How to get yourself an 'edge'

Do you remember puzzle of the lily pond? It runs like this. . .

In the middle of the garden there is a lily pond. The pond contains just one lily. Every day the number of lilies in the pond doubles, so when you come to the pond on the second day there are two lilies, on the third day there are four lilies, on the fourth day there are eight lilies - and so on. Now let us say that the pond will be completely full of lilies on the thirtieth day. The question is, on what day will the pond be half-full?

I'll let you think about that for a moment.

One of the news reports today is about the number of relationships which are foundering in the current economic crisis. Apparently it is job insecurities and money worries which are putting a strain on relationships. Bills need to be paid and it is not always certain that the money is available. Work is pressured and the stress of that work does not stop when people leave the office or factory. Tempers get frayed. Things are said which a cooler head would not have uttered. People feel close to breaking point. They are giving there all and there is nowhere left to go. There are no reserves.

And there it is - 'no reserves'. There is no slack in the system. Running on empty.

This is one of the problems with living one's life to the maximum of your capabilities. Living at 'top C' all the time. Letting input exactly equal output - (let's not talk about those organisations that want you to give 110%). The problem is as we are seeing now, that when something unexpected occurs then we have no spare to capacity to deal with the change.

We see this circumstance in other situations:

We drive into work, crowded into arterial roads. One driver thinking about a work problem is not paying attention. They don't stop quite in time and there is a bump. Nothing fatal - hardly a scratch - but matters have to be resolved and so the two drivers exchange details. . . and the queue stretches back as the two lane carriageway is now down to one lane. And a few hundred people who have no slack in their time schedule are now going to be late for work, stressed before they even start trying to be productive.

This is as true of our cars as it is of our jobs, of our finances, of our time and of our relationships. Living at our capacity affects our whole life. There needs to be some slack in the system.

From where do we get this slack? Does it mean that you don't give your all, that you don't live life to the full?

The slack is achieved in two ways. The first way is by not giving up the slack in the first place. The second is by putting as much slack into the system as you can before you need it. Your 'all' is not living at the extent of everything all the time - it is more than that. It also includes your creativity and wit and compassion, your joy, your love, everything you can BE rather than just everything you can DO. Your 'all' includes all those things which get squeezed out of a life by just 'doing more' and 'having more'.

Trying to give ourselves an edge, living life at the edge, might be more of an edge than we first appreciate

Now you may think that is a good idea to try to put some slack back into the system, and that you will get around to doing it. That is why I started this blog with the question about the lily pond.

I am sure that you have got the correct answer by now. You realized that you have to work it out backwards - if the pond is full on the thirtieth day it must be half-full the day before (as it doubles every day). So the answer is that the pond will be half full on day 29.

And there is the thing: on day 29 everything looked fine. There was plenty of space to grow, plenty of opportunity, no problem. For all of the pond's history, everything looked fine and everything looked set to continue. But just one day later there was no more expansion, no more growth and from then onwards life in the pond was never the same again.

We don't always realize how close to the edge we are, how close to our maximum. One way we can check is to ask ourselves if we are being everything we can be or just doing everything we ought. Are we being driven along by circumstance or are we working to a more measured inner quest.