For me, this next year is about more joy, more love, and self-acceptance. About being fully enough in the moment while acknowledging my own growth at the same time. For the last few years, I’ve been grinding down a road of self-development and improvement (aka. fixing) that has been nothing short of exhausting. Fruitful, but exhausting. So this year, it feels ripe to slow down. To let everything I’ve been doing congeal and begin to take shape externally instead of internally. I want it to mean more laughter and more play. More fun, and more discovery. More adventures and more humility. More dancing and more friendships.
As this sense of ease spills out of me, I realize it’s the first time since early December that I have taken a breath. I slept in this morning for what felt like ages (9:30) and began my morning with breakfast followed by a foggy hike. It is in the depths of nature that I am always able to come home to myself, as I think is true for many of us, especially in this corner of the world. I am consistently mesmorized by the beauty of our natural surroundings. Today, it was the stunning contrast of the mossy tree branches against the gray sky. They hovered in ethereal beauty as they created an archway around the muddy path. It inspired me to think about returning to my photography, curious if I can capture the stark contrast against the sky and the pulsating energy of the moment. Often, you will spot me wandering about the forest without too much direction while I examine bark, ferns, leaves, and talk to trees. They hold a wisdom beyond our feeble years, I am quite certain.
It took this kind of release, this kind of deep breath, for me to finally return to my writing. I had been fretting earlier in December with what to write, though I had no shortage of ideas. My Dropbox folder is filled with seven different half-drafts. Sparks of ideas that hit for me for a moment, a half page, or a page and a half, but never seemed quite right. And with that, I finally decided that I wouldn’t write a Q4 post—that the point of this, in fact, was to give you inspired writing from my heart—not a forced march through quarterly publishing. So from here on out, you’ll hear from me periodically, with an effort to be quarterly, but with no particular compunction about it. Believe me, it will be more interesting for us both.
In this vein, I wonder often why we don’t approach our work this way, too. We think that there’s something vitally important about deadlines when sometimes it’s exactly what crushes creativity and the proper evolution of an idea or project. It’s more about managing expectations, in my opinion, than it is about meeting predetermined and sometimes superficial dates. This doesn’t mean I don’t like a project to move—I do—but I have often noticed how much we sacrifice in the way of long-term viability and effectiveness when we do so. If a bump in the road occurs, address it, extend or re-organize your timeframe, and communicate (often not a missed step, but a feared step—and that’s a critical nuance). This is easier said than done, of course, and there is an art to it because too much time can also defeat a project, as many of you know.
I love to ponder these types of ideas: What makes us effective? What leads to change? What creates a better organization? A healthier community? To that end, I’ve started slowly creating a seminar, to be taught at an as of yet undetermined time, that addresses key topics like overwhelm (which obliterates creativity and productivity), burnout, emotional safety, trust, intuition, (over)communication, disclosure, movement in relation to the mind, and even a segment called Giving an A inspired by one of my favorite books, raising an important perspective on how our frame of mind before we walk into the room greatly affects what we accomplish. My apartment is plastered with pieces of paper, large and small, as I try to put this together. And while these topics have been broached by others, and the content will surely evolve and strengthen from now to the final product, it will have my framing, my curation, and my guidance added to the mix. Hopefully, that’s enough for a few curious minds. It will undoubtably be held at a beautiful locale with easy access to the outdoors because, well, I would enjoy that, and I think you might, too.
And that’s it for this moment! A check in to say hello, Happy New Year, and best wishes for a wondrous twenty twenty.