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Heloisa, Maria, Rod,
I enjoyed working with
Rod's experiment for
a day: "Let go of the habit of trying … take a chance … and see what
happens."
I started wondering about the notion of a
`habit'. Habits are funny things. As long as we buy into them, they
seem
impossible to break. We can try with all our might, but like a rubber
band,
after we stretch it for a while and then let go, it just flips back
again. And
yet, and yet … sometimes it is ridiculously easy to drop a habit.
Sometimes we
reach a point where suddenly we can stop, really drop a habit, and that
is it. When
we really see through what it is that binds us to a habit, its power is
lost,
and we realize that we have always been free to walk away from the
habit.
So in the case of the
`habit of trying,'
here we are, living in a world, and while playing a role, trying to
play a
different role. The instruction of the experiment is to `let go' of
that habit.
I experimented with two different approaches.
First, I let myself
feel the strong
conviction of there being a world, really absolutely existing, and me
being a
player in that world, also really existing, for a while at least, in
that
world. Within that setting, I then played with giving up trying. While
doing
that, however, I was quickly confronted with the futility of such an
approach. If
I really were a player on such a stage, it just wouldn't make sense to
not try.
I would be a bad player, I would forsake my role, obstruct the play,
and bother
others in doing so.
Then as an alternative,
I tried to taste
the possibility of there not being a world, of the world and me and all
parts
of it having never existed, of it all being like reflections in a
mirror, part
of a magic show. That made it far easier, in fact all too easy, to
not-try. It
was not so much that the habit was broken, or that I now consciously
could let
go of the habit. Rather, the whole notion of even being able to try
anything at
all was sabotaged, with there no longer being a world to try in, or
players to
try anything.
Of course, it was not
easy to stick to the
second approach, and many times during the day I found myself
habitually
falling back into the first approach. But reflecting on it, I noticed
that my
very judgment of `many times' and `habitually' and `falling back' were
part of
the language of the first approach. That all seemed terribly binding after falling back in that first
approach, where I
then
seemed stuck. But as soon as I remembered the possibility of the second
approach, I again realized that there is only freedom, that there has
never
been bondage or confusion or strictures of habit.