The Ever Limiting Life
As we age, something strange happens to our world - it gets smaller. Not the actual world, of course, but the world we inhabit. Our daily geographic radius shrinks from the neighbourhood explorations of childhood to predictable routes between home, work, and familiar shops. We don’t call friends as often as we should or did in the past, choosing texting instead. We lose the art of handwriting through disuse, just as we lose the art of genuine conversation and belonging to a community.
The ancient Stoic Seneca observed that "we suffer more in imagination than in reality." How often do we avoid reaching out, trying new places, or engaging with strangers because we've created elaborate stories about rejection or discomfort or created a self-imposed mood of negativity? We are happy to build comfortable routines, telling ourselves we're being practical when we're actually becoming prisoners of our own making. New experiences and new places become imagined only or seen on a screen.
It's ironic. In our quest for security and comfort, we often create the very isolation we fear. We stay in our homes, surrounded by our stuff - 'home comforts' that insulate us, stuff that’s on display for our own satisfaction and pleasure. Even the stains and marks on walls become so familiar we don't notice them anymore. This whole internalised life becomes the norm. We're convinced that venturing out is somewhat dangerous, or expensive, difficult even. We feel change is uncomfortable, we feel awkward, and it's not something we give thought or energy to as we did when we were younger, living driven by our own chemistry. We create excuses to get out of living! Incredible isn’t it.. But true.
The real danger is the slow suffocation of our own possibility. True belonging isn't found by making our world smaller and safer - it's discovered by having the courage to peek our heads above the parapets of life and find new meaning, new experiences and even new friends.
Today, reflect on this: how might your world expand if you chose curiosity over caution, just once, in some small way?
Word of the Day: COURAGE
Practical Exercise Options:
Take a different route to somewhere familiar today
Have a 5-minute conversation with someone you wouldn't normally talk to
Write one sentence by hand (and notice how it feels different from typing)
A Modern Fable: Life in the Dark..
In a hillside warren lived a rabbit who believed he was the last of his kind. Years of solitude had convinced him that venturing beyond his tunnels meant certain danger. His world had become a maze of familiar passages, each one leading deeper underground, away from an outside world he'd forgotten existed.
Then one terrible day came the rains. Day after day, water filled his comfortable lower tunnels, forcing him upward through passages he hadn't used in years. As the flooding continued, he climbed higher and higher, scared of drowning in the muddy black water - until finally - with nowhere else to go - he poked his trembling head above ground, sure he would suffer.
Alas - what he found wasn't the scary, dark and foreboding winter landscape of oblivion that he'd escaped from as a young buck those countless years ago. Instead, there was sunshine that warmed his fur. Birds chattered cheerfully in nearby trees. The grass was green and sweet, swaying in a gentle breeze that carried the scent of flowers he'd never smelled before. And there, grazing peacefully in the meadow in the near distance, were rabbits. Dozens of them. A whole community he'd never known existed, just beyond the boundary of his fear.
The flooding hadn't destroyed his world - it had revealed a much larger one he'd forgotten was there.
Lesson: Sometimes what feels like crisis is actually life pushing us toward the belonging we've been seeking all along.
How does this story make you feel?
Reply with one word answer in the comments please