Imagine two very bored castaways on a desert island. They have food and shelter, but nothing to do. They spent the whole day throwing coconuts at each other for fun.
One day, a crate was washed away, its contents intact: hundreds of classic paperbacks! Melville, Hugo, Tolkien, the Brontë sisters and more. The men celebrated and immediately started throwing books at each other. They invented a game like Jenga, but with books instead of wooden blocks.
Life on the island has really improved with these new forms of throwing and stacking games.
Both men read well enough, but they both thought the classics were too boring to bother reading, and they were bored enough as they were.
After a month, the novelty of the book “Jenga” wears off and one of the men decides to focus his energy on solving the problem. Lord of the Rings. He had to concentrate repeatedly to get past the opening section, which dealt with the family lives of the creatures known as “hobbits.”
But by the time Gandalf tells Frodo about the ring, life is never the same for our castaway. He doesn’t know that those inky passages in the yellowed book can bring your thinking into a whole new world and make you feel things you have never felt before.
Another man has now invented new forms of books – Jenga and Coconut Bowling, but he doesn’t realize that his friend has discovered this whole new dimension. He saw no indication that a piece of paper could contain anything like Middle-earth. It’s like a coconut with a rocket inside it that goes to space.
He sat on the buried treasure and didn’t know it.
The world you are destined to enter
Each of us is one of these castaways.
There are dimensions of experience that you know now that you did not know before and that remain hidden from others. Maybe you “started” (i.e. entered) the world of distance running, classical music listening, or pastry making at some point. Maybe you learned to code, knit, or meditate, and before that, those things seemed like magic to you and still do to others.
This new world becomes part of you, even part of your life yes for you.
Yet at a certain point, that part of you wasn’t born yet. If you haven’t found a way into it, it probably hasn’t been born yet.
There are still countless areas of experience that are hidden from you. You may admire people who play the piano fluently, plant spectacular gardens, or build thriving online communities, and you might want to do the same. But you still don’t know what it feels like perch These abilities, live in them and feel the unique satisfaction they provide.
One of the most life-affirming things a person can do is to discover and enter a new world of experience, a world that matches their spirit, much in the same way that our islanders discovered how to enter Middle-earth (and the pure hearts of Dune, Camelot, and Jane Eyre).
Life does expand when you enter a new world. For example, when you start to “master” photography, you gain a whole new way of seeing. The visual world will always become more compelling and meaningful. This may sound dramatic, but it’s true.
You already know where you should go
For each of us, there are worlds that we understand and would like to enter.
Some part of you knows you should be making music, but you’re forever struggling on the guitar, unable to play a full song. You see other people entering the world, but you remain outside the world.
Ideally, you should invest your energy in finding your way into the world that calls you, or into the deeper layers of a world that you’ve already begun to explore.
But our instincts and our society keep us away from deeper exploration. Between a natural aversion to discomfort and embarrassment and a device that offers endless novelty, we tend to choose Widerrather than deeper. We constantly latch onto new forms of the familiar and known rather than entering new worlds. this is just Easier It’s far better to scroll through your news feed, or put on another true crime podcast, than try to read Aristotle or develop your singing voice.
How to enter the new world
You already know something about the world you want to live in: a good guitarist, a reader of thick history books, a baker of golden pastries, a Spanish conversationalist, and so on.
You may need to find guidance, but that’s not the hard part. Books, courses, and information abound.
The hard part happens when you follow the instructions, when you start doing the thing itself. You’ll encounter awkwardness, confusion, and boredom. Entering a new world is not easy. It will confront you with unsolved puzzles, awkward feelings, and frequent obstacles.
At the same time, the mind is always looking for a sense of smooth progress and easy satisfaction. But these are not yet found in the New World, only in the Old World. If you succumb to this urge for easy mastering – let’s play Another magical walllet’s play iron man Riff again – you just go wider instead of deeper and never get in.
These desires for comfort can serve as clues for deeper thinking. You choose your path through the jungle by paying slow and careful attention to the psychological puzzles and physical demands of your new world.
For reading older books, this means slowing down your pace and being content with reading a few pages at a time. This might mean reading aloud, those twisty Victorian sentences again when they lose you.
For guitar playing, this means carefully forming those awkward chord shapes, relaxing tension as much as possible, and patiently working through every problem point.
Entering a new world requires repeatedly digging into its weeds and thorns, using slow and careful attention as a tool or a lantern. This kind of work is tolerable in short, regular sessions. But you have to let these meetings happen, and during the meetings you have to deny the mind’s desire for quick and smooth progress.
The good news is that it doesn’t take a lot of “drilling” to get through any particular thorny terrain (e.g. the tight chord positions, the thick prose of a Victorian novel) to become familiar with it, but each world is huge and there are lots of places to go.
Never boarding the ship – staying home in the Shire, so to speak – seemed like the worst option. Think of a guitarist who never learned to play, or a writer who never wrote a story. Maybe you don’t have to imagine.
All our lives we long to be in some world that we think is our own, and we know that it is possible. Which castaway is at the helm?
What is the world you’ve always wanted to be in?
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Choose a world and go
If you want to take a guided tour into the world you’ve always dreamed of entering, there’s still time for winter activities a big victory group.
Each participant designs a mission to enter a new world of their choice and conducts small, manageable studies of it until it becomes a part of them. Repeat this for other worlds as needed.
