DAY 60 OF 100 DAYS SELF-REINVENTION SERIES - Moving to the Edge of Freedom – Going beyond your made-up capabilities

"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure."

— Helen Keller

I tried to explore the subject of how what we can do is something that we made up in the last chapter. This chapter goes a step further on how we might free ourselves from the slavery of a false boundary of safety that we built. A consequence of this false boundary is that many of us are not enjoying the life that we are creating every day. A rational mind will ask why you would stay in the confines of a boundary you created. Well, many of us are not aware that this boundary of possibilities was drawn by us. My first book, dwells extensively on how we create our realities, regrettably unaware that we were the architects of this reality. So, we wrongly attribute our limitations to external forces, political happenings, and religious ideals. We fail to realize that reality does not exist anywhere except the images running inside us. You would have noticed by now that neither the mountains nor the trees have any voice. Only humans speak. The descriptions that you try to ascribe to reality are created from within you. To borrow from the poet and novelist Anaïs Nin, "We don't see things as they are; we see them as we are."

Through introspection, you will notice that the things that cause fear when leaving your comfort zone are not real. What brings fear is the stored boundaries inside you. You hear warning bells as if to say the voice of God is stopping you. Except for the rare occurrences, it is never the voice of God that wants to stop you. What is actually holding you back are memories of what is possible for you in the given context. After James G March expounded his views on the Hot Stove Effect, he went on to propound a way of escape from these trappings of the unconscious. He called it The Technology of Foolishness. In the technology of foolishness, March begins to explain that you have to consciously go to domains outside current boundaries to learn new things. In his words, "It's a tricky thing, because foolishness is usually that—foolishness. It can push you to be very creative, but uselessly creative. The chance that someone who knows no physics will be usefully creative in physics must be so close to zero as to be indistinguishable from it. Yet big jumps are likely to come in the form of foolishness that, against long odds, turns out to be valuable. So, there's a nice tension between how much foolishness is good for knowledge and how much knowledge is good for foolishness."

Remember that foolishness only exists in language, as does failure. Failure is a descriptive term for something that happens. The thing described in this context is meaningless. It is like the half-full and half-empty glass phenomenon. Both descriptions are interpretations of the same phenomenon, but they are so described however we so choose depending on how our observations correlate with who we are. If you are willing to suffer psychologically for what your brain termed foolish and explore domains you hitherto thought were scary, at this stage you’re now moving towards the edge of freedom. I love the way book two of the Landmark Learning series captures this move to the edge of freedom – "Nothing is so reckless as waiting for certainty—that's a game we are sure to lose. Anyone who runs a business, chooses a mate, or just drives down the street knows there's a risk. When the possibility of power, effectiveness, and freedom arises, we often find ourselves asking "what if the ball actually goes over the fence. What if it doesn't?" The question of whether something will happen or not is irrelevant to the phenomenon of possibility. There is no certainty as to the inevitability or predictability of the outcome—we are the ones saying something is possible. Real power occurs when we know we have something to say about the way things are—that we have access to the state of affairs beyond just reporting. Creating possibility is risky business. Creation is a great risk, a kind of ultimate risk— the willingness to take a stand with no evidence. FAITH!

Look at the world around you, and you will find that everything we enjoy today came from people who were willing to embrace foolishness. There is a place of freedom when a decent amount of knowledge is mixed with a corresponding amount of foolishness. Really, what James March calls the technology of foolishness is actually the technology of not knowing. When we approach boundaries of what looks like unknown, , we want to turn back to safety, but it isn't really safety, it is the prison that our beliefs of possibilities built for us. Life lived on this premise is really not worth living. When you find out that life is either a daring adventure or nothing, you will be willing to take the first step towards this edge of freedom. As Landmark Education rightly points out, nothing is so reckless as waiting for certainty. Can you imagine that Manchester United FC will turn down a match because there is no certainty of them winning? But that is exactly what many of us do in our personal lives. Will any football team turn down a competitive match because they have been beaten several times by the other club? You can’t imagine that any football club would do that. So why are you doing that in your personal life?

To move towards the edge of freedom, you have to relearn some of the things you thought you knew. You have to redefine failure. Once you begin to learn the art of seeing possibility in domains outside your comfort zone, you have begun to blur the boundaries that define and restrict what is possible for you. The children of Israel became so comfortable with a way of being in the world, and when they attempted to move close to the edge of freedom, they felt it was better to go back to Egypt – the known, the familiar, and the prison of comfort. They wished they had died in Egypt; daily, they fought what seemed like the unknown. But God dwells in the unknown. As Solomon rightly said in 1 Kings 8:12, "The Lord has said He will dwell in the thick darkness." This is where magic takes place. This is where freedom is. Freedom isn't in the things you know; you have to add a decent amount of foolishness or risk-taking behavior to get your freedom. All through history, men who live in freedom have had to at one point or the other embrace the unknown. From Christopher Columbus to Martin Luther, freedom comes from moving out of the known. I leave you with the words of President JF Kennedy – "We choose to go to the Moon...in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too." When you realize that hard and easy are interpretations of an occurrence with no conscience, you will see how mastery of language can influence you to move past known limitations.