“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.’*

Be a prequel, not a sequel.

Movie sequels come from the world of measurement; they are knowable, repeatable, and, therefore, guaranteeable.

For reasons like these, we can be attracted to a sequel-kind of life, where tomorrow is a repeat of yesterday because today was.

Movie prequels normally follow a successful series of film – like the more recent 2009 Star Trek, which tells the back story to the original series and subsequent legacy of films.

The prequel-kind of life, though, is about setting the scene or context for a story never been told:

‘[A] universe of possibility stretches beyond the world of measurement to include all worlds: infinite, generative, and abundant. … In the measurement world, you set a goal and strive for it.  In the universe of possibility, you set the context and let life unfold.”**

I’ve previously written about finite and infinite games; the world of measurement equates to the finite game and the universe of possibility to the infinite.

To open the mind is possibility.  So, we come to each new day as beginners, with questions to open our minds and to open the universe.  New words and metaphors and stories we encounter opens new worlds – and some of these will produce dancing in our hearts.

We never arrive.  How can we?  Just when we think we know our world, it opens further into hugeness before us.  Sequels build up one after the other following the original.

Prequels keep on enlarging the context in which we find ourselves, including the context of our lives, which are deeper and larger and more astonishing than we thought.

(*Shunryū Suzuki, quoted in Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)
(**From Rosamund and Benjamin Zander’s The Art of Possibility.)