What are your Brules?

20th Aug 2017

Rules. We live by them. We need them, actually. Otherwise, we’d be overloaded with decisions. Like having to think about which way to veer when we meet a car coming the other way on the road. Sticking to the left is a useful rule.

Some rules are not so useful. Some rules limit us too much, sometimes to the point where we feel like we have no choice, and we go on autopilot, blindly accepting that ‘that’s just the way things are’, as if we were a train, and the rules were rails.

Like the ‘rule’ that you need to have a permanent job to have a secure income. Like the ‘rule’ that you get four weeks holiday a year. Like the ‘rule’ that Christmas should always be spent with extended family.

All rules are invented. We can uninvent them too. Or rewrite them to suit our needs better.

A few years ago, we broke the Christmas rule. We’d traditionally gone by the ‘rule’ that we had to spend Christmas day with extended family, either hosting Christmas lunch or going to another family member’s place. That’s what you do, right? But in the lead up to the big day, we’d often feel unwanted stress. We’d sometimes look at each other and go “this is turning into a circus. That wasn’t what we wanted!”

One year, we decided to do something quite different. Eleven days before Christmas, we went camping on a remote beach three hours drive away from home with two other families that were good friends of ours. We had the place to ourselves, the sun shone every day, and we were sleeping under the stars. The day before Christmas, we went into the local town, and bought locally caught crayfish, prawns and champagne. Christmas Day was spent just like the preceding eleven days, kicking back on the beach, hanging in the hammock, casually enjoying the fruits of our shopping trip the day before. We were so relaxed we were horizontal.

It was one of the best Christmas Days I’ve ever had (as a grown-up).

The next day, Boxing Day, we packed up. During the morning, the hoardes of holiday makers gradually seeped in and filled the surrounding area that had been completely empty the day before. By lunch, the place was teeming. With a quiet smugness, we drove against the flow of the streaming traffic, back to our ‘normal’ lives, completely revitalised.

Some rules are what Vishen Lakhiani, founder of Mindvalley, calls ‘Brules’, or ‘Bullshit Rules’. They’re the belief systems that are too rigid, outmoded, or just plain false. They’re ripe to be tested, rewritten or perhaps thrown out altogether.