I think the current conversation about boundaries focuses heavily on keeping people out, meaning they did something and a wall is built, a text conversation ensues, a rogue social media tirade, and it devolves from there.
Yet — what about shifting the focus from keeping others out to keeping yourself in tact. I wonder if that makes sense if the words I have chosen have reached you well?
Of course, we need the boundaries to move and react from the external, and that is not the only level to be attentive to is what I am intimating.
What about the inner-assessment of where we are over-extending and making it easier for others to walk pass the doorway without knocking and strutting over the threshold with their expectations leading the way?
I’m not finger-pointing; I am permission giving. What if we listened without judgment when our inner-selves groans at an invitation?
I think we need to talk about pendulum swings. When I was a kid in Philadelphia, at the Franklin Institute there was a pendulum that swung, at least two stories, or floors. In kid-dom it was gigantic. I would stand on the marble spiraling staircase and watch this gigantic pendulum swing across the marbled floor, dancing over a star pattern outlined in gold. I can feel my chin pressing on the brass hand rail, watching that pendulum swing in metered geometry. Back and forth, back and forth.
I think we are in an aged of a fixed right while living in a reality of polarity. You can choose to stay fixed, but you’ll have to deal with the imbalance you create.
That pendulum had the boundary of its balance. Its gravitational pull. Was it pyhsics? It was not mechanized. It was not simulated. It hung from a chain—suspended. It showed the unseen forces swinging, the kind of things kids pay attention to.
Maybe that’s more the invitation. In a world that can simulate anything, maybe we would serve turning a bit toward the unseen forces within that are waiting for our attention to open us back to wonder and the spaciousness of unfoldment.
We’d have to make the space though. We’d have to have the boundaries for the larger display, without guilt or shame. We’d have to value the spacious that we deserve as humans to have an interior life, for us to investigate and befriend the spaciousness that lies within, moving us through time and space.
If we are alway overextended, we may rush right up the staircase of our to do list and never notice the wonderment before us and the creative solutions that lie in that world of magic — the one that kids pay attention to.
You may forget but
let me tell you
this: someone in
some future time
will think of us.
-Sappho
I wonder — Was the pendulum better in your mind than in the photo?