Living On The Edge Will Sharpen Your Skills - Grasshopper
If you listen to the conversations in the deli line, at a local bar or to the needs of a person in therapy, the common thread seems to be the goal of an unchallenged life. It’s this quest for the middle that dulls our desires.
You can exist in the middle but you can’t thrive until you visit the edge.
The edge is filled with challenges that keep you alert and alive and at the top of your game. The edge is not recommended as a place to call home, just a place to visit more often than you do.
The edge is just past your comfort zone where new learning is in abundant supply. You are required to get uncomfortable to learn something new, otherwise you are like the library that philosopher Alan Watts refers to.
“If I think all the time, I won’t have anything to think about except my own thoughts. Now, that would leave me high and dry, and I would become like a library to which the only books being added were books about the books that were already in it.”
The edge is putting yourself out there not knowing what to expect but trusting that you’ll know how to respond. The edge is not thrill seeking but self discovery.
Seeking thrills is a never ending end game like drug or alcohol dependence. You need to maintain a certain level of saturation to feel like you have an edge.
You won’t discover anything new until you make a commitment to live on the edge. Again, it’s more like an occasional weekend getaway, rather than getting a mortgage.
Our comfort zone is just our conditioned patterns on parade. We learned from other non-learners that the safe zone is the only zone.
Life’s lessons are learned at the edge. We then get to bring them back to our normal base of operation to enhance our lives and aliveness.
Just like entering the stock market, there is a risk in going to the edge. You don’t always win but you always get an education. And if life ceases to be educational, you have settled for being mired in the mundane.
If you desire to discover more about you, you have to travel to the edge more often than you do.
I’m reminded of a nonsensical phrase I learned a long time ago: “A noisy noise annoys an oyster most.”
The reality is that an oyster has to be immersed in and irritated by sand to produce a pearl.
We, too, have to leave our comfort zone in order to find the edge of discovery.
All the best,
John
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