"Neuroscientists have found that this "edge of impossibility" is when the brain produces its maximum doses of feel-good hormones like dopamine. It's where we find what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi famously labeled "flow", and where Ellen Langer found the intensely restorative, age-reversing quality of "mindfulness." It pushes us to such intense concentration that we enter the present moment, put down thought, and enter Wordlessness..." Martha Beck in "Finding Your Way in a Wild New World."
How often do you live on the edge of impossibilities...where you attempt the impossible? Where you leave the wide space of possible to venture near the impossible?
I sat down or was pushed to the edge of impossible by the sheer force of becoming aware that what I had thought was a possibly okay life, was actually a massive legacy of abuse...with nowhere to go; I was shoved to the shores of impossible.
I could no longer live in my old life, for it wasn't possible to be okay with what was littered all about, NOR did I feel comfortable or confident on the edge of impossible.
Impossible loomed like a huge slippery unknown mountain...and I, in-between it and my dysfunctional past. I knew there was nothing I could do in my past, nothing I could change or correct...and yet I knew nothing about doing the impossible either....and yet I had.
I had for 46 years built a 'normal life' out of dysfunction. I made fathers from pedophiles, and mothers from an ostrich, I was actually quite creative in my mind...but, this new edge of impossibilities was to create me out of my past.
A Me that seemed impossible to define....and yet I knew I wasn't defined by my past...and yet I was made up of it.
It was thrilling, exciting and deafening terrifying. To leave all you have ever known to head into all that is unknown. To tear down who you were to become who you are.
Inside me was this alive wiggly alert growing self...who was curious to know who it was...for the false me was built out of abuse...I was just a newer version of an old pattern...but not uniquely me.
Me?
who was I really?
My brother spoke of the sentiment of "What's the Use..."
It is often a feeling of hopelessness or giving up, of not caring. And, I would say, that we are forced to give up and be in this hopeless not caring state in abuse. We can't care, for it is futile. So, we learn to live with those feelings humming along.
And, even make this what's the use state our 'natural' state of being.
We feel 'useful' when we are being used....and when not, 'tossed aside and useless'...sadly our self worth grows the more we are used.
If you then take the statement "What is the Use" and turn it into an empowering statement, it can be seen as what is the use for me. How can I serve or be of use to the Universe? What are my gifts? How can I use me?
Flipping this switch from being used....to using can take years in the making.
It is to switch completely inside out. To live your life from the insides...what you want and desire, compared to being wanted and desired.
You will go from living behind other people's ideas of you to start living your ideas of you.
It forces you to live in on the edge of impossibilities and dreams.
For, no one is ahead of you telling you what to do, you are having to dream up your life. You are no longer following the pattern set by your parents, your church, your abuser, but you will become the fashioner of your life.
You are the art and the artist...without a pattern to follow.
You are the edge of impossibilities.
It is wildly liberating and extremely daunting to know you are the only one who is leading your life. No one to blame, no one to hold responsible for the choices you are making, you are living beyond the pattern in the wide open space of pure potential.
Or as Rumi said, "Out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing, there is a field. I'll meet you there."
Coming from the structure of abuse, where we are used and it is not an option to have our ideas and our desires met, we learn to live the life of being used...and when we leave there, we don't know our own use. "What's the Use?"
I guess that is the second question...behind, who am I?
What is my use?
Oprah has sent up a prayer each day saying "use me" to God.
Imagine being used by the Universe....what possibilities?
