Landmark Forum Leader Insights

Possibility leaves us with power and freedom

By Laurel Scheaf

All we are given is possibilities—to make of ourselves one thing or another. –Ortega y Gasset

An “expectation unfulfilled” or “ideal unfulfilled” leads to a lack of power, where a “possibility unfulfilled” leads to a possibility—and no loss of power or freedom. When we look at our experience vs. what we’d hoped for or how we thought things would go (but it didn’t turn out that way), then go out and create a new possibility, it can feel like that’s against a backdrop that negates it. It doesn’t occur to us as something’s “missing like a possibility,” it occurs more like an invalidation or that something’s wrong—like there’s something we feel we need to justify or defend. In getting stuck there, we miss out on that place of power and freedom.

The domain of possibility doesn’t exist; we need to create it in order for it to exist. (Happiness, fulfillment, regard, satisfaction are all states that exist only as a possibility. So is everything else that’s of any value.) We can’t have power and freedom because we want it, because it would be good to have, because it would make life better or easier, or because we would succeed with it. What gives power and freedom is to live in a “possibility” that calls for power and freedom. A possibility truly is “to be” that something is possible. There are no facts that limit possibility there are only conversations that limit or create possibility. Language shapes the way we think, the way we live our lives, and it gives us hands-on access to a world that’s open to being invented.