At an event today in which students are presenting wonderful projects they’ve worked on for months, I’m struck by the immense power of human energy. When we set our minds to it, and put in enough focus and work, there does not seem to be any limit to what we can accomplish.
This kind of “building over time” energy is a strange phenomenon because it highlights a fundamental split in our modes of thought. Most of the time we are more or less spontaneous, living in the moment, hanging out, having conversations with the people around us.
But we each have the potential to go into this other mode — a kind of superpower mode. One in which we can focus for several months and master a musical instrument, or write a play or novel, compose an opera, film a movie, or invent and build a new kind of machine that nobody has ever seen before.
When caught up the intensity of such creative experiences, we often don’t even realize that we have entered a heightened zone of being. And when we come back from them, it seems to marvelous indeed to realize that we were capable of such things.