was still rising, this meant a long uninterrupted hike. By this time daylight had arrived and the birds and insects were busily going about their business.

Arriving at the first pool to be fished, Dad would flick through his fly boxes, explaining that the quality of light and the height of the water determined the colour and size of the flies which he would select, often three different ones per rod.

As he fished, Dad would invite me to guess where the salmon could be expected to lie. They preferred to station themselves in the quieter spots, under a steep bank or downstream of a large rock in the middle of the stream, where thy could lie with a minimum of exertion and feed on the fare which flowed by. In this way, he taught me how to `read a river´, a phenomenon which still enchants me to this day.

There were periods in my life, when my powers of exploration, my capacity for wonder and awe, were not as immediately accessible as they are once again today. In times of great stress, such capabilities tend to get buried deep inside, to the point where they even seemed to have disappeared.

The PQ Programme of Mental Fitness Training re-awakens the so-called Sage Powers, which offer a viable and healthy alternative to living in autopilot or in the grip of our Saboteurs. `Explore´ is useful when attempting to understand a situation or challenge more deeply to find a better path forward. It asks the question: `What more can I discover?´ It helps counter the widespread yet unhelpful attitude of `knowing it all´, otherwise expressed as `contempt prior to investigation´.

It is rare that we find ourselves in a place of deep curiosity, openness, and wonder in the midst of a crisis or challenging situation. This is because our Saboteurs are interjecting their judgements, interpretations, and assessments during the Explore phase, rendering it significantly less effective in terms of true learning.

The `Judge´ has us look only for evidence that the other, or the circumstances, are wrong. The `Controller´ hones in on the material which will encourage us to get our own way. The `Hyper-Vigilant´ will only see signs of danger and reasons to beat a retreat.  

We thus torpedo our ability to discover all the important relevant information before we move on to a solution or action. Equally important, if our Explore powers are diminished, we will not be willing to look at past situations in `blameless discernment´ in order to learn from our `mistakes´.  Indeed, a `mistake´ is only a mis-take if we fail to `take´ the learnings into the next iteration of our day-to-day activities.

The Power Game to re-discover and build our Explore power is the so-called `Fascinated Anthropologist´. Such a person, working on site, say in Pompeii, would never think of criticising the living habits of our Roman forbearers as the evidence is unearthed. That’s not in their remit. The job at hand is simply to discover how people lived in ancient times.

The PQ Programme of Mental Fitness is an effective way of re-engaging with the Sage Powers which reside in each and every one of us. With increased mental fitness, vast amounts of energy, otherwise squandered by our Saboteurs, are freed up, our physical and mental health improve, as do the quality of our relationships and the outcomes of our personal and professional endeavours. Life truly becomes an adventure of discovery.