Discovery

January 2, 2017

Greetings from the explorer,

When we learn to tie our shoes it is a challenge.  It is foreign and frustrating and it requires concentration and effort to master.  And then with practice we become expert to a point where we devote little to no thought or energy in the execution.

Human beings create habits, the body and mind acting semi-autonomously on our behalf, so that we can concentrate on other things.  It is a survival function that we have adapted to such a degree that it can jeopardize our survival.

Because what gets sacrificed in this process is a small thing, that has hidden in it, a big thing.

Before I go on I’ll remind you here that I am a great proponent in creating habits that add value to our lives, which support the behavior we want most in our everyday living.  But what happens for all of us is that we refine our lives with habits, master the mundane with habits, and then our habits master us.  It sounds disturbing, but what is the real loss?

Discovery.

I sifted through a mass of words looking for what I was feeling this morning, perched on the edge of another new year, and this word held on.  Discovery.

We advance through life looking for ways to make things easier, more efficient, safer and consistent and predictable.  Presumably so we can continue to explore, unfettered by distractions like learning to tie our shoes every morning.   Enter inertia.

It may be age, or it may be the accumulation of habit, it may be the ‘groove’ we seek that becomes the rut we dig.  However it comes, it is what narrows our lives and keeps us from the fullness that is just on the other side of discovery.

To find new worlds you have to believe and then you have to act, to seek.  This takes a little courage since there is risk involved.  The little prick of fear you feel before you take your first piano lesson, or when you put on a pair of skis for the first run, is the leading edge of discovery.  It is what stops most of us.

I am aware of my own limitations as I write this, and along with fear I will add impatience.  If I seek to discover the beauty in nature, I can’t run through it with my eye on my watch.  If I seek to discover my neighbor, I can’t accept a wave as I drive by.  I have to devote time and patience.   

We can start with ourselves.  We can ask of ourselves what we would challenge our children with when we first sit them down looking at their laces.  Do this, take this chance, and feel the thrill of not knowing, and then knowing.  Learn, read, sing, explore, change things, rattle around in our head until something shakes loose.  Seek the talent, the beauty, the gift that waits within us.  Sound too vague?

Start with asking: where are you when you are at your best?  What talents, what strengths do you bring to that moment?  Who are you with? What is it that you feel?  In that moment of richness, smiling, eyes shining, happy, courageous, you could do what you’ve been dreaming of.  You can ask the girl of your dreams, you can learn a language, you can play chess, you can do yoga.  Because your spirit is bigger than the fear that blocks you from discovery.

So begin with finding how you can be your best self, and then ask what you would do next if you knew you could not fail.  This is you in full fledge discovery mode.

And there is this: the reason we stop meeting new people, and the associated resistance to new ideas, has its roots in this same fear we feel approaching all discovery.  We are not confident in ourselves (yet) and so we do not risk discovery of others.  Plus it’s far easier to talk about how different other people are than seek for ourselves to see what is behind that difference.  That is what lies behind almost every headline you read about the divisiveness of the last year.  We are the solution to that which divides us.  Discovery.

You might think that all of the world has been discovered, that there are not new frontiers left for us to explore.  But every day, including this second day of 2017, holds mystery and new ideas, new challenges and new perspectives.  Every day we wake up we have in us undiscovered talent, beauty, genius, waiting to be uncovered.  Some small actions, like making a bow from a cotton lace, some large, like listening to the person you were sure is wrong.   Often it just starts with a question like;  “….what if…?”

“The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”

Marcel Proust

Hope this finds you seeking,

David

Copyright © 2017 David Smith