You do not have to be good.
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Month: March 2019
I Wish You Knew
You don’t have to work so hard. You are enough.
You don’t have to hide any part of yourself. You are already loved.
You don’t have to repent. You are not wrong.
You don’t have to feel so afraid. You carry safety within you.
You don’t have to work for love. You are already worthy.
You don’t have to save joy for someday. You deserve to be happy today.
You don’t have to pretend you’re a light bulb. You are the sun.
You don’t have to wait for permission. You are the sun.
Experiment Results: Writing for Thirty Days
A few days before February 1st, I decided to take on the challenge of writing every day for a month. To really crank up the growth opportunity (a fancy way of saying intense discomfort) I knew the writing would have to live in a public location like a blog.
I took two days to create a blog name and decide on and set up the technology. And then I started writing.
Why I did it
I realized recently that I spend over 90% of my time consuming versus creating. I knew immediately that I wanted to flip the ratio. I decided to start with writing because it would require minimal resources. Also because I thought I hated writing and was curious to see if I could flip that belief as well.
My super uncomfortable – I mean growth opportunity-filled – theme for the year is The Year of Being Seen. Over the years I seem to have developed a surprising aversion to certain types of visibility. I’m fine expressing myself in person; probably one of the last adjectives people would use to describe me is meek. But being seen online, where who I am doesn’t just dissipate in transient experiences, is almost painful. I had to step into the discomfort once I realized this was such a thing for me. I don’t like feeling constrained, especially when the constraint is coming from within.
What I discovered
I am really uncomfortable being seen in this way. I set up this blog with a new domain so no one would know who I was. That was the only way I could tolerate going live with the site. The only person I told about the experiment was my husband. About two weeks into the month I told one more person, and another a few days after that. A week later I added my name to the metadata. Two days ago I added links to some of my social media. All of this, even the initially totally anonymous blog, felt excruciatingly uncomfortable. It’s been neat to watch my reactions to each new mini-challenge and then watch as the discomfort dissolves without anything horrible following in its wake.
Extreme perfectionism wasn’t nearly as difficult to abandon as I thought. The way I used to write was perfectionism on steroids (this is the way I’ve approached most of my life). These days, though, I simply don’t have the time or desire to spend several hours a day for thirty days writing a blog post. So I set a time limit for writing: ideally thirty minutes or less, no more than one hour. I rarely had the time or energy to edit and re-edit, some days I didn’t even reread what I wrote (I can’t believe these things are true even as I type this sentence). Every time I finished writing a post I’d publish immediately, ask my husband to read it, and pretend I wasn’t staring at him as he read. When I couldn’t stand it anymore I’d say “It probably totally sucks but that’s okay, at least I wrote something, but does it totally suck? Never mind, doesn’t matter.” I reminded myself that quality wasn’t part of the challenge, yet I still feel this every time I publish a new post. And yet I continue to publish new posts. I can now formally say that my name is Anna, and I am a recovering perfectionist. It’s much easier this way, even if it is occasionally uncomfortable.
Innate creativity is really real. One of the most valuable outcomes of this experiment is that I have more tangible proof of the innate creativity I believe is present in all of us. I was very surprised to discover that I always have something to write about. I don’t know if it’s good, or interesting, or of value to anyone (I hope it is), but I’ve somehow always managed to find something to say. In addition to limiting my writing time to thirty minutes I decided not to research or extensively plan post ideas. I have kept a simple list of post themes, but the only thing I brought to a writing session was at most a title idea or a quote. And a quiet mind. What I found was that once I stripped away the perfectionism, research, strategizing, planning, and what-if-ing, words flowed through me and I wrote.
I could totally write a book. Before this experiment, writing an entire book seemed more daunting than hiking up Kilimanjaro in heels (I don’t wear heels). I don’t know if I will write a book, or if it would be a good book, but now I know it’s possible. If I wrote every day, with some loose plan or theme, I could have a first draft of a book in less than a year. This is not a unique revelation – I’ve read The Artist’s Way, The Power of Habit, Atomic Habits, countless other books and research articles about starting small, etc. etc. But it’s actually true! I could do it! I’m almost giggling at the thought of this very real possibility, something that felt nearly impossible just one month ago. I could totally write a book. Wow.
What’s next
I’m going to continue my daily writing practice. It’s become a habit and it’s making me a more interesting person. Seth Godin is right about the benefits of writing and reading blogs.
The next hard thing for me to face will be sharing my writing. It’s here, a few people are reading it (Hi!), and now I need to take a less passive approach to being seen. I’ll let you know how it goes.
♥ Anna
An Explosion Happened When You Were Born
Your expectation of something unique and dramatic, of some wonderful explosion, is merely hindering and delaying your self realization.
You are not to expect an explosion, for the explosion has already happened – at the moment when you were born.
There is only one mistake you are making: you take the inner for the outer and the outer for the inner.
What is in you, you take to be outside you and what is outside, you take to be in you. The mind and feelings are external, but you take them to be intimate. You believe the world to be objective, while it is entirely a projection of your psyche.
That is the basic confusion and no new explosion will set it right.
You have to think yourself out of it. There is no other way.
― Nisargadatta Maharaj
Many of us assume life happens from the outside in. We think the way we feel is caused by things outside of us. We think the way to improve our experience is to change things outside of us. This approach requires endless effort and will never bring true fulfillment, because it takes us further away from ourselves.
An explosion happened when we were born, a big bang that created the entire universe within us. We’ve spent many years thinking ourselves into forgetting – but we’re just one thought away from coming back home.
Everything
There are only two ways to live. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
– Albert Einstein
I was very religious when I was young. I was also very afraid. Fear didn’t paralyze my proclivity for action but it did keep me in a vice grip for a long time.
Every night as a child I listed everyone I knew, asking god to keep them all safe. If I missed a name or spoke out of order I would begin again, lest my mistakes caused a terrible tragedy. Sometimes praying took several hours.
I believed that life was the experience of an endless fugue of problems to be solved. I believed in a god but didn’t have any trust that things would be okay.
Through the atheism of my twenties and the whateverism of the decade after that, I did feel something profound when experiencing nature and studying genetics and biology. There was something about life that seemed amazing and powerful. I felt it when hiking in Alaska and traveling broke through Europe. But I didn’t think about it much beyond that. It certainly didn’t have anything to do with my daily life.
The past few years have brought more loss than the past three decades. Many of the people I prayed for as a child are gone. Two new lives have grown in my belly and now run through my everyday life. There have been cancer scares, cancer, baby surgeries, husband surgeries, debilitating depression, a stroke, Alzheimers, financial instability.
I’ve always been resilient, an accomplished problem solver, pretty adept at optimizing the effort of dealing with life. But what I see now is that life is actually a constant, an infinite safety net, an endless fugue of commonplace miracles. There’s nothing to deal with.
There is loss, and there also is my heart doing what a heart does without any problem solving needed, oak trees growing from acorns, ants doing whatever the hell it is they do in the month before they invade my house every year, black holes black hole-ing, the universe expanding and contracting.
These days I know everything will be okay, because that’s just the nature of this weird and beautiful human experience of life, which will happen whether I’m trying to solve it or not.