#Expansion

Sometimes I get overwhelmed by the sheer number of possibilities. How do I keep control in the face of all this uncertainty? This has been an ongoing story in my life. My answer has tended to be to seek to control via contraction: I clamp down.

Thus the possibility of expansion has felt deeply threatening to me.

So in many ways I have lived a small life, bounded by my need to feel in control, and I have hated the smallness of the life I've allowed myself, but until now that's what I've allowed myself.

Now, finally, I am practicing expansion.

I am practicing expansion:

What if life could be so much more than it currently is?

Well of course it can.

Then why isn't it?

My teacher, Jerry, points out that I am attached to the struggle. He says, "Ben, it doesn't have to be so hard."

Hmm. What might that look like?

"Play with it." Jerry gives that instruction a lot.

Somewhere over the course of my 40 years, it became a lot harder to find play in what I'm doing. How did that happen? And why?

What might that look like?

It would look a lot like play, I think. It would look like taking chances and seeing what happens.

It's a little weird to think about how I've lost much of the ability to find play in what I'm doing, and at the same time I say that I'm a professional writer. I mean, what else should writing be but playing with words?

What might that look like?

It would look like deciding to publish every day, and then facing the fear and the not-knowing, and then doing it anyway.