I treat everything in my life as an experiment,
Which gives me flexibility to not be attached to an end result or a goal.
I go into every situation thinking,
Let's try this for a while and see how this experiment works.
Some of these experiments have lasted a few months,
And some have continued for 10 years.
It's important to re-evaluate as we go along and frequently question things that made sense a decade ago,
A year ago,
Or a month ago,
And ask,
Does it still make sense today?
We tend to think our choices about who to date or where to live are huge,
Monumental decisions that are going to completely redefine our lives.
Each course of action steers us in a new direction,
But almost every option,
Short of the decision to have kids,
Can be reversed and we can make a new decision the very next day.
Right now,
For example,
We can decide to wake up in a new city tomorrow morning or create a new life with a different job and new friends.
We have so much power when we let go of fear,
Which is what normally holds us back from making a decision that seems quote-unquote permanent,
When in fact,
Nothing is permanent.
At one point in my life,
I moved from San Francisco,
California to Seattle,
Washington.
Seattle is still my favorite city in the world,
But after years of living there,
I one day decided that I wanted to play beach volleyball every day of the year,
Not just during the one month of summer the Pacific Northwest sometimes gets.
So Seattle was no longer conducive to the new kind of life I wanted to lead.
That's when I moved to Hawaii,
Which was great for ten years until life took another turn,
This time rendering Hawaii no longer conducive to the new life I wanted to lead.
Imagine how difficult it would have been for me to move if I was clinging to California,
Washington,
Or Hawaii.
This flexibility in one area of life tends to lend itself to everything else we do.
When I took the monastic vows,
For example,
I was in full robes for two years,
Which made sense while living in the monastery.
We all had the same haircut and the same monastic robes,
Which visually depicted what we believed,
That we are all one,
All connected,
With no difference among us.
But when I left the monastery and wore the robes at the airport and around town,
People treated me as if I was different,
And I was responsible for that.
The same robes that communicated we are all the same in the monastery screamed,
Look at me,
I'm different when worn outside of those walls.
My ability to let go of those robes was only possible because I wasn't attached to them.
They were an experiment until it no longer made sense.
I still follow the vows,
But I no longer wear the robes.
We can apply this perspective to relationships,
Jobs,
Dietary restrictions,
And so on.
Try something for a while,
And if it works,
Great.
If you find out later that it doesn't work,
Great.
It's a sign that it's time to move on.
Treating everything as an experiment in our own lives also makes us more understanding and compassionate when someone else does something that we think is a bad idea.
We can take a step back and think,
They are just conducting an experiment,
And they will do it until it doesn't work.
Our job as friends is to love the people in our lives through their own experiments and to be supportive.
Experiment with that.
As Zig Ziglar said,
Remember that failure is an event,
Not a person.
