Guy Reams (00:02.088)
All right, today is day 210, become an edge dancer. This is one of my favorite concepts that I've been collecting over the years. So I've been writing this blog every day for quite some time. And as I've gone through it, there have been several repeating themes that keep coming back to me. And after this happened a few times, I started recording them down. My ambition is one day to...
write a book potentially on the key and core concepts that have been the most powerful to me. And amongst that list of 20 things, one of them has become an edge dancer. And so today I thought I would share my inspiration for this concept that I call edge dancing. And so there are three primary.
what you call motivations behind this edge dancing concept. And so I'll list those three. The first is from an author known as Brandon Sanderson. If you don't know who he is, he's a science fiction author. And he created this universe called the Cosmere. And one of the book series in the Cosmere is called the Stormlight Archive series. And in those books, he has several characters.
And the heroes in this book obtain their powers from a source in the Cosmere. And there are 10 categories of these heroes, and they're known as the Knights Radiant. The first one that you read about in the books is a character named Kaladin, who has this heroic journey that he goes through. And he's known as what is called a Wind Runner. And he's obviously very cool. But.
That's not my favorite one. My favorite one is known as a character known as Lyft. And Lyft doesn't really know that she has powers, but she is in the night's radiant known as what we call a edge dancer. And the edge dancer has two key powers and she has the ability to manipulate the force of abrasion or friction so she can be really fast, be incredibly agile and swift.
Guy Reams (02:21.672)
And then the second power she has is that of progression, meaning she has some power over organic things so she can help living organisms grow and heal faster.
So, and I also like the lift character because she's really witty and sarcastic. So this has kind of become a thing for me. This idea of understanding the balance between taking risks and the growth of living things and being able to do that quick or fast has become kind of a personal ambition of mine. Definitely not something I'm necessarily good at, but something I want to become.
And so this idea of being an edge dancer was born from this novel concept. However, I noticed in lots of my reading that this concept of being an edge dancer is actually prevalent in several other areas of literature. One of my most, one of the ones that really inspired me was a poem by Patrick Overton. Patrick Overton writes on things of faith.
And he has a poem that he basically it's about being having faith in the unknown. Here's the quote from his poem. When you have come to the edge of all light that you know and are about to drop off into darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing one of two things will happen. There'll be something solid to stand on or you'll you will be taught to fly. And so this is really the essence of being an edge dancer.
It's having faith to know that what you're going about will be successful. But if not, you will be thrown into chaos and into darkness. And you know that by being thrown into chaos, that you will learn and you will grow. And that iterative process of having faith to be successful or faith to failure will ultimately lead you to a happy.
Guy Reams (04:33.288)
iterative process where you grow constantly. Now, the third area that really inspired me was I read a book by Jordan Peterson, one of his first books. It's a very long, thick book about his theory of a lot of many things, but mostly about myth. In one of those books, in one chapter in that book, he talks about this concept of
coming from Taoism. And in the book, he talks about the symbol, the yin yang symbol. And if you remember that symbol, it's basically the black and white symbol where on the black swirl part of the symbol, there's a white dot. And on the white swirl, the symbol is a black dot. And basically, it's these two opposing colors. But in each opposing color, there's a small area in which you might suddenly
get thrown into the other side. So basically this represents order and chaos or the feminine and the masculine. It represents, you know, fire and darkness, you know, water and the sun. So it's kind of the water and the sky and water. So it kind of represents the two opposite extremes, yin and yang. But the idea is that when you're in chaos, when your life is in chaos,
That one little white dot means that at any given time you could potentially be immediately thrown into complete order. You could find the thing that you were looking for. And if you are in complete order, there's always the chance that you could be thrown into complete chaos. So the idea is to find true purpose or to find the maximum area where you could gain the greatest growth is to know how to dance on between the edge of order and chaos.
And so the idea is that if you can embrace both of those concepts, then you can learn to dance on the edge of chaos and order. These three influences have really taught me to think of this as a continuous process, because as I've pushed myself to improve and do better, I've always had this times when I'm discouraged, when I'm failing or not doing well, where I take a leap, a risk, and it ends up not
Guy Reams (07:00.808)
working out very well. And so I've had periods of depression and discouragement. So these three sources have helped teach me that edge dancing is actually okay, and that I can find hope, even when I'm in the midst of despair, or that I can know that any minute in time, because I'm taking risks that I can fail, and to be okay with that journey.
So that is my edge dancing concept.