Boundaries

Boundaries are not limits. They are guides, not masters. Crossing them is a choice.

Staying inside the boundaries offers an illusion of safety. Painting our careers and lives inside lines drawn by others, guided by the hand of self-interest.

Inside the boundaries, we are known, and it's very difficult to reinvent ourselves. It is too easy to end up like the metaphorical frog that allows itself to be gradually boiled to death rather than jump out because it doesn't notice the changes in its environment.

Trespass, as Nick Hayes practices it in The Book of Trespass, isn't just about hopping a fence; it's a craft, a deliberate art of crossing lines that were drawn to keep people out of what was once common land. The practice draws from the Situationists and their dérive, a playful drift through urban space, but turns it towards the countryside, using walking as a way to see through the illusions that walls create and to feel where power really lies in the landscape.

There are different ways to move through forbidden territory. Some people stroll, some ramble, and some trespass with intent; each creates its own temporary space, neither quite public nor private. What makes trespass more than simple rule-breaking is that it enacts the world as it should be: by walking freely across enclosed land, not just protesting the boundary, living as though it isn't there.

The trespasser learns to read landscapes differently, to see walls not as natural features but as psychological barriers, and develops the particular courage needed to question why certain people claim the right to exclude everyone else.

Trespass requires both surrender and calculation. You let the terrain draw you in whilst remaining alert to what you're discovering about how space shapes behaviour. In the end, trespass belongs to a long tradition of political walking, from mass trespasses to pilgrimages to the Situationists' urban wanderings, transforming the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other into a quiet insistence that the land belongs to everyone.

If we pause for a moment, the most common enclosure most of us face isn't a wall around a country estate, it's the workplace. Work has become its own kind of fenced territory, with its hierarchies and protocols, its designated spaces and approved behaviours, its implicit rules about who can speak and when, about what questions are allowed and which doors remain closed.

The modern workplace encloses not just physical space but time, attention, creativity, and the very possibility of moving freely through your own day. Just as landowners carved up the commons and told people where they could and couldn't walk, organisations partition our working lives into meetings and permissions, approved projects and forbidden tangents.

So what would it mean to trespass at work? It starts with the same craft, the same deliberate crossing of invisible boundaries. You take a conversation into territory it's not supposed to reach. You ask the question that's meant to stay unasked. You collaborate across silos that were built to keep people apart, or you simply walk into a space, literal or metaphorical, where your presence isn't expected.

You work on the thing that matters rather than the thing you've been assigned. Like trespass on enclosed land, workplace trespass requires you to see the boundaries for what they are, arbitrary lines drawn by authority, and to develop the particular courage to move as though you have more freedom than you've been granted.

Trespassing inside the organisation is, of course, a risk. The history of punishments for trespass tells you everything about power. In 1723, the Black Act made it a hanging offence to poach a rabbit or cut down a tree, introducing the death penalty for over 350 offences designed to protect wealthy landowners' property. By 1932, when Benny Rothman led the Kinder Scout mass trespass, sentences had softened to a few months in prison, but the principle remained: keep people in their place.

Today, we've invented new enclosures with their own penalties. Employment contracts bind you to approved activities, non-disclosure agreements fence off what you can say, and non-compete clauses restrict where you can go. Every app we use carries its own terms and conditions, including for many, an inability to sue, but rather go to binding arbitration. Increasingly, money is a boundary and defines our ability to access the sort of education that enables growth, rather than compliance, and healthcare beyond the bare necessities meted out in ten-minute slots.

Today, the punishment for crossing these lines might be a lawsuit or sector isolation rather than a noose, but the intent is identical: to make you afraid of stepping out of bounds, to convince you the enclosure is legitimate and you belong on your narrow path.

Every boundary may be a constraint, but that doesn't stop us from making it a beautiful one because when we define a boundary, it is also an invitation to move beyond it. To harness the alchemical properties of The Athanor to identify the nigredo, the first stage of alchemical transformation, the decomposition of the familiar, and move to albedo, which brings clarity after confusion.

Doing the work requires that we set our own boundaries: one core group of five to eight people, committed to doing the work of learning and helping each other along the way. A larger community where we will share what we learn through posts and newsletters, and a space for guests and visitors who want to look at what we're doing.

We will form the core group during November, allow that to settle during the holiday period of December, and start the work in January. We will start with The Emotional Architecture of The Athanor, and acknowledge that architectural transition is profoundly disorienting before it's intellectually clear. We will explore the emotional impact of AI, create space for contradictory feelings, and develop wayfinding practices. When we've done that, we'll look at what we have learned and what we do next.

"Fortune is the arbiter of one half of our actions, but she still leaves the other half, or almost the other half, to be controlled by us." Machiavelli (Discourses on Livy,1531)

If you would like to be part of this, sign up, or if you have any questions, email me at richard@richardmerrick.co.uk.