I have come to think that we are much too influenced by our current selves. We spend too much time in its company, we listen to it too much, we gauge our potential and our capacities by what it can do now. Everyone knows somewhere that if we are really challenged, or in some completely different context, or in some emergency, we can astound ourselves by what we can do. Yet there is that self from which we take our cue, and our assumptions, and our cowardice about what is possible: why it has such mesmerizing power over us can of course be due to inertia; but also I think because it is so close to us, so "in our face" all the time, that it enthralls, ensnares us into thinking that who we are now is the rule, and everything else the exception. My students dream of what they could be: but their selves whisper that it is a vain dream.

There are innumerable recipes for breaking free: Buddhists say, deny the false self; Emersonians say create an imagined future self and strive towards it; and others say find a greater power into which you can flood your hopes and fears. But all, it seems to me, acknowledge the fact that we can be much more than we are; and that our fixation on who we are now are keeps holding us back from the unimaginable prospect of what we could be.