The familiar life horizon has been outgrown: the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit; the time for the passing of a threshold is at hand.

Approaching a threshold is akin to stepping through a portal; An opening of a new and previously inaccessible path. It’s more than mere change, thresholds imply that transformation has taken place.

Art is long, life short, judgment difficult, opportunity transient. To act is easy, to think is hard; to act according to our thought is troublesome. Every beginning is cheerful: the threshold is the place of expectation.

Some individuals in this world will arrive at these thresholds. These points, any one person can arrive at, but not all will. Once passed, we can never return. For there is no unchanged point we could ever possibly return to, as we hurtle through time and space perhaps it would be wise to take pause at such thresholds. To truly take stock of the era we are entering and to notice how some boundaries once crossed, will never again be uncrossed. We are at many such thresholds this century.

There comes a time when the pain of continuing exceeds the pain of stopping. At that moment, a threshold is crossed. What seemed unthinkable becomes thinkable. Slowly, the realization emerges that the choice to continue what you have been doing is the choice to live in discomfort, and the choice to stop what you have been doing is the choice to breathe deeply and freely again. Once that realization has emerged, you can either honor it or ignore it, but you cannot forget it. What has become known can not become unknown again.

Links

• Critical Transitions in Nature and Society
• Early-warning signs for critical transitions
• Threshold Models of Collective Behaviour
• Threshold model
• A network-based microfoundation of Granovetter’s threshold model for social tipping
• Cascading Behavior in Networks: Algorithmic and Economic Issues
• The statistical properties of the threshold model and the feedback leadership condition
• Social contagion with degree-dependent thresholds
• Civil resistance: a space oddity
• Understanding street protests: from a mathematical model to protest management
• Mathematical model of repressive response to collective action and protest waves
• All electoral systems have thresholds of representation
• How proportional are electoral systems? A universal measure of electoral rules
• Poverty Traps
• Do Poverty Traps Exist?
• On the Roles of Risk and Ability
• Information Cascades and Threshold Implementation: An Application to Crowdfunding*
• Cascading Behavior in Networks: Algorithmic and Economic Issues
• Desertion and Collective Action in Civil Wars
• Tipping elements in the Earth’s climate system
• big risks in the Earth System
• Planet’s first catastrophic climate tipping point reached, report says, with coral reefs facing ‘widespread dieback’
• Can positive social tipping points prevent climate collapse?
• Societal tipping points
• Tipping Points Definition