If it feels like turmoil is roiling in every corner and the weight of the unknown is beginning to sink a little too far under your skin, you are not alone. You are not alone in the world—this era feels like that to most of us—and you are not alone within yourself—this is an opportunity to reconnect with the creativity in your mind that thrives in chaos, in a way that can be delightfully invigorating. Let’s journey together for a moment.
Where we had thought to travel outwards
we shall come to the center of our own existence
And what we had thought to be alone
we shall be with all the world.
Everyone I know is feeling a tad adrift right now. Struggling to stumble across the finish line, wrap their arms around a personal matter, articulate the messaging that represents the evolved version of their offer and them, and/or get their launch off the ground.
It is as if we are all in a state of suspended animation. Neither here nor there. It is equal parts disquieting and frustrating.
We are witnessing things fall apart on global and local stages. And that atomization seems to mirror our own dissolving into a new becoming.
This odd weigh station can foster a wild romp of self-questioning: Am I doing or saying the right things? Is my strategic path properly mapped? Have I missed something? Why do I not trust myself?
In this terrible taffy of stuckness, we can lose sight of the stars overhead and refuse to consult our nautical maps of creativity. We just want it solved.
An excerpt from my book, Buoyant: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Becoming Wildly Successful, Creative, and Free:
“Our inability to tolerate uncertainty makes us frightened of our creativity. We worry that we don’t know how to do it. That we don’t know how our work, our voyage, is going to turn out. How good it will be. How successful it will be. Happily, none of those things matter!
What does matter is our willingness….
We are like an awe-inspiring Moroccan bazaar: if we let ourselves get lost among the colorful and seemingly impossible-to-navigate stalls, we can notice the colors, patterns, and textures of the fabrics that live on tightly bound rolls stashed inside of us. Bright, varied as countries, with their own languages and colors and music.
The decorum of truth-telling demands we abandon our carefully planned itineraries and leave them in a trash bin by the city’s edge. We can learn that the map we’ve been following is a fool’s errand. The hills that move farther away with our every advance are mirages built upon the sands of what everyone says we must do. There is no music or comfort there.
Let’s all dig deep for what we truly want to represent us to those who need to hear it most. Don’t turn your shoulders away and think the moment cannot be calling you. It is calling you.”
In times of stress, we will reach for certainty, closure. We want to douse the flames of not knowing and stop the whirling thoughts, reams upon reams of paperless self-doubt.
But as we flail and grasp in a panic for the rope of surety, we can lose the clarity and truth of staying longer in the chaos of uncertainty.
The answers we are desperate for lie within us. We crack our hardened shells open and pry out rich guidance by doing what feels irrelevant, childish, and a waste of time…we play. We do what brings us alive.
We stop resisting what is by taking ourselves on a walk, looking for Beauty everywhere. We gift ourselves a nap. We walk through the well-lit galleries of a museum and gaze upon color and contrast. We sit in a cafe with our favorite books and beverages. We journal where we are afraid, lowering the temperature of our feverish foreheads.
By doing these things that seem so counter to our hard-charging and judging pre-frontal cortexes, we find our way, intuitive hit by intuitive hit. The path is not linear, nor should we wish for it to be.
There are discoveries around every unseen corner that will make the simmering sauce we are tending much more rich, sublime. Discoveries that will taste of the sweetness of truth.
Truth that simultaneously sets us free as well as those we long to reach.
