Inside my safety zone, I lived in a very neat, orderly, organized world. Everything had its place. I knew what to expect and I felt secure within these boundaries. I was given a model of how the world was supposed to be run and I was taught always to be prepared for whatever happened to me in my life. I suppose that is all well and good when one is a child.
This notion of always being prepared also implied that there is a "right" way to do things and an "incorrect" way as well. As a child, I just blindly accepted that the "rules of the game," as defined by my parent's world, were necessarily correct and true. I believed that I had to live within the boundaries those rules established for my thinking and my actions.
Later, during my teenage years, I was growing up in the tumultuous world of the 1960's. This was the decade that gave us man venturing into space, the Viet Nam War, the civil rights movement, Woodstock, student takeovers on college campuses and Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. My generation challenged the sometimes stifling notions and conventions of the day. My generation openly declared its right to color outside the lines and to think outside the box. By the end of the 1960's, the comfortable and secure order of my world had been shattered and replaced by a chaotic world in which any idea or value could be openly questioned or tossed aside. Certainty, in any realm of thought, became a thing of the past and accelerating change in the way we understood the world became the norm. Our world has not been the same since.
Of course, during the seventies, many of the rebels and revolutionaries of my generation eventually settled down and became housewives, businessmen, college professors and stock brokers. The world seemed to be returning to some semblance of order and sanity. However, the reality was that our lives had been irrevocably changed. No one pretended any longer that if one played by the rules and did all the "right" things, everything would turn out okay for us. The essential inequality and unfairness of human society was laid bare for everyone to see.
It was now okay to openly acknowledge that the real world is not always a fair or predictable place. Everyone does not always play by the rules. Life is not always fair. Often the playing field is anything but level. Very seldom are all things equal. Most of all, our lives are inherently messy and that messiness just goes with the territory.
But we should not assume that the uncertainty that these realities bring to our lives is necessarily an entirely bad thing.
In a recent issue of REALSIMPLE, I came across a really lovely passage in an article by Molly O'Neill. The title of the article is Ready or Not. She talks about living a life ruled by the notion that one has to be prepared for everything that you do in life. At this point in her life, she has found the flaw in that argument and I wanted to share it with you.
Reality does not always dovetail nicely with theory. My... belief in... Being Prepared, I realized, neither guaranteed a particular outcome nor allowed room for chance, luck, spontaneity, or serendipity, the things that keep life interesting. Any push past the zone of the familiar requires a leap of faith, a moment of terror, a howling careening through unmapped territory. "Ready, or not, here I come!" my brothers and I would cry during our backyard games of hide-and-seek when we were young. It was the unknown that caused our hearts to race, the unpredictable that caused our shrieks of discovery to echo throughout our tidy, well-planned community.
By now, you have already figured out that there is always going to be a factor of uncertainty in many of the endeavors we set out to do in the course of our lives. We will have to abandon the safe assumptions that we held within our safety zones and sometimes we have to just wing it, taking sometimes huge risks with untested strategies, with no guarantees of a successful outcome. Sometimes life simply requires what Molly O'Neill called "... a leap of faith.."
In my own life, I have experienced that rush one feels when venturing into a new and uncharted territory. Let me tell you, it is an exhilerating feeling one does not easily forget. I don't go there often enough, but I truly savor the feeling I get when I find myself in those times and places.
At the age of 60, I have tried to make some sense of all this. I have learned from all my experiences that we are going to miss something very important if we choose to live lives which are just a little too orderly and scripted... if we never venture beyond the safe boundaries we contruct for our lives... if our lives aren't just a bit messy and uncomfortably unpredictable. We should want to change and grow as a person during our journey. We cannot do that if everything we think and do is laid out for us by someone else. Living that way may be safe, but it is hardly a satisfying way to live.
We should see our lives as marvelous adventures... a life-long journey during which we will never be sure of what is going to happen next. It is these very elements of the unknown and the unpredictable that keep things exciting and interesting for us until the day we make our exit, stage left.
Kindest Regards,
Howard Fireman
Houston Tx.
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