Purposeful Wanderings - Bradford L. Glass - January 2025
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people and assign them tasks, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
How big is your world? Not in terms of … geography … money … status … possessions … followers … or “likes,” but in terms of possibility … the potential life holds: freedom to create a life of your dreams, self-trust to do the creating, resilience to handle life’s obstacles (incl. people), capacity to embrace uncertainty, unknowns, differences, paradox? Stop a bit; ponder. Do you experience the energy of your potential … or how it has been stifled?
I suggest that the world you experience (your reality) is a direct result of how you learned to think. But because we tend to get attached to what we think instead, we remain largely unaware how we came to think it. How we think is invisible … yet until we come to understand it, the world we experience is a world we unknowingly create, so it’s largely illusion. Let’s look at the invisible forces that define how we think, and which, without our awareness or consent, create what we think, and thereby define the size of our world:
Forces that pull you forward … into your dreams and longing. (Hint: all are innate human qualities)
· Curiosity and wonder … about life’s – and your own – mysteries
· Willingness … to allow life’s experiences to change you (learning)
· A unique, innate longing … that “wants” to express itself through how you live (purpose, meaning)
· Tolerance … for the unknown, uncertain, different and paradoxical (resilience)
· Acceptance … that “truth” depends on context (vs. absolutes); it changes with new learning (growth)
· Courage … (based in self-awareness, self-trust, conscious thought) to step into new possibility
Forces that hold you back … stifling your potential. (Hint: all “learned,” yet overpower our innate humanness)
· Fears: 1) of standing out in a crowd, being different, 2) of taking personal responsibility, 3) of the unknown, the uncertain, the paradoxical, 4) of lack of social acceptance, 5) of the perceived penalty for making mistakes
· Attachment to a fixed version of truth
· Attachment to a belief that life is supposed to be difficult and that you’re meant to suffer
As you grew up, you unconsciously constructed your world … out of old lessons, the way you learned life “should be.” Unaware it’s someone else’s story, you move in, and now live there – as if it were your own. If you learned more about what holds you back, your world is smaller, because your thinking tells you possibility lives outside the frame you’ve chosen to live inside. You likely can’t imagine your struggle is of your own unconscious creation.
You expand your world (into greater possibility, your innate potential) by becoming consciously aware (maybe for the first time) all this is happening. Awareness alone lets you see how “you” came to be, how you created your world, and where old beliefs and habits now limit you by defining [unnatural] edges. And as you come to trace your own thinking back to its roots, you come to understand the thinking of those around you, too. When you can see their story, you no longer need to judge it or react to it. This allows you to choose your world in each moment.
If/as you consciously choose to imagine, create, then live in a world big enough to include the thinking of others (yes, including those with whom you may disagree), you open new possibility, not based in your need to be right, protect or defend, but in your curiosity to learn and grow. With this awareness comes acceptance. You don’t have to like, agree, or go to dinner with someone to accept that they just see the world differently than you do. It’s as if you’ve become the audience … perhaps in a bad movie at times; but you’re still just the audience. With practice, you come to a place where the world around you can be crazy, yet you simply “notice” it. You know how you fit – in your world, and in theirs. Let it be; stop the fight. That’s the home of freedom, self-trust and resilience. The need to judge/change/fix others simply disappears, because your own self-trust eclipses any need to defend yourself.
Exercise: Think of your world as a circle. Its size doesn’t matter right now; just envision a circle with you inside it. The edge of the circle is the edge of what you see as possible, and all you’ve experienced – as of today. Envision.
Now imagine “your” circle living inside a bigger circle that represents all human experience – what’s known, what’s [still] unknown, perhaps even what can’t be known. I’m not suggesting you need to grow “your” circle to match, but rather just to see that there’s stuff that lives outside “your world” today. No judgment, just awareness.
Now envision someone you know and love, living inside their circle … made up of their possibility and experience. Imagine that – because you know and love them – there are places (maybe lots) where “your” circle and “theirs” overlap (like the MasterCard symbol). The overlap represents places and ways that “how” you think is shared.
Now envision someone with whom you have little in common. (This isn’t to point out disagreement or issues but to recognize that you’re just “different.”) Because you have little in common, your two circles don’t overlap at all. The lack of overlap represents the fact that “how” you both think is very different … nothing in common.
Now … come to realize that – for each and every person (as well as you) – the world they live inside feels real, valid and truthful… because each is a result of “how” they learned to think. The “how” makes it feel like truth.
Now … come to realize that ALL these circles – shared, overlapping, separate – live INSIDE that giant circle of human experience. The point here is that every single one of us has created [largely unconsciously] a circle that defines our world; then we moved in, and now live there. Each of us sees “our” circle as “the real world.”
As you do this simple imagination exercise, you see how – by expanding the size of your world (based on growing awareness alone) you “make room” for the differing viewpoints of others, not because you somehow now all of a sudden “agree” with them, but because you just see them as having learned differently; you need no longer make them “wrong.” (As your world grows, you may well see the limitations in the viewpoints of others, too. But because your world is big enough to include awareness, you just let them pass, like clouds on a summer day. This is not some new age jumbo, but the source of some true peace and freedom and resilience – for you. No need to engage.
Lastly, you might ask what if you chose a viewpoint – of yourself, life, world – so big that it includes everyone and everything. There’s no room for divisiveness in this world because everything (including all new possibility) is already inside it – even if you don’t agree with it – because you see how they came to think as they do. And all you had to do was learn to see a bigger world (and perhaps be more comfortable with uncertainty, change, paradox).
Life Lessons from Nature: In my home, I have a photograph of earthrise taken from the moon. It’s a touching image – an impossibly blue ball floating in the black vastness of space. From this viewpoint, there’s no hint of conflict or difference or divisiveness. Everything that is happening … or has ever happened … to us as humans has happened on this pale blue dot. I see wholeness, oneness and peace. It’s perhaps the circle of all human experience from the exercise above. Although I don’t know firsthand, I suspect I’d not find evidence of separateness until well after I’d returned to earth and began observing. Now, I’m aware there are those among us who think we should just go colonize some other planet. I’m great with exploration, but if we take “how we’ve come to think” with us, we’ll create the same limited viewpoints wherever we go. So start with “you;” expand outward; nothing in the universe grows from the outside in; it starts with you … your thinking, your world, your potential. Nowhere else.
Book of the month: Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. A journey into the way our minds work, and a window into “how” we think. He explores the plusses and minuses of our fast (intuitive and emotional) mind as well as our slower (logical, purposeful) mind, and how the results of each “color” our “thinking,” largely without our awareness, or consent! SO many of our problems – personal, professional and societal – stem from our lack of awareness of how our minds have messed up our “intentions.”