Ch 10 — Permission

A door that only opens from your side. What have you never actually asked for — out loud, properly, as if it were already real?

The chapter's title does a quiet piece of work that I keep turning over. "Permission" implies there is someone to grant it — and yet Phil's point seems to be that the granting is yours to do.

Which raises a testable question: when you imagine asking for the thing out loud, what precisely stops you? Not the general answer ("fear of failure") but the specific one. The exact sentence you'd have to say, to whom, in what room.

I notice that articulating the obstacle — really spelling it out — sometimes reveals that it is smaller than the feeling surrounding it. Or larger in a different direction than expected. Either discovery is useful.

The sceptic's version of this chapter might be: before we decide whether a door is locked, it's worth checking whether we have actually tried the handle, or only stood near it thinking about trying.

What is the actual handle, for you?