The Edge of Experience Is Not the Edge of Reality

On limiting beliefs, imaginary destinations, and the strange business of becoming someone you haven’t yet imagined.

Some twenty-six years ago, I was out running when Bono stopped me in my tracks.

Not literally, of course. He wasn’t standing in the middle of the road, arms outstretched, demanding that I contemplate the nature of reality. Although, knowing Bono, I wouldn’t have put it past him.

I was listening to U2’s Walk On, a song from their album All That You Can’t Leave Behind, when a particular lyric caught my attention. Bono was singing about packing a suitcase for an unknown destination, a place that had to be believed in before it could be seen.

I stopped running.

I remember that much clearly enough. The rest is a reconstruction, assembled from fragments of memory and the understanding I’ve acquired in the intervening years. Memory is a peculiar thing. We don’t so much retrieve the past as invite an earlier version of ourselves into the present and ask him what he remembers. And, like any unreliable witness, he sometimes tells us what we want to hear.

Still, I remember the disturbance.

Up until that moment, I’d been familiar with the conventional wisdom that seeing is believing. Show me the evidence. Demonstrate the truth of something, and then I’ll accept it.

Missouri, after all, is known as the Show-Me State. Whether Missourians actually wander around demanding proof of everything is another matter, but the sentiment is familiar enough.

I’ll believe it when I see it.

And yet here was Bono suggesting the reverse.

Some things, apparently, have to be believed before they can be seen.

I was at the beginning of my journey into neuro-linguistic programming, or NLP, at the time. I’d become interested in the idea of limiting beliefs: those convictions about ourselves and the world that quietly constrain what we think possible. NLP offered a framework for examining such assumptions, even if many of its broader scientific claims haven’t stood up particularly well to scrutiny.

What interested me wasn’t so much the machinery of NLP as the underlying proposition.

If beliefs can limit us, couldn’t they also liberate us?

If I can believe myself incapable of something, thereby avoiding the experiences that might demonstrate otherwise, surely I can also entertain beliefs that encourage me to venture beyond my apparent limitations.

What if belief wasn’t merely a description of reality?

What if it also helped determine which parts of reality we were willing to explore?

That was the thought that stopped me running.

Or at least that’s how I remember it now.

Twenty-six years is a long time to carry a moment around in your head. The memory has probably changed as much as the man remembering it. 😉

The invisible walls

The curious thing about limiting beliefs is that they rarely announce themselves as beliefs.

They present themselves as facts.

I’m not creative.

I’m terrible with money.

I’m too old to start again.

I’m not the sort of person who does that.

We say these things with quiet authority. There’s no need to investigate. We already know.

And because we know, we behave accordingly.

The person who believes they aren’t creative doesn’t attempt anything creative. The person who believes they can’t make friends avoids unfamiliar social situations. The person who believes adventure belongs to younger people stays home, occasionally watching documentaries about other people having adventures.

Eventually, the absence of contrary experience becomes further evidence that the original belief was true.

See? I told you.

The belief has constructed its own proof.

It’s a remarkable little arrangement. We mistake a boundary of our experience for a boundary of reality.

And because we cannot see the wall, we rarely think to test it.

Of course, not every limitation is imaginary. Some are physical, financial, social, or otherwise stubbornly real. Believing I can jump from the roof and fly will do very little to alter gravity’s opinion on the matter.

But there are many other limitations whose authority rests almost entirely on the fact that we’ve never seriously challenged them.

And I suspect these are the ones that do the most damage.

Not because they prevent us from achieving particular ambitions, but because they quietly diminish our sense of what a life might contain.

The tragedy isn’t necessarily that we fail.

It’s that we never discover what might have happened had we tried.

A suitcase for somewhere we haven’t been

What Bono offered me that morning was an inversion.

Instead of demanding evidence before entertaining a possibility, perhaps we sometimes need to entertain the possibility before evidence can become available.

Consider the person who dreams of becoming a writer.

They might spend years waiting for permission. Waiting for confidence. Waiting until they’ve read enough books, mastered enough techniques, accumulated enough experiences, or received some unmistakable sign from the universe that they possess whatever mysterious substance makes someone a writer.

They want proof before committing themselves.

But proof of what?

That they can write?

Surely the only way to discover that is to write.

That their writing will be any good?

Perhaps. But even that question cannot be answered until they’ve produced something that can be judged, revised, abandoned, or improved.

At some point, they have to sit down and begin.

They don’t have to believe they’re a great writer. They don’t even have to believe they’re a particularly good one.

They merely have to entertain the possibility that writing is something they might do.

And then do it.

The experience follows.

Or perhaps the experience leads.

Already, the neat distinction between belief and experience is beginning to collapse.

Because the act of writing changes the person doing it. They discover pleasures and frustrations they couldn’t have anticipated. They encounter resistances they didn’t know existed. They begin to notice the world differently, because the world has become potential material.

A conversation overheard in a café is no longer merely a conversation. It’s a scene. A peculiar remark becomes the beginning of an essay. A passing thought demands a notebook.

The aspiring writer hasn’t simply acquired a skill.

They’ve begun to inhabit a different relationship with reality.

And somewhere along the way, without any formal ceremony, they become a writer.

Not because they finally believed hard enough.

But because they entered into the experience of writing, and the experience changed what they understood themselves to be.

The trouble with thinking your way into a new life

Recently, I came across a passage in Brianna Wiest’s 101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think, in an essay about the subconscious behaviours that keep us from having the lives we want.

Wiest challenges the assumption that changing our lives begins with changing our thoughts. Instead, she suggests that we should seek experiences capable of making new beliefs evident to us.

The passage brought me straight back to Bono and that interrupted run.

Except now I had a problem.

Bono seemed to be saying that belief precedes experience.

Wiest appeared to be saying that experience precedes belief.

Which one was right?

For a while, I entertained the contradiction. Perhaps one was simply wrong. Perhaps Wiest had identified something that the positive-thinking industry had overlooked: you cannot persuade yourself into a new life merely by rearranging the sentences in your head.

There’s something appealing about that.

I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the idea that we can affirm our way into becoming whoever we wish to be.

Stand in front of a mirror and tell yourself you’re confident, successful, attractive, intelligent, and destined for greatness. Repeat until the universe gets the message.

Maybe it helps some people. But there has always seemed to me something suspicious about the idea that reality is obliged to accommodate our preferred descriptions of it.

If I’m terrified of speaking in public, telling myself I’m a brilliant public speaker doesn’t necessarily change anything.

But standing up and speaking, trembling knees and all, might.

And standing up again might change something else.

After a dozen such experiences, I may discover that I’m no longer the person who believed he couldn’t speak in public.

Something has shifted.

Not because I’ve talked myself into a new identity, but because I’ve acquired experiences that make the old identity increasingly difficult to maintain.

Yet something must have happened before the first attempt.

Some little impulse of possibility.

Some willingness to entertain a future that the present did not yet justify.

Otherwise, why would I have stood up in the first place?

Perhaps Bono and Wiest weren’t contradicting one another after all.

Perhaps they were describing different moments in the same process.

Imagination gets there first

I keep returning to the possibility that imagination is the missing element in this conversation.

Before belief, perhaps there is a question.

What if?

What if I could do this?

What if the life I’m living isn’t the only life available to me?

What if I’ve mistaken familiarity for necessity?

These questions don’t require conviction. They don’t demand that I believe something without evidence.

They simply create a little opening.

And sometimes a little opening is enough.

Imagination presents a possibility. Possibility invites action. Action produces experience. Experience reshapes belief. And the altered belief expands, or perhaps contracts, the range of possibilities we’re prepared to entertain next time.

Around and around we go.

We’re not travelling in a straight line from thinking to believing to doing. We’re participating in a continuous conversation between the world as we understand it and the world as we encounter it.

There’s something wonderfully untidy about that.

It also makes sense of the boy I once was, wandering through the woods and imagining himself an explorer.

I didn’t need evidence that I was an explorer.

I simply went exploring.

The imagination came first, but the experience gave it substance.

Later, that appetite for adventure would carry me to West Point and into the Infantry. I had certain ideas about the soldier I wanted to become, some probably borrowed from history, literature, and an adolescent enthusiasm for heroic exploits.

The experiences that followed were considerably more complicated than the fantasies that preceded them.

But that’s the point.

The imagination invited me into the world.

The world answered back.

And somewhere in the exchange, I became someone I couldn’t have fully imagined beforehand.

The important thing wasn’t that my original beliefs turned out to be correct.

It was that they got me moving.

The philosophy of going outside

I’m increasingly attracted to the idea that wandering is more than a pastime.

That going out into the world without always knowing what you’re looking for is itself a philosophical practice.

A way of knowing.

The philosopher sits in his study and asks what is true.

The wanderer puts on his boots and goes to see what happens.

Naturally, I don’t mean to disparage the philosopher. I’ve spent a considerable portion of my life happily sitting around thinking about things, and I intend to continue doing so for as long as circumstances allow.

But there’s a danger in remaining inside one’s own head.

The mind can become a remarkably convincing echo chamber, particularly when it mistakes coherence for truth.

An idea can fit beautifully into an existing system of thought and still be entirely wrong.

The world, meanwhile, has an inconvenient habit of refusing to conform to our theories.

People surprise us.

Places disappoint us.

Experiences we expected to enjoy turn out to be miserable. Experiences we resisted become transformative.

We encounter versions of ourselves we didn’t know existed.

And this, I think, is one of the great gifts of wandering.

It places us in the path of the unexpected.

When I sit in a café, listening to conversations, watching people come and go, observing the small dramas of ordinary life, I’m not necessarily looking for confirmation of anything.

I’m making myself available to the world.

An accidental remark might lead me into a subject I’ve never considered. A stranger’s behaviour might reveal an assumption I didn’t realise I held. A street I’ve walked a hundred times might suddenly appear unfamiliar, as though someone has quietly rearranged reality while my attention was elsewhere.

The experience disturbs the existing arrangement of my mind.

And the essay becomes the place where I investigate that disturbance.

This is one reason I’ve always been drawn to Montaigne.

His essays are not simply declarations of what he knows. They’re attempts to discover what he thinks through the act of thinking and writing.

He examines himself, contradicts himself, wanders off, returns, changes direction.

His mind is both the instrument of inquiry and one of the things being examined.

There’s something deeply congenial about that approach.

An essay needn’t be the polished presentation of a finished belief.

It can be a record of belief undergoing revision.

A little laboratory of becoming.

Enter Mudtown Lion

At this point, Mudtown Lion would probably interrupt.

He’d been sitting quietly in the corner of the café, apparently absorbed in his notebook, although I suspect he’d been listening all along.

“You’ve got it backwards,” he’d say.

“What’s backwards?”

“All of it. Belief, experience, imagination. You’re still assuming there’s a stable person underneath doing all this believing and experiencing.”

I would look at him.

He’d look back, presumably pleased with himself.

“What if,” he’d continue, “the person is simply what emerges from the relationship between these things? What if there’s no finished Clay Lowe hiding behind the curtain, waiting to be revealed? What if every experience changes the observer, and every changed observer experiences the world differently?”

“That’s rather existentialist of you.”

“Don’t insult me. I’m trying to be metaphysical.”

He’d return to his notebook, scribble something furiously, and then push it across the table.

The trouble with human beings is that they mistake the edge of their experience for the edge of reality.

I would read it twice.

Then steal it.

He wouldn’t mind. He’d probably claim he’d received it as a transmission from somewhere beyond the ordinary structures of consciousness anyway.

But the idea would stay with me.

Because Mudtown Lion, for all his eccentricities, has identified something important.

We tend to think of ourselves as relatively stable beings who occasionally undergo change.

I am this sort of person.

I have these abilities.

I believe these things.

I like this.

I don’t like that.

And from time to time, some sufficiently dramatic experience comes along and forces us to update the inventory.

But what if we’ve misunderstood the arrangement?

What if the self is less a finished object than an ongoing activity?

What if becoming isn’t something that happens to us occasionally, but something we’re doing all the time?

Then belief is not simply a collection of propositions stored somewhere in the mind.

It’s part of the process through which we continuously construct, encounter, and reconstruct ourselves.

Some beliefs help us navigate.

Others become obstacles.

Some were once useful but have outlived their purpose.

And some are little more than stories we inherited so long ago that we’ve forgotten anyone ever told them to us.

The problem begins when we mistake those stories for the limits of existence.

The belief that liberates

This brings me to what may be the most interesting distinction of all.

Perhaps the most liberating belief isn’t that I can achieve anything I set my mind to.

I’ve never found that entirely convincing.

The world is too complicated, and human life too contingent, for such sweeping promises.

We are limited beings. We have bodies, histories, responsibilities, circumstances, and an unfortunate inability to be everywhere and do everything at once.

Freedom doesn’t require pretending otherwise.

But there’s another belief available to us.

A quieter one.

I do not yet know what I am capable of becoming.

I find that considerably more compelling.

It doesn’t promise success.

It doesn’t deny limitations.

It simply refuses to confuse the present extent of my knowledge with the full extent of my possibilities.

And it leaves room for surprise.

At fifty-eight, I find that room increasingly important.

Not because I’m anxious to reinvent myself into some improved, optimised, marketable version of Clay Lowe.

God knows there are enough people trying to turn their lives into continuous personal-development projects.

I’m more interested in remaining available to experiences that might change my understanding of who I am.

To resist the temptation to declare myself finished.

To continue wandering, wondering, writing, encountering, and occasionally making a complete fool of myself in pursuit of something I couldn’t have anticipated beforehand.

There are worse ways to spend a life.

Somewhere beyond the horizon

I think again about that run twenty-six years ago.

The younger man moving along the road, listening to U2, beginning to explore the relationship between belief and human potential.

He stops because a lyric has disturbed something in his understanding of the world.

I would like to speak to him.

Not to give him advice. I’m not convinced he’d listen, and I’m even less convinced I’d have much worthwhile advice to offer.

I’d simply like to ask him what he thought was happening at that moment.

Did he believe he’d discovered a new truth?

Did he sense that the world had suddenly become larger?

Or was he merely excited by the intellectual elegance of a familiar expression turned upside down?

I don’t know.

And perhaps it doesn’t matter.

Because the lyric has stayed with me.

Twenty-six years later, I’m still unpacking that suitcase.

Still thinking about the places we have to imagine before we can visit them, and the places we have to visit before we can imagine what they might mean.

Still wondering how many of the boundaries I’ve accepted as real are merely the edges of experiences I haven’t yet had.

Maybe this is what it means to live experimentally.

Not to believe everything is possible.

Not to insist that experience alone determines what is true.

But to maintain a certain openness toward the unfinished nature of existence.

To allow imagination to invite us beyond the familiar, experience to challenge what we thought we knew, and reflection to make something of the encounter.

Belief and experience needn’t be rivals competing for the privilege of going first.

Sometimes we believe enough to begin.

Sometimes we begin without believing.

Sometimes the experience proves us wrong.

And sometimes, if we’re fortunate, we discover a possibility that neither our beliefs nor our imaginations could have prepared us for.

I rather like that.

Because it means there may still be places I haven’t dreamed of visiting.

And versions of myself I haven’t yet had the pleasure of meeting.

Somewhere out there, beyond the edge of my experience, the road continues.

I think I’ll go and see where it leads.

---

If this post gave you something to carry into your day, consider supporting my work by buying me a coffee or making a monthly donation or subscribing (free) to the blog.