Don’t resist.
Relax and let it happen. It shouldn’t hurt, though you might feel a tugging sensation. It’s okay to stop—just for a little while—the striving, planning, strategizing, evaluating that make your work so successful, that you hope makes you notable and valuable.
It’s fine to step away from the carefully wrought echo chamber of your efforts and achievements and of those you respect—just for a bit—and acknowledge how wide and unknowable much of the world is.
When you’re able, close your eyes. Go small: Listen to your breath, feel your eyelashes on your face, your pulse in your throat, your hands in your lap, your toes in your shoes.
Go bigger: Hear air forced through vents, traffic on the street outside, the laughter or murmurs of the people in the next room. What are they doing there? Picture the occupants of the building next door, Rear Window–style. What are they working on, dreaming of, around their conference tables?
What might the day hold for a 10-year-old in Latvia? For an 90-year-old in Laos? For flight engineers on the ISS, stocked with spare air and freeze-dried dessert, orbiting 220 miles out from the restraining press of Earth?
Don’t worry. You don’t have to throw out your list-making—this can be a good time for a thoughtful review of the year past, especially if it helps create a context for the one to come.
But first, make space for experience that defies judgement, that just is, regardless of how smart/sexy/clever/sweet/caring/tough/relentless/good you are. The sight of an octopus making its way across seaweed-tufted ground doesn’t require your analysis; neither does your toddler’s take on the best use of a salad spinner. You’re allowed to just take them in, hands-free, senses wide.
So maybe it’s worth a try; worth trying to hear, taste, feel, imagine it all—everything you don’t know for sure. Examine the wobbly feeling that may result. Let it help you notice where you’re already stone-steady, where you’re prepared to risk getting stronger. Allow yourself to pull away from the mesmerizing loop of your routines and attitudes, just a little, no matter how well they seem to serve.
The wide unknowable is there for you, inexorable and mundane and confounding and exciting and utterly beyond your control. Take that as the gift it is. Keep it with you, in your pocket or on the corner of your desk or in the back of your mind, within reach. Now—break over. Open your eyes and get back in there.
[Image: M.C. Tapera]
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I wish you put this advice in a top 10 list :-p
Noted, Dino.
Thanks, and Happy New Year to you!
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