Living on the Edge

Find your edge--and then learn to go beyond it.

By Ezra Bayda

For example, when faced with a difficult decision and lost in confusion, are we able to see clearly how to practice? Students often ask for help when trying to decide whether to stay in a relationship or make a career change. They're often caught in the mental snare of weighing and measuring the pros and cons of each position, spinning among possibilities with no hope of resolution.

However, confusion is a state out of which nothing but confusion arises; the real source of confusion in such situations is that we don't know who we are. As the French philosopher Pascal said, "The heart has reasons of which the mind knows nothing."

To practice with difficult decisions, we must leave the mental world and enter the heart of our experience. This means residing in the physical experience of the anxiety and confusion itself, instead of spinning off into thoughts. How does it actually feel to be confused? What is the texture of the experience? Staying with the bodily reality of the present moment offers us the possibility to see our life with a sense of clarity that we could never realize through thinking alone. How long will it take? No one can say. But practicing like this is a good example of going to our edge and working directly with where we're stuck.

Another example is working with fear. What do you do with your fears when they arise? Do you usually vacillate between trying to stomp them out and trying to avoid the fearful situation? Most of us do. But when we come to our edge—and what is fear if not the clearest indicator that we're at our edge—we can take the small practice step of choosing to go against our habitual reactions to fear. This is not done with the intention of modifying our behavior by stomping out our fear.

Instead, we take the moment to observe and experience as fully as possible what our fear really is. The next time fear arises, see if you can really feel the energy of fear in the body, without doing anything to change it or get rid of it.

Living Courageously

Practice always involves seeing our edge and taking a small step beyond it into the unknown. As a Spanish proverb says, "If you do not dare, you do not live." Nietzsche echoed this when he said, "The secret of the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously!" Nietzsche wasn't necessarily talking about doing physically dangerous things; he meant taking a step beyond our edge of comfort.

Still, we have to step toward our edge by ourselves. Instead of regarding our edge as an enemy, a place we prefer to avoid, we can realize that our edge is actually our path. From this place, we can take a step closer toward what is. But we can do this only one step at a time, persevering through all the ups and downs of our lives. We may sense danger; sometimes we may even feel as if death is upon us. However, we don't have to leap in headfirst, going for all or nothing. We can simply take a small step, supported by the knowledge that everyone feels fear in stepping beyond the illusion of comfort.

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