There Are No Rules

There are no rules. Everything around us, that is not the wilderness or the wind or the rain and the sun, is fabricated. It has been designed, built, constructed, and complete born out of the imaginations of humans. That means it is all completely made up.

These roads we drive down, and the rules we obey, have been created by people, by committees, by groups and by teams. It is all constructed and engineered. Made up by people who look a lot like you.

And that means there are no rules, other than those we all agree to recognise. Sure, there are laws to keep order, to keep us safe and to keep society moving along. But there are other rules, that we relentlessly follow, which are not rules at all. It’s just the way things have always been done. Convention. Tradition. Culture and etiquette. And so we simply fall into these patterns.

Often these patterns don’t benefit us at all. Often they are so out of date that while they still serve some vestigial purpose, they are gradually losing their relevance. And often we just follow them out of politeness, because it requires no effort and because we don’t know what else to do.

But it also means that we don’t have to follow them at all, and we can make up our own rules. We can decide what to and what not to do. We can find old rules that don’t work properly any more, and choose to break them and disrupt them.

People who are breaking the old rules and writing their own are all around us. Some of them get branded as eccentrics, others and mavericks, and others as go-getters and entrepreneurs. Sometimes the lines are blurred.

There are those who ride unicycles to the office in the morning (I’ve seen this). There are those who choose to eat unconventional foods at lunchtime, like quinoa and green smoothies with a shot of spirulina on the side. There are those who choose to live on boats instead of in houses, those who choose to homeschool their children and those who dive into icy waters for a swim on Christmas morning.

And there are those who recognise that following the old rules, which don’t really exist anyway, can keep them trapped and prevent them from fulfilling their potential. These are the people who start things, build things, create things, and who set out to change the world – or at least a part of it.

There are the poets and the painters, the innovators and the inventors, there are the singers and the activists, the passionate and the empowered.

Every day we have a choice. We have the choice of following the old rules, the way things have always been done, the rules that may or may not bring us the life we want. Or we have the choice of stepping up and being seen. Letting our voices echo in the hearts of others as we strive for something new, something better or something different.

There are no rules but those we choose. And that choice is always ours.