Feel Better about Things  
 
wisdom for living
 
 

Getting Out of the Box

"People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid."
- Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

     Here's a very old puzzle. Copy the dot pattern to a sheet of paper. See if you can hit all the dots using only four connected straight lines. In other words, your pencil cannot leave the paper.

     Most people have trouble solving the puzzle because they feel they have to stay within the boundries of the "box" shape of the dot pattern. They are unaware that they've made an unneccessary assumption and as long as they hold on to this assumption the puzzle cannot possibly be solved. Without this assumption, it's fairly easy:

     Incorrect Ideas can be very troublesome when we are not aware of their influence.

     Imagine that you're learning to drive a car, but there's no one helping you. You have to practice on your own. For some reason you have the idea that the rear view mirror is where you look when you want to see where you are going --- you believe it displays what's in front of you. The idea doesn't work very well. Every time you start out, something goes wrong. You hit something or end up where you didn't want to be. Driving seems to be a very hard thing --- maybe impossible. Would your driving improve with practice? How about if you tried harder? No, as long as you hold on to this idea, you're not going anywhere.

      Do we have any ideas like that? Yes, we do. How often do you find yourself saying or thinking, "I'll be a lot happier when this or that happens or when so and so does this or stops doing that." We tend to believe that circumstances determine our happiness. In other words, what happens to us determines how we will feel about things. We were brought up and educated to think this way. It's a perspective which is ingrained in our view of the world and even in our language. But, this perspective is not only incorrect, it's upside down and backwards. Our happiness comes from within us. We create it. We create how we feel about things.

     In other words, we have the power to create value in any situation, just by how we approach it. If we really want to learn to "Feel Better about Things," we must to learn to function outside of the "box" imposed by our assumptions. This means using our capacity to imagine and visualize --- a powerful tool which allows us to unlock our potential.