Let's start with a Joke:
A duck walks into a bar wearing one shoe and orders a beer. The bartender asks him, "hey, did you lose a shoe? He replies, "No. I found one."
Are any of you confused by this joke? Granted, it’s not a great joke. But that’s not the point. The question we have for you is: Was it very challenging for you to imagine a duck walking into a bar having a conversation with a bartender? Did any of you want to stop us and tell us that the joke makes no sense because ducks can’t talk. I doubt it!
As soon as we told you we were going to tell you a joke, you created a new context and a new intention. By this we mean you made space for a possibility in which ducks can talk. You were able to swiftly and easily change the context, you listened with probably little judgment of the outlandish story. In the context of a joke, you know that ducks can talk (and they frequently enter bars). You fluidly shifted from one context to another and were easily able to see from another perspective. Imagine if you were able to do this in your relationships?
If you did this, you would be able to fully inhabit another person’s context and therefore have a greater likelihood of seeing from his or her perspective. The idea of right and wrong would start to evaporate real quick, wouldn’t it? Your ability to get to the heart of the matter would be much simpler.
Your ability to create context is one of your greatest gifts as a human. The problem is we rarely choose to use it to our benefit. Sadly, we pick contexts that keep us severely limited and we pick from a very small basket. What if we went for the "impractical" or "spectacular" ones instead of the "safe" and "conventional" ones.
The biggest barriers to this kind of fluidity is our ego and self-esteem. We rivet to one particular context because we’ve been told and believe that this is who we are and what we’re capable of accomplishing. Any context you choose is fine as long as you see it as a book on a shelf that can be taken down and put back up at will.
You’re not stuck with one book. You, as a human, have access to the most expansive library in the universe. Don’t limit it to only one or two sections.
To fluid contexts!
