I was inspired to attempt some free verse poetry the other night after watching the movie Leaves of Grass, named after the great Walt Whitman work of the same name.

In the movie, Keri Russel quotes a passage from the book to Edward Norton:

You have not known what you are—you have slumbered upon yourself all your life,
Your eye-lids have been as much as closed most of the time,
What you have done returns already in mockeries,
…
The mockeries are not you,
Underneath them, and within them, I see you lurk,

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Sometimes my mind wanders into thoughts that feel so uncomfortable they hurt. It harkens back to a situation where I encountered evidence of me at my worst; and I find myself shutting my eyes really tight, almost as if I was trying to wish that thought away.

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When you assume it makes an “ass” out of “u” and “me.” Or so the clever naysayers would have you believe. What they don’t tell you is that when you share an assumption out loud you’ll get a response confirming or correcting that assumption.

Ask someone their opinion directly, and you’re likely to get a flaccid answer. The truth is that we don’t have strong opinions on most things because most things don’t concern us. It’s much easier to say “I don’t know” and be on are way than to think our way through a very open-ended question to find a specific answer. The alternative to asking boring questions is to make rising accusations. Ask someone why they don’t want to try something new and they’ll skim the first answer off the top of their head in response. Tell someone, “I bet you’re afraid of trying something like this because you won’t get the credit if it succeeds,” and you’re starting a whole new conversation.

You may question whether it’s smart or productive to incite the people around you to get defensive. But when you give someone honest feedback in the form of what you’re really thinking, it moves the conversation into uncharted territory. And it is precisely our desire to avoid uncharted territory—and the endless barrage of excuses we deploy to defend that decision—that keeps us stuck in the rut of being boring, predictable and unremarkable.

How much of rising to the occasion involves being exposed to occasions worth rising to? How different would your life be if, instead of surveying your options and choosing the ones that felt best to you, you deliberately set out to create opportunities to thrive? Not necessarily opportunities to accomplish something, or even opportunities to make a difference, but simply opportunities to be your best self, even if only for a short while.

For example, I excel at making humorous comments and taking conversations to interesting places when talking with a circle of friends. Something about being around a conversation that will move forward on its own (since there are several other people there to carry it, even in my silence), and feeling comfortable enough to be myself and not hold back, makes for a great environment for me to thrive. I don’t get paid to be myself in those situations. It doesn’t necessarily advance my career or even cause me to grow as a person. But I love who I become in those situations. And the more I expose myself to those situations, the better I feel about myself and my life. So why don’t I intentionally try to create more of these opportunities? Why do I instead worry and fret and struggle to attempt to cajole myself into doing “productive” things, or give up all together and settle for a stimulating distraction that will take my mind off my inability to accomplish my dreams?

The answer is that I, like many of us, have bought into an idea of what it is to succeed that was created by persons other than myself. And the more I see thriving as something that brings me closer to some societal ideal of success, the more I will see myself as a failure for failing to move toward that ideal.

But maybe, just maybe, I can turn that around. And the next time I catch myself not liking where I’m going, I can take some initiative and create a situation that will remind me of how awesome I am.