Out of the Fishbowl

"It's not trespassing when you cross your own boundaries." (Anonymous)

A friend of mine was going to clean his fishbowl and so he put a few inches of water in his bathtub and put the two fish in the tub. When he came back to retrieve the fish, he noticed them swimming in a little circle the size of the bowl.

I love this story because it reminds me of so many things; how large our possibilities are and how unlimited the space we have to create those possibilities is - and, how little we are willing to access that increased space.

Strangely enough, I was reminded of this story by some issues I'm having with my computer and the database I've created for a client. It's quite a large database, filled with graphics and text, both english and Czech. Recently it started acting funny - and, after a series of scripts, crashing. Not a good thing. I activated the "Activity Monitor" on my MAC so I could watch, in cute, colorful graphics, the processes as they were taking place and try to figure out what the problem was. Somehow, memory was leaking from somewhere like a certain dike in Holland. I could watch the little pie graph change color as the script progressed, until finally, a few hundred records in, everything stopped.

I fiddled and faddled and finally decided to turn off one of the more obscure plug-ins I bought. I think that has made a difference.

So, back to our story - my RAM is limited to 2GB right now, and usually I don't come close to using it up. But, I learned the importance of being able to access more of it when I needed it. So, swiming in a small circle might work well for the fish, but it would be nice to be conscious that there was so much more that they could access if they wanted to.

We are conscious of that - or at least we try to be. Whatever world we inhabit right now is only a small potential of what's possible for us. Sometimes, an internal "memory leak" can give us the illusion that we are at the outer reaches of our boundaries, but it's only an illusion. We aren't even close.

We need to constantly check for memory leaks - to test our limits to see if they are real. To check and see whether we have the courage to venture into uncharted waters. Buddha said, "To see what few have seen, you must go where few have gone."

The laws and limits of the world, unlike the my MAC, exist by agreement only. When we release small thinking, we inherit a Realm of vast and unlimited potential. The world we live in is as grand as the thoughts we use to create it. Today - think grandly.