Stillborn

I step off the bus in Kuşadası. The bus pulls away. Someone steps into the passenger seat of a car and pulls the door shut. The car pulls away. I am alone now.

Through my shoes I feel the dirt and gravel of the parking lot beneath me.

The voice in the back of my head says “Matt, you are not of that world anymore, and you can never enjoy what is to come unless you learn to leave that one behind. It cannot be part of you anymore.”

“But wait,” I think, “didn’t this already happen? Didn’t I already do this, 10 years ago? I don’t have to do it again, do I? This is a dream, right?”

As I wake, that parking lot in Kuşadası disappears into thin air, and the chaos of the morning closes in on me.

In the first two months of our work together, your POV (point of view) is like that dream. If you expose it to the chaos of the morning too early, it will die. For the first two months of POV formation, we have to keep a safe space, just the two of us, where the POV can take form outside your body.

In the third month, I coach you on the skills you will need when your POV goes bumping up against the other POVs out there in the world. Out there in the world, your POV will do things for you that you couldn’t do without it.

But if you try to skip forward to the third month before the safe space of the first two months, your POV will be stillborn.

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