Robert Frost's neighbour had a rather good point* (even if Frost didn't think so)
Various people across my assorted reading lists hither and yon have been linking to this post about consent and sex (in a BDSM context but with wider implications).
What it also seems to me to be about is the value of establishing limits within which things can productively happen.
I find the thought of limits as enabling rather than confining really rather exciting, because it does tend to mesh with my experiences across quite diverse fields of endeavour.
That if there is no particular reason to go in a particular direction or get stuck into a particular task or if you're facing an enormous supermarket full of choices, it can really be somewhat paralysing.
Many years ago, when I was just starting therapy, I spent most of the first session in silence because I couldn't think where to begin.
I've done a certain amount of swirling around at the beginning of projects until I've imposed certain parameters of what's going in and what's staying out.
Being an archivist would be wholly impossible if you had to keep everything and didn't quite early on in the process eliminate certain classes of material that people want to give you or have just hopefully boxed up and sent in order to get out of their own space. (I once saw a really bad list that was masquerading as a catalogue where someone had presumably just sat down and gone through box by box listing everything as they came to it and had imposed no selection or editing or coherent organisation - with a little of that, perhaps those two chocolate-bar wrappers listed might have been demonstrated to have some contextual meaning?)
Similarly, the role of all sorts of generic constraints or formal limitations that can be imposed upon works in all sorts of arts (even Jackson Pollock paintings are in delimited rectangles...) might be considered to be enabling rather than restraining creativity.
*He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."
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