Serendipitous inspiration and moxie.
Sometimes my thoughts are like cute, fluffy cotton candy floating through the sky.
Sometimes my thoughts are dark storm clouds that hide the sky altogether.
Sometimes my thoughts feel like a crazy shrieking alien stuck to my face that just won’t let go no matter how hard I tug and pull.
Every time, they’re only just thoughts. No more weighty or permanent than a cloud.
Years ago I knew a couple who changed my perspective on the importance of truth.
I met them in the summer, through mutual friends, at a picnic in the park. John was wonderfully kind, Jane was brilliant and funny. I spent an hour engrossed in stories of Jane’s unusually interesting life. She had three graduate degrees, could fly a helicopter, had beat lung cancer, and was doing contract work for the government she couldn’t really discuss.
I mentioned to my and John’s mutual friend that he had really found an amazing lady. Anger flashed across my friend’s face as she told me in a low voice that nothing Jane had told me was true. Everyone was concerned for John, she said, and some of them had even tried an intervention of sorts the previous year. John knew that Jane was a compulsive liar, and stayed with her anyway.
My friends believed Jane was taking advantage of John. I agreed. I considered truth to be unconditionally essential in a healthy relationship. Absolute honesty, I believed, was the path to an authentic intimate bond.
I’ve thought about John and Jane many times over the years. Even when I first learned of Jane’s exquisite penchant for storytelling, so certain it was hurting John, something in me wondered about their connection. John seemed to be happy with her. She was happy with him. They loved each other. They still do, from what I hear – they’re still happy fifteen years later. And she still tells her stories.
I no longer think truth is more important than happiness. Our concept of truth was created in service to our human experience, to the way we feel. Truth is made up of thoughts. Thoughts create our experience. If John and Jane can have a wonderful experience with each other, regardless of the level of truth in their conversations, good on them.
Would you rather have truth without happiness? Or would you rather feel truly happy?
Have you ever seen an apparition in the dark, something that looks exactly like a weird animal or ominous intruder? As soon as you turn on a light you realize the shadowy visage was created by a tree branch just outside your window, or maybe a hanging lamp in the hallway.
Our feelings are also shadows. Fear, anxiety, depression, sorrow, joy, gratitude, exuberance, yearning are all the shadows of our thoughts.
Emotions don’t happen to us. They are created by our thoughts, by our in-the-moment predictions.
Learning that emotions are the shadows of thought has changed my experience of life.
I lived with often debilitating depression and anxiety for over thirty years. I thought depression and anxiety were real, that they were actual entities living in my brain and mind. I spent so much time thinking about and talking about and worrying about shadow monsters. Knowing they are just shadows created by thoughts has changed everything.
Now, when I feel a wave of anxiety, I acknowledge the shadow monster in whatever form it appears. Then I turn on the lights.
Occasionally I’m able to pinpoint exactly what thoughts conjured up the monsters, though it turns out identifying them doesn’t matter. It’s enough to remember the anxiety is caused by random thoughts floating through my mind.
All it takes to turn on the lights is remembering the anxiety is caused by thought. Thoughts aren’t real, they float by just as quickly as they came, and there will always be new ones. I can choose which ones to follow.
The shadow monsters aren’t so scary anymore because I know they’re not real. Now I can appreciate their dark, momentary beauty.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.