In The Bourne Identity, a special agent completely forgets who he is after a trauma, but retains all his survival skills. He doesn’t understand why he reads a space in such a peculiar way!:
“When I walk in here, the first thing I do is assess what can be seen from where and look for escape routes. I can tell you the license plate numbers of all six cars parked outside. I can tell you our waitress is left-handed, and the guy behind the counter weighs 215 pounds and knows how to handle himself. I know that if I were looking for a weapon, the best place to check would be the cab of the gray truck parked outside.”
Bourne sees opportunities everywhere that for others simply don’t exist.
Yesterday, a theater director explained:
“Make the space yours. Otherwise, you trap both yourself and the audience in a corner. And then you are not the master. The point is to make the space help you, work for you.”
In practice, this means slowly walking around the room, noticing a crack in the wall, touching a curtain, looking out the window, opening a cabinet. Your attention turns all these little things into potential resources.
Importantly, this is how you make this microcosm familiar, understandable, yours.
As the unknown disappears, so does your anxiety. Confidence, openness, and curiosity take its place. A desire arises to improvise, experiment, play, and discover yourself.
Like your prehistoric nomadic ancestors, you have performed a ritual, making a new and frightening world habitable.
Remember this advice when a dark day comes and it feels as if everything is against you and you are completely alone in a cold, empty world.
Wherever you go and wherever you find yourself, walk around the territory, carefully observing everything and everyone. You may be surprised by how much there is that is interesting, or even useful to you.
In any case, the space will become a little more friendly. As if someone thought of you in advance and placed these resources here.
And it feels good to sense that the world around you is on your side.
Sincerely yours,
-Alexander
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