Lightning: When There Is No Resistence Between What You Want and What You Have.
Life on the ranch, waiting for our friend Andrew Delaney to perform. Photo by Julia Balinsky.
Lightning. In the sky, between us, among us. The particular electricity you feel when there is no resistence between what you want and what you have.
When that happens, there's only one thing you can do.
Surrender.
There is a fine line between surrendering your goals and giving up on them.
Both mean letting go.
There is a moment when, before you let go, you don't know which one you are doing.
These past weeks of endeavoring to put first things first grew from a recognition that, if the path to joy was a river, mine was starting to run dry.
My joy was coming from getting things done, rather than from doing them.
The thing about getting things done is, you never CAN be done.
You have temporary moments of joy, which are too soon encroached upon by the need to get more things done.
And to get things done, I was neglecting what would fill me with joy in the long term.
Exercise. Slow eating. Belly laughs, which require lingering in a moment long enough to see what is funny about it, rather than rushing from one to the next to "get things done."
Like this:
This week has been an exercise in surrender.
Reversing the course of the river away from finding joy in the accomplishment of tasks and towards experiencing joy again in the actual endeavor.
I don't remember letting go, when I stopped trying to hold on to putting first things first, but I do remember feeling like "Uh oh, am I doing this right?" just before I did it.
From this vantage, that was the moment I actually did it.
Memo to future self: the state of absolute unknowing means you're doing it right.
And I am starting to feel the effects of opening the trade routes with joy. See below.
Shout out to our beloved Kerrville friends and longstanding Haiku Milieuvians, Julia and Andy Balinsky
