This doodle leads us into the Alchemy Quest.  Solve et coagula is the alchemist’s mantra, meaning “to separate and bring together.”

We may not be able to turn lead into gold but alchemy really happens when we see how a person’s life can be turned from unremarkable into remarkable.

We look closely at our lives in order to separate talents and passions and experiences so that we may know them better and more fully, and then we bring these things together again but in a new way.

This has been called the adjacent possibility, meaning the things which constitute our lives at this moment in time can be reconfigured in an infinite number of ways to achieve many different purposes, or, to put it another way, to write many different stories.  There is not only one way.

We’re answering the two questions: Who am I? and What is my work?  By work we understand Not the contribution we know and feel we have to make in the world whilst we have breath.

Knowing and feeling these things makes it possible to join more imaginatively and creatively with others – then the number of possibilities go up incalculably.

Setting out on the Alchemy Quest means we are preparing to break away from WYSIATI – What You See Is All There Is – and to discover things about ourselves that are already there but have often gone unnoticed.

SOMETHING TO DO: Try writing out your top three for each of the following lists: your values, your talents, your passions, and the significant experiences which have altered your life-path (excepting marriages and births and such, we are givens).

RESOURCES YOU MAY ENJOY;
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
Ken Robinson’s TEDtalk: Bring on the learning revolution!