Week 2- Reading- The Art of Possibility

An analysis of the first four chapters.

The book by Rosamund Stone and Benjamin Zander, The Art of Possibility is one that requires you be ready to open your mind to change.  The premise here is that each of us individually contains the ability to affect major change.  This book is a combination of therapeutic and experiential advice on how we can begin to take on the act of changing.  

In the first chapters we are asked to look at how we experience the world.  The idea is that we experience the world through our senses, which then our brain has its way with.  The difficulty with this is that our brains have a way of wiring themselves in an attempt to save energy and therefore skip as many steps as possible.  This is not necessarily a bad thing; we just need to be aware that we are doing this to ourselves.  We are "seeing" things through the limitations that we put upon ourselves, from inside a box that we create.  We, or should I say our brains, are trained to make assumptions, and so first we must acknowledge those assumptions and then ask ourselves, what inventions can we create in order to see the experience differently.  Then, when we see the experience differently, new opportunities become available. 

In the following chapter, we are introduced to the idea that once we realize that we invent our opportunities; we need to address our present practice of measuring our presence to some level of achievement.  Therefore, we are constantly in a state of striving and never at peace.  This constant competitive state is not a place of creativity.  Therefore the advice is to continually ask yourself how you are playing into or reflecting the “measurement world”, until you eventually come to peace with where you are.

Chapter three asks us to address our practice of grading and realize it is a manifestation of our old way of thinking; measuring and comparing ourselves, situations and others.  By viewing each child we as teachers come across, as an unlimited package of potential, and immediately granting them an A, we become their partner in discovering the necessary skills and self-expression that child requires in order to reach that potential. 

The subsequent chapter begins to have us take action.  Once you begin to look at the world through different lenses, we need to actively declare ourselves a contributor.  Whether we now how or in what way, the more important factor is that we vow to be a positive force of contribution.

I look forward to reading further.  It has been a while since I have read a book that has felt like it is not just simply adding information to my collection, but instead reorganizing and reforming the information that I already possess.