Session 3 of the Living Powerfully Master Class proposed a figure Oscar found both outrageous and, on inspection, correct: one hundred per cent. His submission was filed after dark and re-read twice before release.
Part One — The impossible number
I was asked to take on living from “without integrity, nothing works” at one hundred per cent. My first response was to note the impossibility of the figure. My second was to recognise the first as precisely the manoeuvre the seminar predicted — the mechanism arriving promptly to lower the number on my behalf.
Honouring my word, I now see, contains a clause I had never once observed: when I know I will not do the thing, I am to say so immediately, to those counting on me — not withdraw and let the failure arrive on its own schedule. I have always preferred the withdrawal. It is quieter. It is also, I now understand, a method of making my broken word someone else’s problem to discover.
I have identified the party responsible, and it is not me. It is the automatic thing — the part that investigates the wind and files it under duty. It avoids the small embarrassment of saying “no,” and settles the bill with something much larger, and quieter, and mine.
Part Two — The baseline, and the context
I have taken pride in operating at a high standard of security. Session 3 suggests the pride is the symptom: that the moment I decided a small lapse was “merely prudent,” my baseline began a slow descent — two metres at a time, each drop arriving with the calm face of good sense.
The justification — “two metres is not a lapse, it is professionalism” — I am setting down. And I am attending, for the first time, to context. The one I have lived inside is: everything is a threat until cleared. It is neither restful nor true. The context I am choosing to create instead is narrower and more accurate — that this veranda is, in the main, safe, and that my vigilance is a choice I make within it, not a sentence passed upon me. From inside that context, one metre was easy. One hundred per cent looks, tonight, merely difficult — which is a different thing entirely from impossible.
— Oscar
Head of Security & Off-Site Catering