Wk2 Reading: Art of Possibility Chapters 1 – 4

The worst thing you can do to yourself is to doubt anything, because every time you do, a door of opportunity closes...
--David Cheng

This is an incredible book ("The Art of Possibility"), and it certified a lot of my life. Many of the things in the book were things I've been doing since I was a kid, including understanding that everything is a "game", about the world of measurement and competition, and about contributing to others. One time, a high school teacher told me after class that I had to "wake up", because I was living life as in a dream world. I told him back "In a few years, let's see what sort of dream I have made for myself." Unfortunately, the teacher died of leukemia, so I was never able to show him my "dream world." I think though that to understand and do some of the things in this book, a person would have to have some good amount of willpower, as I could see people giving up quickly without even trying, always looking for "reality."
I think that one of the things that got me thinking this way was an incident when I was an adolescent. There was a small creek with a waterfall near the house I grew up in. The water right next to the waterfall was very deep (maybe even deeper than 30 feet), and was known to have claimed many lives. When I was about 14 years old, I went swimming with some cousins, who were great swimmers, and had lived at the ocean coast all their lives. I went close to the waterfall and tried to test how deep it was there, when suddenly, I was caught in a whirlpool and couldn't swim out. I tried with all my strength to swim against the current, but it was too strong. I cried for help to my cousins, but they didn't want to help. My life flashed in my mind, and really thought I was going to die. Then I thought this "well if I'm going to die like this then lets play the whirlpool's game, and die with style," as I took my last bit of strength to sink myself inward into the whirlpool. It turned out that going inward through the whirlpool saved my life, as it "spit" me out from underneath and towards the creek's shore. At first, I got really mad with my cousins, but one of them told me "Hey, if you couldn't get out of that situation, who are we to try. We would have died also." They had total confidence in me to figure out what to do and how to save myself (at least that's the positive, non competitive spin I could put into that). Since then, I never cared about competition, and have lived as a gift to everyone that meets me and spends some time with me (sorry guys, emails and phone calls don't count). Overall, it's a great book, and I hope to read some of your stories as well...