Literally and figuratively forging a new path
Today’s post is a short one I intend to expand on tomorrow, but for now I wanted to show you a couple of videos that set the stage for what I invite you to think about and what I’ll be writing about at greater length in tomorrow’s post. Here’s the first:
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The long and short of it is that this city designed a park with an entrance in one spot, but pedestrians eventually made their own more convenient makeshift entrance at a different corner. As the creator of the video puts it, they voted with their feet and decided on a new entrance.
The thing I don’t want to miss, however, is there wasn’t ever a vote. It wasn’t collectively decided that this should be done. When something like this happens, it’s typically one person or small group who overrules the prescribed design and comes up with their own alternative. In this case, a barrier was removed. We don’t know if that’s what happened first, because the barrier that does exist is pretty easy to clear. It’s obviously meant to be more of a strong encouragement than an absolute restriction. That is to say, the effectiveness of this barrier relies on the cooperation of the people it’s meant to regulate.
Someone probably just stepped over it. Someone else saw this new, unconventional way of entering or exiting the park and decided they’d try it as well. As this shortcut grew in popularity and frequency of use, perhaps another person finally said, “To hell with this chain,” and dismantled the barrier altogether. At some point, the unconventional way became the conventional way. They literally deconstructed the institutionalized design and established their own.
Now here’s another video inspired by and reacting to the first, only this time with a take on the psychological paths we construct, adopt, and reshape every day (note: it might look identical to the previous clip, but I promise it’s not):
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I like how this creator lays out the balance and the tension between the convenience of having a path laid out for us and the desire to forge new ones based on our own observations and calculations of what makes sense. The truth is, we don’t typically want to think for ourselves. We want a path. We want prescribed routines, but we also want the freedom or even the illusion of freedom to create our own when we want to do our own thing.
I mean, no one always does their own thing. Most of us rarely do. That’s a normal part of how we function. We are able to function as efficiently as we do because we have prescribed paths, routines, and mental narratives to tell us, “This is how we do it.” Some of us, those rare and invaluable freaks among us, do things their own way a lot, almost as a rule. They’re the ones who see a barrier as something to step over.
But deconstructing barriers is something any of us can do if we keep our minds and our eyes open to new facts, new opportunities, and signs of a defunct system.
More on that tomorrow, unless this plan I’ve design gets deconstructed. Who can say?