Possibility as Opportunity

How do we uncover opportunities? How do we create more possibilities that show up as opportunities? 

“If you want something you’ve never had, you must be willing to do something you’ve never done.” – Thomas Jefferson

 I think we can all resonate with that idea. But what gets in the way of possibility? 

So here's where fear comes into the conversation. And fear, I would pose for your consideration, is what creates resistance to any possibility.

Anytime we have a sense of possibility and it doesn't happen, there's typically some kind of fear that's in the way of us and that possibility, or us as that possibility. But it's not just about the fear of failure, right? It's also about the fear of success. 

That's a really big part of our human psyche: we tend to like things status quo. And even the notion of something successful can overwhelm us equally to something failing as well! 

Now, a lot of people talk about fear and love as kind of being opposing forces.

 But I think there's something in the middle of that, which can really clarify it in much finer detail. And that is the notion that what informs fear is separation. This becomes a way to – throughout our days – see where fear is popping up, feel where fear is popping up.

 Because we may not always be able to identify it. We may not always be able to say, oh, I'm having a fear, right? Sometimes it's extreme, but in other cases, it's very subtle and it comes in the form of excuses. So we begin to look for moments of separation – physical/emotional, disconnection, etc – to point towards some underlying fear.

 And that's fear's nature: it's contractive. It wants to think about your body somatically in a fear state. Think of an extreme fear state – someone's coming to attack you, so you contract to protect your organs. That’s how our bodies have evolved to protect ourselves physically, and it’s no different emotionally.

 We're afraid, we tighten up, we clench up, we retreat. 

So what’s the opposite of that? Love. Well, what informs love? 

If separation informs fear, then we can infer that unity is what informs love. And unity is the opposite of separation. 

By using the transitive property, love and fear now stand in opposition. But only because of this idea of separation and unity at the core of these properties, of these experiences.

With these ideas in mind, we’ll continue our exploration of how fear gets in the way of possibility – and how we can dissolve this fear – in subsequent posts.