The trouble, of course, is that these constraints form a framework. Within in, one is deemed to be "normal". Break out, and to those still living within that framework, you are now "abnormal". Or "pessimistic". Or "strange". Or "a lunatic". Or many other things.
Yet all frameworks run their course, for the bounds they provide become inappropriate over time. They cause us to move too strongly in some directions, and to ignore others.
Many of the great debates of our time — why our politics doesn't seem to work any more, why our financial system is fraudulent to the core, why we can't reach a resolution as to whether we are irredeemably modifying our only home into something that can't sustain us (much less what to do about that), and much, much more — are collisions between people in the box, and those who broke out one side of the box (but not others). A few have broken through several sides.
Can we simply leave the whole framework, the whole box, behind? (Or are we, by being human, condemned to having to have a box of some sort?)
My suspicion is that this is a journey best taken with others. My guess is that it may well need to be multi-staged, and perhaps well multi-generational. Hence, this blog.
For it seems to me that, if "the longest journey still begins with a single step", then the first step must be to affirm "we are leaving the box behind". Not seeking a breakthough on one wall, but simply to think without it at all.
One thought, as I take that first step into uncharted terrain: as Hegel made clear in his Phenomenology of Spirit (Phänomenologie des Geistes), coherence will mean, for us, that we may start anywhere. We may advance a step anywhere. We will circle around. So we need not know where we are going, but merely that we are.
