Breakin’ All the Rules

Rules are meant to be broken. That’s why we have so darn many of them. If you live a life proscribed by all the silly rules you see and hear every day, you’re liable to barely leave your house without feeling jealous and depressed that everyone around you is having so much fun and you can’t seem to find it.

Tonight I broke a rule I didn’t even know existed. I had a mental block saying that once I’d decided to go to sleep, there was no turning back. But then I got some great ideas and just couldn’t sleep. After a few tries, I realized I just had to get up and write. As I was doing this, another idea occurred to me – I had been holding myself back. I had created a rule about my life that needed breaking. It’s about three in the morning as I write this, and I know I’m going to feel it tomorrow morning, but it’s more than worth it to share this with you.

What rules have you followed lately that made you feel bad? Did you go to sleep “on time” and skip going out with friends or co-workers? Did you stick exactly to your budget and miss a great movie you wish you’d seen? Did you obey the speed limit on a long drive or a windy road? Speed limits, at least, are made to be broken – they know you’re going to do it so there’s quite a large margin of safety. Understand this, and understand that many of the rules of life are exactly the same way.

Human beings are incredible things. Even when we do go ahead and stretch ourselves beyond the stated rules, we always find a way to survive there. For the longest time, the law of the land was gravity. If you went up, you couldn’t stay there for long before you came down. Then some freak bicycle mechanics, with the help of some physicists, realized that it didn’t have to be this way. Human beings could go into the sky and float there, at least for a little while. Later on we found we could go beyond even those boundaries, flying as long as we had fuel in the tank. At that point the only “rule” was that we had to stay where the air was. This was a hard and fast rule for sure: without it we’d be physically unable to live!

But as we all know, even that rule got broken. We found ways to push beyond the atmosphere, beyond even the reach of gravity, to a space where things so beautiful exist we are sure they were not meant to be seen by human eyes. But they are. We found them. We broke the rules of the physical world, and there is nothing stopping you from shattering rules made up of just a few words.

Be bold. Bring your skateboard to the beach. Dive in the pool. Climb a cliff. Jump off one. Make a critical change in your life today. Make a list of all the silly rules you follow, then cross them off one by one. Crumple up the paper and throw it away. Burn it in your illegal backyard fire. Free yourself.