When should you let your guard down?

Guards can be good. They protect us.

Security in a nightclub, or guardrails on a subway staircase. Mouthguards in sport, or cyber technology guarding against hackers.

In humans, uncertainty and discomfort activate our internal guards. Like invisible walls raising against any perceived threat. ?But, exploring when our internal guards are habits and barriers, rather than well-chosen necessary boundaries, is important. ?

Increasingly, I notice hesitance, suspicion or wariness where there really shouldn’t be. You’ll have seen plenty of Instagram clips where someone is trying to cheer up the community and draw unsuspecting crowds in to find a place of joy, and the people passing by are wary and even skip the experience due to fear of what might happen.

And I reckon it’s such a shame. The thing is, it plays out in all parts of our life, this over-protection. We walk into meetings at work with pre-determined fixed thoughts, not willing to hear anything else (even if we got good at looking like we are). We have conversations with our loved ones and stick inside our own perspective and stop hearing their view, focussed on only ours.

On a broader scale, we see governance and systems stuck in loops playing out the old worn pathways, because we don’t have the capacity to let down an old guard and let in new information for fear of losing something (even if that something needs to be kicked out).

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And the impact? People suffer.

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The joy of newness, change, the sprouting of ideas and solutions to hard problems are suffocated.

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We are missing life. Missing moments that can actually stop people hurting. And even if we come back from that extreme, we are preventing the joy and awe of creativity. We are designed to create. Pro-create, make new things, design new concepts, but our guards are getting in the way.

There are a lot of reasons why. Conditioning by societal systems, political agendas, consumerism and pushing humanity into a process rather than embracing an organic cycle of life, where we begin, end and rebirth many times in our natural cycles of creativity.

Perhaps, as a practice we could each catch our guards that are habitual or heavily over assertive and take them down a notch – ready to open ourselves to possibility.

Imagine what might happen in your life if you did?

Things could be better.

What a thought.

S