Step Inside the ‘Wiggle Room’

Be honest with me. How many people do you think are “set for life?” Like, how bad could Lebron James have messed things up? Being 6’9” with enough fast twitch muscle fibers to accommodate a whole village. Similarly, there’s a three year old girl right now growing up in Syria that one could pretty much write the rest of her life story without needing much assistance. She’s “set for life” in a different, tragic way. 

How much control do we have of our lives after all? 

There is an overwhelming amount of evidence that geography, genetics, and opportunity (or lack thereof) has a remarkable amount of control over our future. Ironically, the best way to have a great adulthood is likely to choose a great childhood. Since that’s remarkably outside of one’s control, it seems that we’re at the heart of the nature versus nurture conversation. 

If I’m being honest, this has been hammered home for me with our non-profit work. If I grew up in their shoes and experienced what our guys who are incarcerated did, I’d be locked up, too! And, hell, it’s hard to argue with everyone’s favorite saying that “everything happens for a reason.” 

If everything happens for a reason, do we have a choice? 

I’m not sure how much of a choice we have to be honest. It’s hard to tell an endomorph body type with slow twitch muscle fibers who is growing up in Sayulita, Mexico that she’s going to accomplish her goal in becoming an Olympic figure skater. We’ve got Myers Briggs to tell us what kind of brain we have and genetic code to tell us what kind of athlete we can be and a simple yes or no question about childhood trauma will inform our future of anxiety, depression, and suicide as well as any other factor. 

Enter: the “Wiggle Room.”

The Wiggle Room is a place where life is worth living for everyone. It actually is the most egalitarian experience life has to offer. It’s actually where Lebron James and the young girl in Syria are the same. The Wiggle Room is where we play in the margins. It says, sure you’re a right-brained, extroverted, female with dyslexia and an abusive father but you want to be an award winning arborist. While none of those characteristics are typical for the best arborists in the world, you can still choose to play in the margin. 

It’s clear that Bob Dylan can’t sing, but the goddamn singer songwriter has enough Grammy’s to use as door stops for every room in his massive mansion and his Nobel Prize and Presidential Medal of Freedom are cherries on top. 

At 5’3”, the NBA seems off limits unless you’re playing in the margins of the human spirit. As long as there’s a Muggsy Bogues story to tell, the Wiggle Room is alive and well in my book. 

Even if life is 99% determined for you, I pray you’ll play in the 1%. 

There are too many examples of men and women who transcend their fixed path for an improbable reality to settle for a deterministic view of life. Any time life feels decided for you, I invite you into the Wiggle Room. There’s always space and someone is always doing something that defies the obvious.