179th Week:  Thinking Big

An art installation has just opened in New York City that is of such a grand scale that it got me wondering about “thinking big”, and how often I limit my awareness of what’s possible.  The artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude have completed their “Gates” project, consisting of 7500 large gates with banners hanging from them that wend their way through 23 miles of walkways in Central Park.  The scope of the project is astounding, and the vision and commitment involved boggles the mind.  The artists have worked for many years – since the ‘70’s – to bring this project to Central Park, and they never gave up.  Even though there is now some controversy as to whether or not their work is really art, there is no question that it is a gigantic, and successful, undertaking in that the banners are flying in the park and people are walking under the 7500 gates.  I see them from my office, and walk under many of them on my way to work each morning.

As I experience The Gates and the enormity of the vision that created this installation – to the point that the width of certain gates along a given pathway differ because of changes in the direction or width of the pathway itself – I find myself less concerned about the discussion of art or not art than I do the presence of a vision manifest.  I’m especially moved because this vision took a long time and a great deal of perseverance to accomplish.  It’s that quality of the experience that has touched me and that I wanted to explore more fully in an experiment.

I found myself wondering about places in ourselves where we may automatically think small, rather than big, and where we give up, rather than keep at something – places where this may be a habit, or places where we hide from fear, or where we avoid breaking family or community rules about how big we’re allowed to be, or what we’re allowed to do.  These places in our lives may not be dramatic, but it’s worth discovering them so we at least have a choice about what we can be and do as we move through our unfolding lives. 

And so, for this week’s experiment, I invite you to pay attention to the places where you may limit yourself – where you tone down your vision, tell yourself something you want to accomplish is impossible, hold yourself back from responding to an opportunity.  These don’t have to be large moments, or large issues.  Allow yourself to notice whatever moves into your awareness and experience where you hold back or limit yourself in any way.  Then, play with what it would be like to go ahead, to give yourself permission to think or envision on a bigger scale than you normally would do.  The point isn’t to move into immediate action.  Rather, the invitation is to get to know the places where you hold yourself back and then notice what it’s like to imagine opening up new options.  You may find yourself running into beliefs or rules that you hadn’t even realized are still operating in your life, and that’s a worthwhile exercise in itself.

As always, have fun with this one and use the experiment as an invitation to curiosity, an exploration, a possibility for discovery.