Frontiers or Front Tiers...

For the first time in my life, today I heard someone say the word frontier with a slight different pronunciation and it just threw me off track.

This person, with a rough and sweet Irish accent said the word as if it was the concatenation of two words: front-tier. Then, and all of a sudden it was as if something I had seen all my life took a different and more correct meaning.

A frontier is nothing more than the tier at the front of where we demarked our territory. And those of us who sometimes wonder into that front tier are nothing more than explorers looking to broaden our definition of what up to now we thought of as the limit to our territory.

A frontier does not need to be static or even well defined. Just as it does not need to be an end to something.

When we set to ourselves frontiers - "this is the maximum I can stand", or "this is the farthest I can run" - we are doing it in only in our minds. There is no established and uncrossable line.

It is up to you, and your own decision, to choose if you want to cross that frontier later-on with some more efforts, or if you are OK with where you got. And make sure to understand that it is perfectly fine to be satisfied with the placement of a frontier, as there is no theoretical end point to the actual place where that frontier can reach, so any one point is as good as any other.

Another interesting thing to recon is that there is never only one frontier. We have frontiers in every direction we look. It is only a matter of shifting the direction you are staring at.

We have frontiers in front of us and in our backs, we have them in every one of our sides and in every direction you turn to look, we have them up and even down, and most importantly we have them also in our minds - and boy do we have countless frontiers in our minds...

I do not know many people who can expand more than one frontier at a single time, maybe there are but I just don't know them.

This explains also why when we are investing our efforts in expanding our abilities (moving a frontier) in one direction, it usually comes at the expense of moving another frontier (or set of frontiers) closer to where we stand - shortening other frontiers in order to expand the one in front of us.

Which brings me to another point I realized by understanding we are talking about a front tier, and that is that we can move a frontier back and closer to us. At times it may even make sense to do so.

Not every retreat is a defeat. Sometimes a retreat is an understanding that we went to far over a previous frontier, and what we found there was not really worth investing the efforts to stay and keep the frontier expanded in that direction.

And here I come to my final realization - that a front tier takes efforts not only to expand but also to maintain. And as we move our frontiers further in one directions we will need to invest more efforts simply to stay in the place we reached, efforts that will undoubtedly come at the expense of other frontiers we will need to shorten.

Frontiers are not good or bad, they are the choices we make about the people, the things, and even the habits that are more important to us.