Emotions are like the ocean and pain can be like a tsunami wave. It’s a collective bundle of grief, loss, sadness, hopelessness, frustration, gratitude. You can’t feel pain without knowing something is wrong.
But like all feelings, pain is a messenger. When it comes, I like to lean in.
Sometimes I am a witness, sometimes I am the mess. But I am in it all wholeheartedly.
I don’t want to miss a single lesson pain has to whisper to me. Sometimes learning through loss is like a woman giving birth. The more you resist, the more painful labour can be. You have to open yourself in the very places your body tries to resist to be closer to birth.
Pain is the pathway to growth because it shows us where something is wrong and gives us a chance to reset the bones. And pain is the pathway to healing too. Therefore I do not, cannot regret being wholehearted and willing to engage in the gritty and the great aspects of life.
I have an unfair advantage here – I’m wired to see this as the marrow of life, that authenticity and getting to the heart of any matter whether spiritual, intellectual or emotional will always be the place where truth empowers us to move forward. I go to the depths of the ocean all the time. It’s my playground. But don’t imagine for a minute that means pain is any less painful for me. No, it’s brutal and heart-wrenching and grinds my world to a halt.
But if you get to know me, behind the layers and the writing and really get into my soul – if I let you in, there is a gift there beyond worth. It’s taken me a long time to believe it, but I see it now more clearly. I see things all day long and connect the patterns of the universe. I understand music and magic in ways you long for in your everyday life. I’ve learned to see joy and sorrow in the same breath. I am a seer. A seer of possibilities, a seer of truth and a seer of hopefulness. That’s why I long to help others learn to see. Not necessarily what I see – the depths of the ocean is often dark, but to see in their unique way.
Many times in talking to someone, even strangers at a bar, we will end up in the depths of their dark wounds or the questions they wrestle with. I struggle with small talk, I’d rather peel back your layers and understand the real you. That means being prepared for the gritty. The bad ideas, the messiness of human living and relationships laid bare. Sometimes I am a witness, sometimes I am the mess. But I am in it all wholeheartedly.
For me, there is no other way to be. There is no deep enough until we hit the ocean floors. Me, wholly myself celebrating you, wholly yourself.
We spend so much time pretending to each other, when our healing is so often found in disclosing the vulnerabilities that allow us to see each other whole and hopeful. If we could do away with pretending, how much healing might we find in the world?
But instead, we hide our true selves so often behind our fear of being seen for our messy selves. In our hiding we hurt each other, in our hiding we resist the pain of vulnerability and miss the gift of intimacy that comes from it.
Yesterday I was given a good piece of advice, and because it’s never too soon to share what we learn, I’ll pass it on.
In the midst of the pain, don’t lose your shape. Lean into your shape, the unique vocation of who you are. Your vocation isn’t a job but your calling on the earth. Mine is to bring wisdom and beauty into the world, through my stories and my experiences. So I have to write, share, talk, speak and show you what I see in the depths of the ocean. What I’ve learned looking into the depths of a thousand pairs of eyes, all hoping to found safe and sound so they can come out from their hiding places.
So today, writer, heal thyself. (speak to yourself firmly and kindly)
Tell the truth of what you see.
Remind yourself of the beauty in the world, the beauty in you.
Remember what you sought in your youth – wisdom, understanding and grace before vanity.
Remind yourself – your natural-born ability to emerge through pain and show beauty to others is your gift, your vocation and offering to the world.
Remind yourself that your heart is bigger than oceans and you fear no feeling.
When waves of unworthiness come, you plant your feet on ocean rocks and bathe until clean.
You rejoice in joy and see that sorrow and joy grow best together.
You are wholehearted like no other, you are a gift for those who need beauty and wisdom in the world.
My whole life, I have thrived in front of an audience. I am a communicator. I have delivered my best work in front of a microphone, in front of an audience and on the published page.
Ask me to write or speak to a room of thousands and I cannot hide the sparkle in my eye. But there is truth in what a wise person once told me – that we craft the skills to communicate well long before we have anything to say. So I spent the last twenty years learning how to say it.
And now I think I have something to say, at last. Several somethings, actually.
Early in life I was labelled a ‘bossy girl’. My mother tells the story of a family friend dragging me home from a playdate exclaiming ‘I will not be told what to do by a five year old!’.
For most of my teens and twenties, I made a reputation for myself as opinionated. I wanted to change the way people think (still do) and therefore think and live differently. The world has a way of disqualifying the young from being able to lead thought revolution. I think it has to do with the idea you have to earn your stripes and pay your dues, both of which really just mean ‘do the time’. Actually I knew who I wanted to be – a person of insight and wisdom and I was practicing my voice, learning how to say what I thought.
Experience ≠ Wisdom
Experience and the sheer passing of time may lead to observational wisdom, the accrual of shared wisdom, but wisdom and insight stands alone. I set out at a young age, inspired by the ancient thinker Solomon, to pursue wisdom. The ability to perceive and understand situations differently. Thinking differently will always lead to living differently.
Being opinionated has led me to broken-ish relationships, getting fired and lots of meetings where I was expected to apologise. Sometimes I did. Sometimes I did not.
My strength has also been one of my greatest insecurities – a fear that if I speak my mind or say the ‘wrong’ thing, I will inevitably push people away or lose those I love. It has terrible implications for my most precious interpersonal relationships when I want to be vulnerable.
But it has also led me to the greatest learning of my life and some of my very best ‘being’.
Being a person who can tell the truth in love when no one wants to hear it. One who sticks it out on the side of the miserable. The one who tackles tough subjects, suggests alternative perspectives and facilitates conversation, not just lectures. And occasionally still the one who digs her heels in to get her way. I have learned when not to say I told you so and when to say it with grace.
The toughness of it – the sheer bloody hard work of this ‘think differently’ life has taught me to be a better communicator, a better writer and a better thinker. You have to learn over and over again how to say what you think and how to think better and better.*
A good friend of mine recently offered some words of encouragement, in her blunt and direct way. “You’re a bit of a powerhouse of opinion. You have insight.”
She also reassured me that giving thoughtful opinion and insight delivered with love isn’t the same as the bossy, stroppy twenty-something girl I fear being known as.
There’s no need to worry so much about whether my opinion or insight is right or wrong, or whether it’s ready to be said. I need to trust my gut more often and listen to my body. Perhaps it is more important that I say it in such a way, my love is unmistakable regardless of whether I’m talking to my friends, my readers or my clients.
In my opinion, with love.
*I am incredibly blessed to have worked with some of the best thinkers I’ve encountered, who have taught me to refine and practice the art of thinking in a variety of contexts. I’m forever grateful and will continue to learn and practice.
Every so often a window blows open in the wind and rain lands in unwelcome places – the fresh laundry pile, the pile of books beside the bed, the pot plant. We shield ourselves from rain in the construction of wood, concrete and glass over our daily lives, but sometimes a crack appears in the ceiling, our umbrellas turn inside out or we get caught by surprise.
We hustle to open our umbrellas while clambering out of cars on our way to the office or the grocery store. We try to avoid the rain, to escape the wet. Why this aversion of skin to rain? Why do we run from it?
There was no shelter on the path I walked home from school and I hated the plastic rain coats we used to wear. Hated them with a passion so during winter and spring, it was nothing to arrive home soaked to the bone. Under the trees of Great South Road I would surrender to the forgone conclusion but I didn’t mind it as much. Damp, uncomfortable wool and polyester of my school uniform clinging to my body, hair at maximum frizz and curl or relented to the weight of the water. Drenched in the rain, I’d strip off and take a warm shower.
Why is water so cleansing and good, so welcome when it flows from pipes and faucets but when water falls from the sky, raw and uncontrolled it makes our skin jump, our shoulders hunch and our faces fall inwards with new wrinkles around the nose and eyes? How can I leap into oceans, rivers and lakes and climb to waterfalls gleefully when I choose to do so but when the water chases me, pouring out of the sky, I flinch?
When I began wearing glasses, I started to flinch from the rain in ways I hadn’t before. Rain can be like tears, hard to see through. Exposes the weakness of my sight. Reveals that clothes are just fabric, susceptible to the elements as we are. I am exposed in the rain.
Is it the control I resist relinquishing? The rain falls without invitation. The intimacy of the raindrop that falls, catching on the skin of my neck, coursing a stream into places unseen? Exposing my vulnerability with the abruptness of the touch that comes without invitation? These questions lead me to ask what I must do to recapture the delight of the child that jumps in puddles.
When I was even younger, a large cyclone bore down on my city and we watched from our classrooms as great grey clouds rolled across the sun. We lost the light into greyness for a week, only knowing the dampness of our toes inside our shoes from the moment we left home. Across puddles and in those uncomfortable jackets, drips escaping down sleeves and soaking into socks we never feared the rain. Even the discomfort of the squelch… it was a joyous delight. I watched the floodwaters in the playground and at intersections on the way home like swimming lakes to be conquered. Rain was an adventure, to see what the weather might do.
One summer camp, we were flooded out by a summer storm. Buses evacuating one thousand teenagers into a local high school and I found myself forming a group of volunteers to load and unload trucks in the storm. Hair plastered against cheek, I felt brave and strong to stand in the rain so, doing what I could to help out.
What changed between then and now? Was it when I started to wear expensive shoes and carry an iPhone in my pocket or when I exchanged my polyester and cotton for finer fabrics? When did I learn to love the sound of rain on the roof and against the window pane, feeling secure and under shelter more than the cool splash of the elements and wind against my skin?
I used to be so raw and unashamed to be exposed. At least, I think that’s how it was. Maybe it’s just I’ve become used to being dry. Maybe I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be exposed to the elements. Maybe you have to? We get so used to waking up in the morning, jumping into routine and the clothes we wear, the roles we play that we need a reminder. We need to be pulled back into the elements from which we come.
We are 90 percent water, after all. Shouldn’t the rain feel like coming home? We spend so much time in our lives looking up and out to find meaning and connection that when the universe comes falling on our sacred skin, comes reaching towards us – we flinch. It’s a touch we’ve forgotten but somewhere, it feels familiar. A memory of the kids we used to be – curious, shameless and delighting in the sensation and freedom of being drenched. Fearless in our vulnerability.
This weekend I spent a lot of time in the rain and let myself relax into it. I didn’t rush out of the falling water. I stood above a waterfall in the rain and let my glasses get misty. I didn’t want to get back in the car. Watching the water cascade over the falls and touch me at the same time, I wanted to be raw and vulnerable again. I wanted to be exposed. Inside, I felt the storm was inside me and the best I could do was surrender to the storm that was falling down on me.
It was gentle. It was momentary. It was happening all around me and I simply had the invitation to be in the midst of it or to run back to shelter. I felt the raindrops that landed on my neck and the dampness of my cheek. I resisted the urge to flinch. I welcomed the rain and it felt like a caress I had been waiting for a long time.
Floodwaters will rage from time to time. Storms will come and rain will fall then sometimes not fall. It’s a rhythm and cycle of how the earth works. Despite our best intentions, our storm water systems, drainage and strong buildings – rain still falls. Sometimes it creeps in through the cracks and sometimes it will be torrent. We build and construct our plans to control the impact of the rain but we cannot make the weather. “Rain, after all, is only rain; it is not bad weather.”
“Rain, after all, is only rain; it is not bad weather. So also, pain is only pain, unless we resist it, when it becomes torment.” – The I Ching
We cry out when dry, thirsty and stricken with drought for the rain to come – when we are ready. We turn and run from floodwaters that expose our weakness and threaten our security. But I would rather be rain-soaked and taken by surprise by the proximity of God, than ever to be dry again. Let it rain.
If theology is a conversation about our ideas of God, then talking about rain is a good place to start. What if we could learn to live in rhythm with the rain? We are meant to live in communion with our environment and each other. To nurture it more than we do and in return, be nurtured by it. The rain is our life-source, after all. We could learn to live around the rain and in the rain, rather than build our palaces to hide us from it.
I have never felt so close to the Universe as under the raw sky in a canvas tent, smelling the rain and dirt as the Earth goes about the business of replenishing and withdrawing from itself. I have had moments of profound aliveness walking through the bush soaked in rain to bathe at the bottom of a waterfall; listening to the birds and forest sing with the life-giving refreshment the rain brings after the heat of a summer day.
If you watch and wait, the clouds will gather and cover the sun. The rain will fall and the earth opens, releasing her fragrance again. Green appears from the dust and the crickets, birds and trees rustle into their songs again as the light emerges from the passing storm. The earth breathes, the water cools and refreshes the land.
That’s the thing about God. Ain’t no bully, despite what some say and demonstrate. God is gracious and gentle. When we flinch, God rarely pushes. I believe it is in the nature of the Universe to be so, allowing us the wilful fortitude of closing the door on unwelcome invasion and waiting for the beauty of invitation. We, yearning for control in a world that seems spinning, so often say no. The universe gently persists and reminds us with a raindrop or two, that our vulnerability is welcome with God.
I didn’t feel very brave. I’d just confessed that I hadn’t done the job I was meant to do and more importantly, why I hadn’t done it. I thought it was morally wrong as well as a waste of time. So I hadn’t done what I’d been asked to do and now I was paying the price for pretending. But I have always been brave in the art of honesty and confessing.
‘Brave would have been saying no and what I thought in the beginning, I think,’ I replied ‘instead of pretending like I was sometime going to get around to it.’
‘Maybe. But it doesn’t change how brave you were in the last five minutes. You just faced it head on. I couldn’t do that, whether I was in the right or the wrong.’
Maybe it was that I thought I had nothing left to lose but she was right, I was brave. I am brave.
Brave is not all of me, but it is a significant part. And when she said it, I recognised myself in a dozen different instances from age 4 to 19 years old. The brave girl who has learned to say what she thinks.
If your True Self is a muscle that flexes at a mere trigger, you feel the energy that displaces as soon as that muscle engages. Recognition. You recognise yourself in the moments you think and act out of your Truest nature. Our most True Self is the one who emerges when we are free to form our own shape instead of pushing ourselves into other shaped boxes.
Important side note: there is a difference between what feels familiar and what we recognise. We are drawn to the familiar because it feels known, we see patterns we know and out of habit, we understand how to respond and operate within that system or construct. Often these patterns of familiarity draw us back towards what has been, rather than what might be.
Recognition is as precise and distinct as a puzzle piece, with only one place that precise shape and colour way can fit. A distinct and necessary part of the puzzle that is you. Your life is the same – the tasks and situations that my hands were made for, where my voice has the most resonance, where my words make sense.
rec·og·ni·tion ˌrekəɡˈniSH(ə)n/ noun
the action or process of recognising or being recognised, in particular. synonyms: identification, recollection, remembrance
identification of a thing or person from previous encounters or knowledge.
acknowledgment of something’s existence, validity, or legality. synonyms: acknowledgement, acceptance, admission
Lately, I’ve been recognising myself again. In moments of a little freedom or when back in wide open spaces – the brave, courageous girl comes rushing back out. I have to be brave again, because being my brave self is key to getting back on the path to my life.
The girl who wants to change the world. She is fully connected to her wisdom and knows that her voice resonates and travels on the wind to the far corners of the earth. She feels the permission of the universe to be Other and her otherness is empowering. She feels engaged to her sensual, epicurean self. She has been leaning into her True Self wherever she recognises her and remarkably, it feels like the world is leaning in towards her too.
I’ve gone on a journey the last few years of trying to follow a script that isn’t my own. Granted, I’ve followed it in my own weird way but here I am, with a list of lessons and skills I’ve learned and an aching heart to get back to being myself.
The Brave within me is relentlessly hammering at the cage of my skeleton, the muscles flexing to make themselves known.. there is more. Not more success or more fame, more fortune (in fact, that is the least likely outcome) but more of ME. There is more of myself waiting to come out and be useful, meaningful and beautiful in the world.
Perhaps it was Mother Superior in The Sound of Music who said it best: ‘You have to live the life you were born to live.’
So I’m listening to myself, recognising the Brave and letting her be, Myself. True Self. Steve Jobs once said ‘Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.’ I think Steve was right. I know who I want to become and I have some ideas about the how and what and the why.
Embracing again, a truth I have always known and recognised a dozen times as it has come to me – I’ll make my own way through this world, not bound to follow a path or a script written by anyone else.
That’s how you know you’re recognising it – because your instinct is to lean into the spaces your True Self fills. And the more of your True Self you lean into, the more of your False Self you fall out of.
That is the life I recognise. The one my heart and intuition knows. Once you begin to recognise yourself and give voice and space to that person, you begin to recognise your life. It happens all at once; a collusion of what is happening within us and around us and all we have to do is pay attention to what we recognise.
My body knows. There are some people I am naturally drawn towards. It’s easy to share affection or to want to be close. There are others I don’t want to touch me at all. My body knows who belongs and who doesn’t and I let my body tell me, all the time. I follow her instincts and she does not let me down.
My heart knows what matters most and if I’m not paying attention, it will bang away inside my heart cage of rib & lung until I listen and spend some time there.
My spirit and soul know when I am my True Self and when I am not. They war against me when I stay too long inside a box that’s not for me. They stretch out for the open spaces constantly. They have been warriors within me and for me these last few years as I have been learning. Now they are clamouring and dragging my attention back to the path.
The body knows. The heart knows. The spirit and the soul knows. Recognition has us instinctively leaning in. Our self whispers ‘more of that, more of that, more of that’.
You recognise your life sometimes before you know you have it; reaching effortlessly for the pieces that belong. The places and the people who fit just so into your puzzle pieces and before you can blink, you are living and fully alive.
That’s how you know you’re recognising it – because your instinct is to lean into the spaces your True Self fills. And the more of your True Self you lean into, the more of your False Self you fall out of.
I have recognised fragments of my life a dozen times over. Places, moments and people who have fit into the puzzle, tasks that have been my truest self, lessons that have refined me not restrained me. I hold on to them, I’ve let them become anchors because I know they fit. I haven’t always known how and I don’t pretend to now. But I know they belong.. I recognise my life when I see it.
There are times I’ve mistaken familiarity for recognition.. but those things have just been a shadow, a watercolour of my true life. I’ve quickly learned to let them go but not without pain. It’s the dream we chase because we know we need to chase it, even though the first, third and fifth attempts might fail. We persevere and strive towards the life we recognise, the one we are writing for ourselves.
So here is the lesson, here is the big Brave of this next step in the journey. Recognising my true life and when I see it, leaning into it.
(the opening image credit belongs to David Hayward, whose art has been a constant companion and source of wisdom in my journey)
“But what if, this time?”, the question echoes in my mind.
The silence in response is the same echoing kind.
I can ask the same question in half a dozen repetitive ways. “Why not, this time, this love, this job, this circumstance?”
I’ve given up on trying to get the question right because I’ve figured out it’s the wrong question to get an answer for. I’m beginning to accept the Universe doesn’t need for me to understand why not, at least not yet. And the day may never come, as so many of us who live with unanswered questions know. If there was an answer to be understood or learned for why my ‘What-Ifs’ have not become ‘What-Is’, I would have found it by now.
I’m not mad about it, just sad about it. It’s Anticipation Sickness, the same illness the ancient prophets and poets wrote of. Hope deferred makes the heart sick but unavoidably, Hope rises and the question, this time just a whisper, echoes again.
“What if, this time?”
An Optimistic Idealist.
We are our own worst enemies at times. A consumption generation collecting toys and experiences, living in a near-constant state of ‘What-Next?’ I, a Futurist and optimistic idealist, am guilty of living always with one eye on the future. It means hope and anticipation of What-Next is constantly simmering away within me, because I wonder if each step is taking me closer to this time, being the exact time my dreams fall within my grasp.
There is a lot of terrible, unhelpful advice available on the subject of dreams.
You have to be bold and grab hold of them. You have to be patient and let them go. You have to make them happen for yourself. Network with people and influencers who will help you. You need pray harder/meditate more / visualise more. Do everything you can do and then do more. If it’s meant to be, it will happen. When you stop trying, that’s when it will happen. Just relax and let it be. Just accept yourself / your circumstance and then you’ll find peace.
I have done all of these things – bought plane tickets and chased my dreams halfway around the world. I’ve done it over and over again. I’ve let it go and let it go again, burning candles and memorabilia. Not just one dream, but several of them. But I’m still left sitting with the question and with that unbearable feeling of Anticipation Sickness welling up within me.
What if, this time? What if I’ve finally learned the lesson that would make me ready, climbed the obstacle that kept me stuck or I’ve become good enough or strong enough or pretty enough. Maybe, finally this mysterious timing and God’s good will has finally caught up with me.
Hope is not a joyful feeling – hope is the gut-wrenching, white-knuckled sigh of the heartbroken, brave and vulnerable to look up, to say ‘Okay, let’s go again.’
A friend said sometimes we are presented with our hope over and over again because in our despair, loss and heartbreak, we learn something we needed to know. She’s right and yes, I have learned deep and good lesson from the heartbreak of hope lost. I know there is truth in that statement but I struggle to accept it as the entire truth – because it doesn’t ring true with my experience. Sometimes all I have learned in the losing is to persevere. But how many times do you need to learn that lesson, before it turns bitter? Surely the Universe has gentler, kinder and more creative ways to teach us that destroying us over and over?
Still, we teach resilience and embrace courage to be vulnerable and to try again, despite our heart-pounding and questions. I am facing my own heart-pounding What-If questions again. Hope comes racing back to the surface and emerges in my late-night sub-conscious, as if the day-dreams weren’t unmanageable enough.
This combination of hope and anxiety can be crippling. And that’s anticipation sickness. Knowing the risk you take to hope at all, knowing what losing hope will feel like, how our way of seeing the world will be again challenged. It’s the fear and anxiety that overshadows joy. Hope is not a joyful feeling – hope is the gut-wrenching, white-knuckled sigh of the heartbroken, brave and vulnerable to look up, to say ‘Okay, let’s go again.’
It’s anxiety in disguise, the kind only known by those who have experienced loss and disappointment. If you have lost hope and yet hoped again, you know what anticipation sickness is. You know the dread feeling of all you might lose again. So it’s hope and heartache all over again and the world clamours at us, with bad advice and little empathy.
It’s lonely, because everyday hopeful circumstances for everyone else , are not that simple or black-and-white for us.
Montaigne sings “Heartbreak / Feels like an old dream / Feels like a demon / I cannot shake him / I’m not afraid to fall / I am still standing here after all / I didn’t die / That’s my consolation prize / I am alive / That’s my consolation prize.”
At times in my life, I have found myself unable to live in my current reality because it felt hollow and empty in comparison to the dream. But the dream is just a possibility. No matter how I reach for it, I cannot touch it or make it a real thing. No matter how I have tried. In my darkest moments, life has felt like a consolation prize, a next-best-option while I wait for the real thing.
Ask A Better Question.
Replace ‘what if?’ with ‘what now?’ and you’ll find a pathway to living in What-Is, the Present.
‘Whatever you have in your hands, that’s your responsibility.’
Nothing more, nothing less. What you have in your hands is now. You cannot hold the past, you only carry the lessons with you today. You cannot hold tomorrow either. What you have is ‘now’. And that is all you need, it’s all you actually have capacity for. Just today. Nothing more, nothing less. That’s what is in your hands.
What-Is stands exacting when What-If is hard to define. My heart, sick yes, with hope deferred and endless wondering of “what if?”, is not so inclined to trust. My disappointed heart is coaxed back to trust again by the experience of the present. I fiercely drag myself back to that brightly-lit day. What now, today?
How To Move Forward The best strategy is just a plan, with a little understanding behind it. I’ve learned a strategy for being present today while moving towards the future is to break everything down into the tiniest steps. Most dreams will take months, years, even decades to eventuate. So when living day to day, it’s easy to feel dejected and that you’re not moving forward at all. But you can take a tiny step in a day. Today, you can do one thing to move you closer to where you want to be. A piece of research, downloading an application form, reaching out to the one you’ve been waiting to hear from. Making the call you don’t want to make.
The Creative Spirit does not jest with us, not once, and understands the fragile human heart. The Universe does not crush our hopes nor tease us without mercy, nor hide themselves from us. We just go looking in the wrong place for God in the future, when God is present in the Now, in the What Is. Present is the only place to find peace in the wake of Anticipation Sickness caused by what we hope for, what we long for, what may yet be.
What-Is is I Am, I Was, is Ever Will Be What-Is the moment and the day, present pressing us closer to the Light revealing masterwork still barely seen, the ripples in each day but at a distance of some What-Was,
the vast, expansive movement of Love is bright. What-Now becomes again joyful, no consolation prize.
I’m coming to the end of the #100days project, which began on August 1, 2016 and will finish on November 8th, 2016. People have been asking, what this project has been about. You’ve seen glimpses.
Here’s an explanation and a question of sorts.
How long does it take to grow? The answer is: forever, like the largest, oldest tree that grows inch by inch into tomorrow.
Live long enough and you will learn there are different ways to grow. Some might grow tall, straight and true towards the sun, unstoppable and with unchanging trajectory. Some still straight but with no idea which way their roots go beneath the soil. Some grow wild and unruly. Some will grow entirely shaped by the elements they face, windswept by westerlies until their canopy echoes the curve of the ridge top. Some will drag life out of stony rockface and make a rambling home there.
But if you have the desire, you can choose the way you grow. You can learn how to learn and how to transform. It’s a strange paradox that transformation is how we get from back to our truest selves after the world has demanded how it wants us to be.
How long does it take to grow? The answer is: no time at all, if you know what you are measuring. I count seasons and especially springtimes, moon cycles and sleepless nights. I know the time it takes to let resilience do its work on the way back from disappointment, I measure the slow creep of desire and how it unravels the truth from us.
How long does it take to grow? The answer is as long as it takes to tell the truth; about yourself to yourself and for yourself.
A gardener can take a bonsai tree and determine the final form it will take. Working with organic growth and guiding it with an artistic eye.
A designer will take elements of shape, weight, colour and purpose and bring these otherwise unrelated ideas together into a single, sometimes multiplying form.
We grow by design, taking lessons intentionally and unintentionally. All growth is transformation but not all transformation takes us back to truth; that finicky balance of awareness and self-awareness. Knowing how the world is around us and how we are in the world.
I began #100days because I was seeking transformation. Having encountered within myself some deep knowledge, an awareness of something underneath the surface of my skin longing to find the light – I had to find a way to guide it out.
So for #100days, I have simply paid attention, observed and written down what I have seen, what I have learned, how I have changed. I have been intentionally focused not on what is outside of me, but what is within me that ought to come out.
It has not been one hundred days of a single activity or focus, like an extended Lent. It has been an exercise in letting my inner self tell a story to my outer self – my soul compelling my mind to listen. Because we must learn how to learn and keep learning even when we are in the midst of a repeating machine. There is something in our souls that longs to reach up to the sun and something in our roots that calls for deeper earth.
The heart can be deceitful in many things and your mind will overwhelm you with anxiety if you let it run free. But if I let my soul speak, that which searches out meaning in the world and listens to both heart and mind – I find my way to transformation.
It is Day Ninety. Today I am noticing how much changes in a year, just by opening your life to new experiences. What new bravery I have discovered within myself and what a beautiful new nuance to my voice, even if I alone appreciate it.
The hardest parts of labour are the moments immediately before birth. The last few days have been hard. These snippets of storytelling have encountered moments of joy, hope, sadness, journey, gratitude and mystery – I have measured my growth in the ability to notice and pay attention to the greater story being told around me.
I wanted to share it, because I wanted to see if I could observe and learn something inspiring or hopeful or useful every day. Here’s to your companionship on the journey with me and to whatever is growing and transforming within you.
Tash McGill is a broadcaster, writer and strategist who works with people and organisations to solve problems and create transformation. She believes people are the most important thing and that stories are powerful ways of changing the world. You can find out more at tashmcgill.com or by visiting her LinkedIn profile.
