Freedom via messing around

Don't tell me that!
I can't handle that being the truth!
Those cannot be the real facts!
Stop shattering my comforting illusions!

We learn early on to stop messing around with reality. When we're in denial, we're told to face the facts. When we're delusional, we're supposed to do a reality check. When we're hysterical, we simmer down and deal with what's actually happened. We get the idea that messing around is a bad thing. We become realistic and say things like "it is what it is". We take pride in being objective and factual.

When we stop messing around with reality, we've gone from the frying pan to the fire. We've stereotyped messing around as only a bad thing. We're missing out on all the freedom that is available by messing around with reality. We've dealt ourselves a prison term until we start messing around for our own good.

There's a good way to mess around with reality that's different from denials, delusions and hysteria. We own our "selective perceptions and attributions" of "consensually validated evidence". We accept the facts but play around with the meaning. We deal separately with our objectivity while we explore our own subjectivity. We observe what is as well as what we make of it.

When we find this freedom in messing around, We change the definitions of problems. We revise our diagnosis of what appears to be going wrong. We reframe what we see in light of what it could become and what it's showing us to change, combine or balance. We tell a different story about what happened and what we're going to do about it. We change our mind about what we see before the world looks any different to our eyes.

Here are some the freedoms that are easy to find by messing around with reality:

• I know this looks dangerous, but it appears to me as an opportunity to stretch myself and explore new territory
• It obviously appears as a setback, but for me it's a wake up call about what I was overlooking and ignoring
• You could say it's a failure of mine, but I see it as a successful experiment to discover what I really want
• I agree it looks like a useless problem, but it also provides some secret satisfaction to keep the problem going
• It definitely looks impossible, but appearances can deceive us and mislead us away from following our heart's desire
• I know that's the logical solution, but some clever deviance will get the job done sooner and better than following procedures
• I agree it has to be done, but not when or how or why it has to be done -- while there are so many different approaches to this