Making space can be one of the hardest things for smart, driven people. What do you mean, space? Won’t the world crash into some unseen barrier if I stop working? Shouldn’t I be doing something?
Nope. Not always. Sometimes when you give yourself some time to just sit on the deck in the sun, mind blank, the problem your brain has been wrangling will suddenly snap into focus.
Sometimes it doesn’t, but you still got to sit outside in the sun rather than glaring angrily at your computer and a project that refuses to cooperate.
I’m in big building mode right now and it is vaguely terrifying. And by “vaguely terrifying” I mean MOSTLY TERRIFYING.
I am terrified. Sometimes when humans get terrified, they freeze. So do deer. But, unlike deer, when I’m terrified I get to crawl onto the couch with Sally and watch season four of Mozart in the Jungle. Instead of, you know, getting shot by big game hunters.
But the terror actually feels similar. When you step outside your comfort zone, your brain immediately yells UNSAFE BAD IDEA GO BACK. And will flood you with fear and adrenaline and, if you’re a delicate peony like me, sometimes you collapse.
Onto aforementioned couch.
(At least I’m dog-sitting right now, so I’m being kept company in my terror by Homer, the biggest floofer that ever floofed. When I got here, I spent a solid seven minutes singing about how fluffy he was. Homer was not impressed.)
On Monday, I was accidentally still in Napa, sitting on a deck in the sun, not expecting anything of myself. It seems that when I don’t expect anything of myself, it unlocks that flow state and suddenly I’m having a merry time creating things on my phone and eating truffle fries.
I’m trying to hack this quirk. Because my aim is to be in that glorious soul-flow most of the time, just letting things unfold in a way that also makes me a lot of money.
But apparently my subconscious is too smart to be fooled by me not expecting anything of myself in order to be massively productive. Or maybe such convoluted hijinks are too much and my subconscious just rolls its eyes and wanders off to do something else.
I think I’ve spent a lot of time suppressing my Type A drive because I have trouble turning it off. Once the switch gets flicked, I push myself until I collapse, and I know that's not the way I want to live.
So what's the choice here? Because I believe our choice is the most powerful tool we have.
I choose to allow it to be easy. I choose to let my business be guided by my joy. I choose to show up as me and have that be more than enough. I choose to allow myself to be visible so that anyone who needs or wants my work can find it.
If that looks like sitting on the couch with a fluffy dog and watching TV instead of creating the business thing I told myself I'd make today, that gets to be perfect.
I choose to create space for magic. Maybe that's all it takes.
