Trapped in the Mind Box

For my birthday several years ago, my sister took me on my first cruise - just a little day trip from San Diego down to Baja Mexico and back.

She herself had been on a transatlantic passage on the QE II. Every time she talked about it, we both remembered the old treatment for what ails you – an ocean voyage. If your boyfriend broke up with you (and you were rich), your mother took you on an ocean cruise. If you suffered some reversal of fortune, there was the same solution. It was assumed an ocean voyage would cure you.

You will know what it cured one of. We all go through these things, though not all of us are lucky enough to do the healing on a cruise ship.

Not that I’d experienced any loss, rejection or trauma, but I was ready to get out in the ocean and feel the magic.

After we'd explored the ship and done some things, she sat me down in a deck chair and brought me a libation and we chatted while I enjoyed the ocean view and began to unwind.

"How far out we are," I thought. "How vast this ocean. So this is what it's like to set sail and venture far from land. No wonder people used to take ocean cruises to heal after a trauma. Here we are, so tiny in the middle of the water. How marvelous it is to see no land in sight. How freeing.”

I voiced that last statement out loud to my sister.

"Turn around, Susan," she said, laughing.

I got up and turned around and looked. We were maybe 1/4 mile from shore, where at that time we were passing a very ugly and industrial town. To say that we had been hugging the shore the whole time would be an understatement.

And so it goes ...

There can be a whole world out there you're missing because you're focused in your own peculiar sort of way.

In this case, I was creating magic where there was none, which feels better than the opposite, but denial is still denial, and reality-testing requires the ability to see the whole picture. Nearly any problem we consider unsurmountable appears that way because we’re seeing only the tip of the iceberg.

My hairdresser, who ought to be a coach always spins me around in the chair at some point and says, "Here. Get another point of view."

POINT OF VIEW. Creativity allows you to get lots of points of view and how your world will expand!

When you develop your creativity you have special powers. When you look at the surface of a problem, or person, or situation, you will know that there might be something else to look at there. The first step is to entertain that possibility.

If you don’t know you’re IN a box, how can you leap OUT of it?