I’ve been staying in the remote redwoods and rugged shoreline of California’s Lost Coast for nearly a month. It took three whole weeks for my mind, body, and psyche to downshift and find a more resonant attunement with the natural world. It took three whole weeks for me to finally opt to be quiet in order to hear, rather than bombard myself with habitual patterns of podcast-listening, task-mastering, weather-checking, and daily self-tracking and strategizing.
I came here wanting to listen in deeply. But I also came here cloaked in the sediments of my daily impulses, sensory habituations, and patterns of avoidance that are thoroughly ingrained in my approach to daily life. So at first I used those strategies in order to create an experience of listening deeply. Ridiculous, I know. But it wasn’t conscious. You can’t craft a soulful experience, yet we all lean on our most comfortable behaviors and strategies to try to generate something magical and different.
That’s why vacations and travel can end up feeling like an extension of your burnout instead of renewal. We have to be willing to put down the entire schtick.
So then I decided to let go of the “image” or “ideal” of what I came here searching for. I let it be enough that I was here, able to walk my dog off-leash and be outside in the cool air. I tended to work, to clients, to my dissertation. I settled in.
In my third week, I began to hear a message:
Make a new choice and the pathway will appear.
And when I began to follow my senses more honestly . . .
When I turned off the favorite podcast because it needled my nervous system. When I dropped my meditation mantra because it filled my head with too much noise. When I took slow gentle walks because my body and my dog really didn’t want any more than that. When I followed the tides instead of my schedule.
. . . I started to hear what this message really meant . . .
It asks that we periodically interrupt the impulses toward sameness and familiarity. These things are comfortable but that does not make them helpful or good.
Make a different choice and the new path will be revealed.
If life is asking you to shift your way of being, your sense of meaning, your purpose, or if you find yourself encountering new desires, and new images of how your life might be, it might feel extraordinarily daunting to jump tracks and access something so Other. You might then double-down on your habits. I know I have, until that program became so grating on my psyche that I finally found the willingness to shift.
You do not need to know the way, or how, or what the path even looks like. Just make a new decision, take a different action. Assert your will or desire in a new way.
This is not a big life choice. This is one small act, or better yet, a series of small acts that follow a different impulse or instinct. Even if you think those habitual impulses are “good for you.”
No planning. No strategizing required.
Just one small inciting movement, and then another.
This is the creative way. It starts with only the beginning in mind.
So much of what we have been told about how to build a life starts with the end in mind (retirement, marriage, house on the hill). But who are we to know that much about the future? Immediately, the crushing limitations and booby-traps of that kind of thinking and that approach to living become clear. How many times have I been asked what I’m going to do with my Ph.D? How should I know precisely? I just knew it was the right new action to take. If I get wrapped up in the end of this process, I cannot tend to where it might lead, who I might serve, how my work might evolve.
But if you begin with only the beginning in mind—one small act of newness—abundant possibility is unlocked. You’ll touch upon the potential to live with a receptive, rather than a deterministic, attitude.
Begin with the beginning in mind.
Even at mid-life. Especially then. Make a new choice, one small act, and the pathway(s) will appear.
I mean, who titles a memoir before the life has been lived? The end is not where the beginning starts.
Through one small act of newness you might learn about your greatest potential, you might discover your real gifts. But not a moment before.
I always imagined my superpowers to be strategy and problem solving. But when I begin with the beginning, I find vulnerability, deep intuition, and artistry instead. One is learned, the other is a gift to the world. One is for my survival, the other is for the benefit of all. Be willing to be someone you think you aren’t, or aren’t capable of being, and you’ll find your one small inciting act.
Begin with the beginning in mind.
And then you’ll be able to embody the difference between discipline (the act of devotion, listening, showing up) and habituation (the adherence to patterns and programs).
With deep humanity,
Erika
PS: In case you missed it, I’ve opened up a few 45-minute spot-coaching sessions each week to support you around anything timely or pressing. Take advantage of this no-commitment way of working together: Book a time here, or gift to a friend or colleague.
