Spinning up to Perfection
Have you swallowed your daily dose of fear?
Have the glossy signals of trouble reach you on your screen? More will be arriving soon.
Whenever we hand over our identity to the screen, we are rewarded with:
- a chatter of problems and promises,
- saturated in a slur of anxiety,
- algorithmicly tailored to stack our silo
- full of self-echoing stuff
- that reaffirm our personal, bias and belief
- with just enough of what we think is good and
- a steady stream of everything we fear is bad.
Just as planned, we then, direct our world with those beliefs - spend our money as directed, invest our efforts in the cause we believe in, avoid what we think is terrible, rarely moving beyond this sphere of self-restriction.
Stay here in the screen. There are stickers. We can like and dislike. It lifts us up or put us down, We get that sense of success or feel the burn of scorn. Within the screen, we are someone or worth nothing at all. Its so like raising a five year old.
This semantic sterilization of the individual forms a hum of mediocrity that is the hallmark of the early 21st century.
Do you want that? Just because you respond to ringtones? Just because you swipe right on the screen? We are Pavlov's dogs. When the bell rings, we matter.
A Stand In for Creation
The purpose of all of this entertainment is to capture us, occupy us, give us the visceral experience of things we are otherwise too afraid to engage. And, for good reason: most of that stuff is dangerous. If it wasn't virtual, it would mean risk.
Which begs this question - are we risk-friendly or risk-adverse?
That's relevant. The very breath of existence is risk.
Nothing exists without it. Everyday, everywhere, If we're alive, we belong to risk. To be ourselves is a risk. To grow up is a risk. To survive is a risk. To be original is a risk. To innovate is a risk.
To dive into the deep end is simply scarier than the shallows of the comfortable and known.
But the tried and true thins out faster as the rate of change we must adapt to rockets past what any of us comprehend. None of us know what to do with it, even as we collectively chant "disrupt! disrupt!"
Risk surrounds us. It is our common ground.
No wonder we swim to the screen to filter out the actual world and hide inside the pixels. It's seems so safe here. It's all the stuff we like to think about, all the people who think like us. It's comfortable. Its cozy. Nothing frightening or strange.
Just how much risk can we take and still be safe?
Can we even make such an arrangement? Take a safe risk?
What happens when we go past safe risk into territories of higher risk? When we see brilliant performance in anything, is that safe? Or is there simply inherent risk in reaching for excellence? Because, if that's the case, we need to increase our resilience to taking risk.
If we're going to raise our performance excellence, risk is the path of development.
Any exercises can be perfected. We can learn the whole course of how something's done. We can even be highly practiced in executing the thing we do but when the moment to be in the zone of brilliant creativity arrives, we have to take a leap of pure faith into the unknown - take a risk.
If that works, and we remain clear and calm we can find ourselves doing things we didn't know we knew, acting in ways that surprise us. There's no doubt that we're performing at the highest level we've ever reached. We can feel that. Anyone watching sees it.
Here's a simple truth: the key to living in a risky world is to raise our game to its highest level.
Whatever we do in life, whatever we create with our thoughts and actions, the safest position to occupy in life is to be a fully awakened creator managing risk on-the-go and spinning up to perfection whenever its called for.
We can find that state within ourselves and when we do, make it our steady practice.
When we do, life becomes a surprisingly inviting adventure of creative wonder rather than a self-limiting silo of structured fear.
Pick one:
- Stay in the silo?
- Spin up perfection?