Possibility Mindsets Transforming the World

By Tracy Saville August 1, 2014

I wrote the following as a chapter to a book I was working on in 2014, that I did not finish because the possibilities of my life went from 3rd gear to 1st, which allowed me to prove to myself my thesis at the time was accurate. 

That thesis is: we have the individual power to shift our thinking and actions (consumptions big and small) to anything we choose, and the mindset of possibility is an engineering decision that has the potential to save our planet and ourselves. We can end conflict. We can end fear and everything it gives birth to. A TON of work is underway (and much horrific) to heal and reconstruct everything, so the getting there is not without strife or pain. But we are on the path.

It felt like a good time to share this. I made a few minor edits to bring a reference or two current, but it is substantially as I wrote it then.

 Tracy S.

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“In 1955, Emily Dickinson, the American poet, wrote a poem about possibility, about her yearning for what might be possible in life, knowing she could never possess it. Her prose explored the tension between being a woman expected to be a Puritan-laced rule follower and a self-directed individualist who defined their inner being not by God’s law, but by an internal edict. She struggled in her writing, as most of us do in our daily lives, to give herself permission to be a powerful individual capable of living beyond the grasp of controlling religious schools of the day.

              We are so often driven to be what others want us to be. This caps our potential, our throughput.

              In her now famous soliloquy, “I dwell in Possibility,” (Dickinson, 1955), Dickinson writes of existing in a kind of unrealized potential, of the possibility of hands spreading wide from their closed disposition, a nod to the idea that closed mindedness is a choice. She writes of the world and everything in it as having a kind of paradise-fueled potential just within our grasp, but always beyond our literal reach.

              Although she wrote more than 1,700 poems during her lifetime—Dickinson mostly shared her passionate ideas only with close family. Most of her genius was discovered posthumously. The world did not know Emily Dickinson’s extraordinary insight into the human condition and nature’s sometimes-cruel disposition until after her death. She never felt the power of connecting her truth with a mass audience; success, by a certain definition, was not hers until well after she was gone.

              It is not that the significance of what Dickinson contributed to our exploration of self and nature suffered for the fact she never felt the high performance and celebrated quality of her prose. Dickinson’s value is not her commercial success from beyond the grave. Her value is her insight into the human experience. And this is of important note if we think about how culture often judges a person who only finds success posthumously as unfortunate, as if the outward trappings of fame noticed by others were what we coveted most.

              Dickinson noticed that some of us were special; some of us were chosen and some were not. Some could see and some could not; some could live in possibility, and some did not. She saw the possibility beyond her own societal chains and what might happen if she could breach the ties that bound her to a world of limited potential. And what a terrible truth to behold; that a little bit of life was better than nothing at all, trapped in average, or worst of all—in almost.

              I have always believed Dickinson shows us a core lesson in possibility itself.

              Those who believe there are limitations for their own lives, about what is possible for them, will believe it. What if Dickinson could have changed her thinking about this? What if she refused to see that there was a wall standing between her greatest dreams and what was expected of her? What if she ignored the expectations and limitations of her God and society and instead followed her heart?

              The irony of that is if Dickinson had accepted all things are possible and she had allowed herself to be powerfully awake and inner driven, she might not have given us this one prophetic piece of prose from which to understand the absence of it. In the world of such perspective, when what we think becomes embedded in our actions and words, we have to be careful that by accepting almost, we don’t foreclose on what might have been. 

              What if we never gave any other external voice the power to dictate our value or being? What if Emily Dickinson had never believed she was shackled by God or by societal convention and instead saw no boundaries for what her words or ideas meant? Might her words of possibility have reached more people sooner, and to greater impact?

              Re-engineering our lives (and systems) for what’s possible based upon our capacity (and the system’s) potential throughput is serious business. “What if” has the power to change the world. “It’ll never work or change” kills the reason and hope for trying. If we rely on external means to define that possible capacity, we tend to float back to the median barometer. Ah, the middle class, the average American family good enough – the majority of Americans feel…sound familiar?

Culture has a way of settling out its sharp edges over time and making fuzzy what was clear and distinct in the moment, but partly because we do seem to have an innate fallback propensity to go along to get along, to join the middle because extremes are risky. We float to the center or somebody else’s bogie and plan where it safe. If we fail, it isn’t on us.

Sometimes we shoot for the moon, but mostly we gravitate to the safety of the majority, or that which we define as the majority (even when it’s the minority), where other people’s opinions become our own. We don’t bother to do our own work about what we truly think, or at least; that is what we once did. That is what got a bunch of humanity into trouble. Somehow along the way we began to lose the possibility of extraordinary being, of valuing an internal, purpose-driven and possibility-fueled life.

Emily Dickinson knew that to find the extraordinary possibility inherent in the human experience, you had to get past the external voices telling you what that was (or was not). And that is the new global world’s biggest challenge: we have to find a way to live our lives into what’s possible.

I believe, and I am not alone, that we are finally now beginning to open our eyes to what this even means.

Listen to the Mayans, the spiritualists and thought leaders of any age who say as a race and as group of nations, our eyes in this time are supposedly returning inward to where transcendentalism as a field of philosophy once took us – from our meaning and existence being all about external direction of what and who we should or need to be, to our meaning being now about our internal blueprint and building out that blueprint from a framework of “us” as a human race– our Age of Aquarius, where we are supposed to be undergoing an awakening to the powerful relationship between self and nature, and the inexplicable truths about the way we behave and why.

Business minds of our time – the works of Dr. Eliyau M. Goldratt and Edward Deming among them – have given us contemporary systems to shift our mindsets and selves and systems from the middle, from what others would have us be and do – to living and working into what’s POSSIBLE.

The truth is we have been working against our grain and in opposition against our own best interests for most of our human history, and yet more of us seem to be open to the possibility of change. I believe what people are truly, desperately hungry for is possibility, for the unthinkable possibilities of our wildest imaginations that show us life and what it can be. Potential. Capacity. Throughput.

To live in a closed view of the world, the anti-possibility way of being is to close off options, to reduce what is available as solutions to our problems, and to mitigate the potential of the human experience. And for all our desires to live quietly and normally, the truth about the way things are is not drawn by our past, or even our present. Life isn’t always going to be hard because it was or is. Life is drawn by what we allow ourselves to be open to in the future and by designing our lives and systems to plan for maximum possibility, for potential throughput.  

We are not our own worst enemies after all. We are the answer to our prayers.  

We actually are on the cusp of a major shift in human development, trying desperately to re-craft our containers to organize something new, not at all based on the old.

What happens to us is no longer in the hands of any one nation or company or technological advancement. It has always been in the hands of every individual, where it began, where possibility has always lived. One person can wake up and then wake his or her neighbor, and isn’t that intriguing?

It is time to claim that possibility, and it begins by refusing to live in judgment of what has happened, or is happening, to you or your people. It is fed by your refusal to accept that blame is even a part of the human experience anymore. We ought not work to justify the past, but rather sanctify the future.

The power to change happens not by what you exert external to yourself, by refusing to forgive your father, by rejecting your relatives because you don’t like them, or by forcing your will upon the world, but by opening up to the possibility of being in the world at your fullest potential, and by being open and allowing yourself to transcend everything you once thought you believed was true about everything.

You have to let go to fall up, to meet possibility where it lives in you. This is the mindset of the future today.