Possibility is a universe we all inhabit. This is true even when we’re pretending to live in a universe of helplessness. Both are filters that determine whether we see ourselves, each other, and our lives as stimulating or draining.
Cultures transmit assumptions through the generations. What is right. What is wrong. Who’s in charge. Dangerously, if they tell us the world is flat, we’ll stop thinking critically about what else might be true. Their assumptions block our shots before we take them. It’s those shots not taken that determine the life we get. To change our trajectory, we have to question every assumption. We need to remember that assumptions survive because people forget they began as interpretations.
All the ‘facts’ about what is impossible, absurd, reckless, practical, and doable are interpretations filtered through someone’s biases and fears. They took a set of circumstances and made a story out of them. We inherit the story and mistake it for reality. Then we build a life around it without stopping to ask who came up with it.
The stories aren’t always dramatic; more often, they’re simple. It’s too late. You missed your chance. You should give up. It’ll always be this way. Play it safe. Who do you think you are? You’re not good enough. You can’t. Time’s up. We don’t suffer because these stories are true. We suffer because we let them keep us from trying.
If we are to live up to all we can be, we need to participate in writing the stories we tell ourselves that create our future. Not fantasies. Not delusions. Narratives that lead to actions. Actions that generate evidence. Evidence that destroys the flawed theory.
Twelve-step recovery offers a useful example. A dominant belief that life is worth living suddenly replaces the suicidality brought on by seemingly hopeless states of mind and body. That hopelessness is exchanged for hope as the filter through which we evaluate our circumstances. Our mind and being are transformed, and a path emerges that didn’t exist an hour earlier. No change in the circumstances. Change in the interpretation. In response to the new interpretation, the future changes too.
Assumptions don’t like to be questioned. People, culture, and fear will tell us to sit back down. Be quiet, ashamed even. We can’t think our way out of the desert. We must walk. We need the sweaty, painful walk to remake us. Possibility is a discipline, a daily practice of asking, ‘Is this still true?’ We don’t need more information. We need more nerve.
What if the thing we call reality is only a story repeated so many times that it now sounds like a fact? What if we stop living inside someone else’s interpretation? Then we have to write our own story.
Quote: Often, “reality” means nothing more than conventional reality. And conventional reality is almost always wrong. Steven Pressfield
Song Accompaniment: Things Behind Things Behind Things, Bon Iver
2026 The Accompaniments – Apple Music
2026 The Accompaniments – Spotify
The Path To The Power You Never Lost