Long-running TV dramas create crisis after crisis for their characters.  If these people moving from one ordinary, repeatable day to another there would’t be ugh of an audience, so the writers give them a push to see how they’ll deal with this or that – anything from a relationship breaking up to a train-crash.

The remarkable happens to us,rather than being something we choose of our own volition.

In a movie, the main character is shaken out of her routine by an initiating incident – usually within the first fifteen minutes; she then spends the rest of the film trying to get back to where she was, but in the course of the adventure or challenge, ends up in a better place.*

We are engrossed by these stories, not realising it’s often in our hands to initiate something remarkable.  But how to get there?

Openness to adjacent possibilities** can be hard to find because of the  resistance we encounter when we want to hit the pause button, to in stop and take notice of how our lives are often pushed along relentlessly and unquestioningly.  When we stop and look around, we might be alarmed at just how much we don’t know and haven’t seen, but this admitting our poverty is positive and good.

Resistance fears it because it thinks it’s an end, as if we’ve been found to be wanting, but it’s really a beginning.  When we are open, we are open to more; we’re ready to embark on something remarkable.

One of the things I’m always on the lookout for is how to support people in finding the ways and means of moving towards something they want.  Openness is a starting point.

(*Not all films ends in this way – just like life.)
(**Adjacent possibilities are alternative life-stories we can live given our talents and our passions – life is more like a palate of colours to be mixed than we realise.)