March 1 | The Mountain of Youth

When you’re young, you don’t know anything.

You don’t know that there are things to know. You’re a mess of impulses, a bunch of semi-random intentions dumped in a soup of hormones, completely free of the mess of knowledge.

There’s a freedom to it, yes. A childlike joy of being, with nothing second guessed or thought out. But it’s also like a scene in a movie where the hero discovers they have super strength when they accidentally rip the door off their car—they have no baseline for what they can do in the world.

 “You have no idea what you are capable of”, says the voice in the back of our heads.

Now we wake up in the world scarred and capable, veterans of decades of learning things the only way we know how. We have an intimate understanding of the world, a prophetic vision for the day built upon knowledge of thousands of yesterdays. 

We become really good at settling down. Checking ourselves. Creating boundaries and systems and internal dialogues that shorten the distance between intention and result.

But now, instead of ripping the car door off accidentally, we all of a sudden find we can’t rip the car door off at all. The world has changed. And so many of the hard lessons of yesterday that became assumptions of the world today are different. 

Instead of being free of the mess of knowledge, you’re chained to it. Stuck seeing the world the way you know how to see it. Contained and limited by the very thing that once helped you grow.

But now you really are older. You really are wise. You no longer need the voice in the back of your head—you can use the one in the front of your head, and say to yourself,

“You really still have no idea what you’re capable of.”… Read the rest