Are You a Prisoner to Rules

You’re going through the “normal” part of your life. Well, it’s normal in as much as you aren’t in a conversation with your coach, so things feel a little less all over the map.

This is the part where you actually put into practice what you’ve been working on. If the coaching conversation is your laboratory or your classroom (or your war room, or whatever other metaphor you like), the rest of life becomes the place where the rubber hits the pavement and you actually practice what you’ve distinguished.

You’ve been working around breaking apart the extreme rule-based nature of the way you view the world, people, your life, and everything else. It’s not that following rules is bad — in fact it’s been your stock-in-trade for a long time.

Your ability to follow rules effectively (better than most, really) has been the secret to your success. It ensured that you were related to as a good child by your parents, a good student by your teachers, and a professional by your peers and supervisor. Your ability to see, learn and apply rules better than anyone else has made you excellent in the careers you’ve chosen — software, engineer, lawyer, medicine, etc.

The problem isn’t that this tendency is bad. It’s that this tendency is not a choice. It is an always-on, all-or-nothing kind of approach to living.

You’re practising noticing this tendency, kind of like you’re hunting for it in the wild, and at this point, you’re just trying to see all of the places where it shows up. You’re compiling a compendium.

At first it feels a bit challenging to capture, which would make sense: you’re trying to see the water you swim in. You see a few obvious places. When you’re driving, it’s good to drive on the right-hand side of the road. When you make an appointment, you should keep that appointment and be on time.

“There, did it. Take that, I answered the question and found some places.”

As though seeing it in one or two places is all you have to do, and then your coach will do some magic on you and things will change. That would be really lovely, but you matured out of that phase as a client. You know that this is the part of the work that pays dividends — or doesn’t — based on what you put in to it.

You know that the game is really more about being in the inquiry and the searching, than it is in finding answers. Wryly, you have a sense that finding “answers” might just be another way of sticking to the rules.

Then, the floodgates open, and your ability to function as a human is destroyed entirely by you noticing all of the places rules are showing up in your life.

You glance at your desk and see a context for thousands of different rules: a second laptop charging speaks to the rule that you always be prepared. You won’t find yourself with 13% battery power when you’re out and need to do some work. Your notebooks are in disarray and that is upsetting — there is a rule for aesthetics. They should be neat and orderly, aligned with the right angles of the desk. Rules help keep things neat and orderly.

A set of receipts waiting to be catalogued is a broken rule; those should have been dealt with yesterday. You have pens strewn about the surface of your desk, instead of back in the container you have created for them.

Opening your notebooks, you notice how carefully they are laid out. Even the pages have built in rules — a set of gridlines on each page indicating cleanly where the writing should go, or how your drawing should be aligned to conform to some arbitrary rule created in the moment.

The desktop on your computer has a few folders on it, neatly arranged according to a grid, named according to a specific rule for how you name your files. In precisely 32 minutes, your writing time will conclude and you will then be off to do something else, because that is what the schedule (another form of rules) beside your keyboard indicates you should do.

You could of course break those rules. Just screw off and leave it all to the side, and yet, somehow, you know that would be inside the same context as the rest of this. You either follow rules like a soldier in bootcamp, or disavow them like junkie on a tear.

You’ve already got a pre-emptive opinion about people’s response to all of this analysis, which will be to point out how having rules is not necessarily a bad thing, and you don’t need to be so hard on yourself, and blah blah blah. Which adds to your frustration, because they are missing the point, and because what they are suggesting you do is OH SO TEMPTING.

Instead, you just keep noticing. You sit in it, without needing to get anywhere. Like meditating and noticing your thoughts, for the next little while, your life is a meditation spent noticing your tendency to set up, impose and follow rules.

You are practicing.