Landmark Forum Leader Insights

Reshaping the course of events

By Laurel Scheaf

We take for granted that things are a particular way—and that it’s the facts, realities, and circumstances that determine what’s possible. We often, however, don’t see the contexts from which we come that are shaping our reality—we see only what they allow. It is possible to have the same circumstances but to create and invent the contexts for the content with which we are engaged. When contexts are created or invented, it puts us at another level of effectiveness, freedom, and power—old frames stop defining what’s possible.

History is strewn with times when major advances happened as a result of new contexts being created. Democracy, equality, relativity, human rights—new ways of understanding the world—were, at some point, newly distinguished contexts. In each case, some person or a group of people saw through or past “the way things were,” or the way they “seemed to have to be.” The act of doing so, and saying so, reshaped the course of events.

And so it is with being human. Seeing past our old assumptions and creating a context of our own choosing alters the very nature of what’s possible—and the truth of “our” world gets transformed. Transformation has the power to upset the status quo, to unseat us from business as usual. To choose living a transformed life requires us to wrestle with our resistances, small and large, to come face to face with giving up our self-imposed limits and live consistent with what we know is possible.