An Open Life Leaks; A Bounded Life Builds.
If direction covered earlier is where you face, constraint is about what you refuse. We covered Alignment and Direction in earlier editions. Alignment to what is right, to my principles, to the…
If direction covered earlier is where you face, constraint is about what you refuse.
We covered Alignment and Direction in earlier editions. Alignment to what is right, to my principles, to the Dharma. Direction is setting yourself in the right path at the start itself. Imagine Alignment to Dharma meant you had to bring back your wife who had gone to her in-laws place and you set yourself in the wrong direction. You will never reach no matter what you do.
If set in the right direction, you need to know the best possible ways to do that and that are what I call as constraints.
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Man is conditioned to think constraintless (new word) that is limitless. So the moment someone talks about building constraints, mind resists the same, because the word itself sound like a loss. Allow me till the end of the edition to explain my point and I know you would be super convinced as to why constraints are required for speedy progress.
Constraint feels like a smaller life — fewer doors, less room. So we avoid it. We keep every option open, every possibility alive, and we call that freedom. I don't call that freedom. I call that leakage.
Lets take social media as example. When you choose a stream of social media to promote your product, you choose that and you keep posting regularly your promotional material. But what if there are more than 5 social media channels you have chosen then it is leakage. Because you energy would just get scattered across. Best is to build yourself in one social media channel and then add another.
Lets take another example. Think of a river. What gives a river its power is not the water — it is the banks. Take the banks away and the same water is going nowhere, stagnant, thin. The two banks, the constraint, are the very thing that turn loose water into a force. Your energy is the water. Constraint is the banks.
So a direction without constraint scatters. You said you wanted to face a certain way — but if you say yes to everything, you face every way at once, which is the same as facing nowhere. Constraint is the honest set of noes that keep you pointed. It is not the enemy of your direction. It is the only thing that makes your direction real.
The ancients had a word for this, and they made it a mark of greatness rather than weakness — Maryada. The limit. The line one holds. The highest praise they could give a man was to call him Maryada Purushottam — the finest of men, not because he had no limits, but because he chose them and never crossed them. To them, the one who holds their own boundary is stronger than the one who has none.
Look at all the chants that we have since ages. They have survived the test of time. How did they survive without ever being written down or sold? Constraint. They were composed in the strictest meter — every syllable counted, every line bound to a rule. That binding was not decoration; it was the technology of survival. The tighter the constraint, the harder the text was to corrupt, forget or lose. A loose text drifts and dies in a generation. A tightly bound one rides the human voice for three thousand years. Their constraint was their immortality.
I am still searching how to do that for my own writing. Maybe I would find my constraints soon.
So after you align, and after you point, ask the third question. Not "what more can I take on". Ask instead, "what will I refuse?" Your boundaries, your rules, your not-this. Constraint is subtraction, and subtraction is what finally gives your days a shape.
Hold just this: an open life leaks; a bounded life builds.
But a shape with nothing moving through it is still only a plan. Alignment, direction, constraint — all of it, so far, is preparation. What turns preparation into a life is the next letter. Action. And that is for the next note.