Peace of mind in a crazy world.

Some of us are good at setting boundaries in one or two areas of our lives (there will be no olives on any pizza I eat, thank you very much), but most of us fall short of setting good boundaries in all areas of our lives. This leads to multiple challenges, including health, work/life balance, our sanity, spiritual life, marriage and family, and the lost opportunity to simply have fun sometimes.

Every boundary starts inside. Either our brain or our body reacts and tells us, nope, that’s not a good idea/person/place. Sometimes, the “nope” is based on fear, an imagined danger to ourselves or our identity. If your body is telling you to stay out of the creepy, dark alley in the middle of the night, listen. If your mind is telling you not to share a belief with others or wear that shirt you love but everyone else hates because of what other people will think, we’ve moved into the tricky range of fitting in with society and being ourselves. That’s a tradeoff we all have to manage every day.

We can also be scared of ideas (the fear of other people is too big a topic for a homepage, but there will be an upcoming essay on that). The non-scary thing about ideas is our ability to hold an idea in our mind, understand it, and not believe or act on it. We need to listen to each other in order to find the best ideas and squash the dumb ones; however, we don’t have to think like each other. We don’t have to agree with the loudest voice. We don’t have to pretend we like things that we don’t. If we do, we no longer live our lives but live out someone else’s vision of what is a good life.

Pick any essay here. Read it, think about it, question it, share it, or forget it. Get in the habit of holding ideas in your head, spinning them around, and checking them out without becoming them. Find your own sense of clarity on what is important to you and how you see the world. Once you do, you may find it that much easier to set up those internal boundaries that shape how you interact with the world.