rules
I have always been just a tad too irreverent. Let’s get this straight first, though. We all need rules. Even the zaniest, most spontaneous and random person you ever met lives by a set of rules you would find surprisingly organized and codified if you could probe that weirdo’s mind. It’s natural, normal and probably even necessary. There is a productive role for rules from the global to the most personal level. Also, rules are not principles. Principles are the guiding concepts around which we organize our lives (storytellers). Rules are essentially instructions on how to do so, and I am obsessing about rules in various states of decay and stoutness.
Anyone who’s ever put together an Ikea bedframe knows that, in general, instructions make things easier. Still, they don’t always work. Sometimes the instructions refer to a completely different end product than we had in mind. Sometimes there are missing pieces. Sometimes instructions just don’t make sense. Other times the instructions are perfect and everything is in place but we still ignore them, choosing instead to puzzle our way through. Why? Such is the nature of rules.
I comfortably posit that rule-bending is a generally good idea for most people in most situations. Rules tether us to modes of existence sometimes far past their expiration dates. Rules create walls where there should be wide open vistas. Rules give the impression that doors are locked when they are not, that we are safe when we are not and that we are stuck when we are not. As such, a certain amount of flexibility in the rules we live by can only serve us well, reminding us that life is a much more open book than most of us live.
For myself, I just lean a little further on the rules. I tend to bend them past breaking when I can’t ignore them altogether. In fact, I usually ignore them with pride and often try very hard to find ways around them. It’s not always pretty. If I was given a box of cake, for example, my fingers would be in that thing just as soon as it sounded good. Why wait for a fork, or a plate, or a table? You would find me standing in the rain, sheepishly grinning as I lick chocolate from my fingers, without a shred of regret and very glad to see you coming.
Or is that just my fantasy about myself? Even chronic rule-breakers ease slowly into unconscious routines and patterns. Rules are insidious to the modern human condition, growing vine-like around the untrammeled parts of our lives until paths once tread daily are overgrown and hidden. A life once a verdant forest of trails, mystery and adventure can become a paved and circular road, organized around a set of meaningless rules that serve only to tighten the circle.
But we are never truly stuck on that road. Exits are ever-present for those who would see: a chance encounter, a certain song, a shocking surprise, delicately running your finger along a string of glistening and tender flowers, an unexpected connection, even a seemingly useless fact that nevertheless tickles some urge to veer off course. A moment of truth opens before us like a curtain being drawn up a picture window we never noticed. We can pass through, or not. We can rewrite our rules, or not. We can relive yesterday or step into tomorrow uncertain, vulnerable, cautious, wearing a coat of question marks, brave as the wind or timid as a sunrise.
There are rules like the thou-shalt-nots and the rules of law, of course. These are fairly concrete. All the rest is illusion, which is not to say invaluable. When the instructions make sense, it’s hard to argue against them. Organize your life around rules that speak to you and 90% of the time you might love the results. Maintain a vigilant resistance to rules that creep into your life unconsciously and you might lead an extraordinary life. Fail to see the exit signs in your round-about, though, or ignore that 10% of the time in which the rules do not apply, and you may find yourself standing on some deserted pier, looking out over a vast ocean of possibility having already missed the boat. Are you okay with that?
Break a rule. Do it today. Find out. No matter how it ends or starts, it could be the turn that leads you home. It may be fraught with pain and suffering or wonder and joy, love, tears, laughter and regret. It may be the road to much useful knowledge. Even if it’s not, your circular road doesn’t vanish because you make one wrong turn. Do it today.
