 This is the latest essay I published in my project POWER of meanings // MEANINGS of power.
We are born into constraints so ordinary that they become invisible: a particular nervous system, a particular family story, a language, a culture, a body that wants and fears before “I” can even form a sentence. Add to this the constraint that we don’t fully understand ourselves—our motives, triggers, blind spots—and the fantasy of unlimited freedom becomes hard to defend. And yet the opposite fantasy—that we are merely programmed—fails too. It doesn’t match lived experience, and it invites fatalism. What seems truer is something narrower and stranger: a small, shifting space inside the constraints where choice can occur. Not a wide-open field. Wiggle room. The phrase matters because it forces a more honest scale. In many moments, agency is not a grand power to redesign one’s life at will. It is the ability to make a small adjustment inside a much larger pressure. It is a narrow opening in a crowded room. It is a few degrees of movement inside a system that doesn’t budge easily. When we call it “wiggle room,” we acknowledge two things at once: the constraints are real, and they are not the whole story... Keep reading here. [This essay will be included in the Newsletter#20 on January 13.]
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