I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Saturday Reflections, I take time out to reflect.
December 6, 2024: almost two years ago, I wrote my reinvention project Day 243 post: Dwelling in possibility. I feel I’m standing at the same place now I was then: working to accept that my life has turned out the way it has, rather than how I think it should have turned out. Working to tear down the limiting strategies I’ve deployed in the past to get what I want. Wondering what might be possible for me and my life, and what I really want anyway.
I’ve been rereading Tracy Goss’ The Last Word on Power and I continue to find it a helpful if strange and occasionally opaque resource supporting me as I move from midlife into (early) late life. I resonate with her idea of letting go of trying to control life outcomes, because I know the ultimate outcome: burned to ashes in an incinerator, those ashes then scattered in the Rocky Mountains by my children.
Once you let go of trying to control everything, of trying to bring about the life you think should be yours, you can “bring into existence a unique realm of possibility”: a “new master paradigm,” in Goss’ words. A reinvention that you previously thought impossible, and which was made impossible by the repetitive coping mechanisms that once served you.
The first step, she writes, is to take a stand for the future you want to bring into being: to declare what’s possible, something you considered impossible before, because you were using old and ineffective strategies for success.
And then this becomes a game for you to play, one that you’ve defined:
This stand becomes your “impossible” game in life. What’s the relationship between the stand and the game? Once you take this stand, you will have embarked on the game; indeed, designing the stand you take is a key part of designing the game.
“To make the impossible happen,” she writes, “you give up the old identity that was built around your Winning Strategy.” And instead you become what Martin Heidegger1 called a “clearing” in the world: “an opening in which an invented future can crystallize.”
What does she mean here? Is she talking about declaring possibility and bringing an imagined future into being like Elizabeth Holmes attempted with her Theranos blood testing machine? That was mostly fraud with a god complex. But what if what Holmes thought might work did work? Then she wouldn’t be in jail. She’d be hailed as a business hero in the mold of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk.
Goss uses JFK as an example of creating a clearing:
John F. Kennedy is remembered today, not for his presidential policies, but for the opening he created, which galvanized other people into being active participants in public life. The line “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country” was powerful precisely because it echoed his way of being.
The current American president is a clearing too: his racism, sexism, corruption, incompetence, partisan blame-shifting, and crude communication have created an opening for his MAGA followers to act the same. He cleared away standards of decorum, attention to the interior lives and cares of people of all kinds, and the expectation that a president should focus on policies that benefit the entire country not just his sons and other cronies.
Fortunately that clearing is closing now, as the country wakes up from its self-centered, un-Christian stupor.
Goss continues:
The German word Heidegger used for “clearing,” Lichtung, means literaly a clearing in a forest. Heidegger used it deliberately because it conveyed a sense of “opening.” A clearing is an opening in the world of dense, conflicting interpretations—a place of light and simplicity.
I feel like a clearing is opening up in my life, after two and a half years of introspecting, writing, making art, and building a life without a romantic partner. I stand for the possibility that a good life can be created from very mundane activities, none of which promote my affluence or my standing in the world or bring me any kind of recognition.
Being a clearing means acting in a way that shows a different possibility, to yourself and to the people around you. If you live the life that your culture and society set out for you — go to college, get married and have kids, build wealth, buy a second home, finally live the affluent life of a senior citizen in America — that is not being a clearing. That is not standing up for an impossible future. There is nothing wrong with it though.
I like the idea of looking at my next phase as a game, as an impossibility, as a clearing. I still don’t know what exactly that means though.
- Heidegger was a Nazi, it’s important to say. He may have acted as a clearing in the worst possible way, using his position as a respected professor to promote anti-semitism and national purging. ↩︎