Think Outside the Circle: Change Your Routine. Try Some New Things.

Sometimes, we get so caught up in our own little world, we forget there’s a larger universe waiting to be discovered.

We focus on a problem and fail to realize there’s a solution that lies just outside our level of experience.

We read the same authors, visit the same places, run through the same procedures, and draw water from the same old well. Then we wonder why we’re stuck.

May the Circle Be Broken

I think it’s time we try thinking outside the circle. We need to adjust our direction a little and move a tad to the left or the right. Let’s see where this new slant leads us.

Instead of walking in the same tight orbit, we might try walking in an ever expanding spiral. Break the old routines and try some new things.

New Discoveries. New Possibilities.

Take poetry, for instance. Every time I discover a new poet, I discover something new about what poems can be.

I first discovered Charles Bukowski and realized that poems could be raw, honest, and bare.

Then someone turned me onto Billy Collins and I found that poems could be whimsical and lyrical, and turn the mundane into magic.

Mary Oliver taught me that poems can be simple but image-rich descriptions of encounters with nature. David Whyte taught me that poems can elevate the spirit. And recently, James Tate taught me that poems can be weird, dream like, and funny.

Freedom’s At the Edges

Such discoveries do two things simultaneously. They free you to try even more new things and they free you to invent your own.

And, as an added bonus, they take you past the edges of your own little circle.

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