On Becoming (Or: Man, It’s Dark in Here)

I was at yoga Sunday, lying on my mat for the final pose.

The one where you lie, still and unmoving, like a dead person.

Corpse pose, they call it.

My teacher read a poem from Wendell Berry.

And I started to cry, just a little bit.

Does this ever happen to you?

Where words just hit you, right between the eyes.

Right above your the ribs, smack dab in the center of your sternum?

Side bar: I was recently interviewed about what it’s like to do the thing you aren’t even sure you can do.

I told the story of leading a bike trip in my early twenties. I got hired to ride bikes 1,500 miles from London to Rome. Across the Alps. With 12 teenagers.

Before that, the longest I’d ever been on a bike was 3 hours.

I didn’t even know that biking through the Alps for 14 hours a day was possible…  until I did it.

Sure, it rained every day in July in northern France. Sure, I got hypothermic on a massive Alpine descent, my brain so slow I was nearly idiotic and incapable of making decisions. Sure, I took a fall on the road down into Nice, and went over the handlebars and nearly got flattened by a delivery van.

That’s beside the point.

The point is: Things that are worth doing tend to strike us as inconceivable.

It’s not even that we think they are impossible.

It’s that we don’t even know how to imagine them.

The older I get, the more I have been trained to look for these dark areas in my own imagination.

And to not confuse them with The Way Things Are.

Side bar: when I started my business, it was difficult to imagine making more than $15,000 a year from it. When I imagined making $50,000 in my business, I pictured a school bus on a freeway. When I imagined making $150,000 in my business, the wheels fell off the bus, it burst into flames, and then everything went black.

Imaginations need exercise or they get out of shape, too.

Getting back to the interview. I told the interviewer I have this game I play with myself. When I am considering what to do next, and weighing my options, I ask myself, “which one feels dead? Which one feels alive?”

When I sit in the darkness, unsure of where I will go next, I play this game.

It’s like busting out a compass.

My colleague and friend Katie, a certified Martha Beck coach, taught me a similar question she uses with her clients: “Does this choice make you feel more free, or less?” She calls it shackles on, shackles off.

Does this option make you feel more free, or less?

Lately, I have been experimenting with trusting my own inner navigational system.

I find myself asking the dead or alive question a lot.

So far, so good.

I will admit to sitting at the coffee shop two Sundays ago, planning out the next year for the business with my eyes closed.

There I was. Laptop fired up. Big sketch journal open. Chai steaming.

Dressed for yoga, opening and closing my eyes, then scrawling down notes like I was taking dictation from my secret boss. There may have been some deep breathing involved.

When I opened my eyes, there was a guy watching me.

Because it’s a bit weird, to be in a public place, listening to yourself, right?

Yep.

Pretty weird. And pretty awesome.

Writes Wendell Berry:

It may be that when we no longer know what to do

we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go

we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Looking back, I consider this year one of Becoming. I paid off $25,000 in business debt. I got my business profitable and set course so it continues to support me for another 20 years. I set up – and funded — a 401K.

This used to be inconceivable to me.

Sure, I’ve had a client tear me a new one when I fired her. Sure, there have been times I couldn’t pay myself because my expenses outstripped my earnings and I had no cash reserves. Sure, I hired an assistant who didn’t have a Facebook account, took notes in pencil, didn’t own a smart phone, and wanted, at the end of her first week, to sit on my couch and talk about our feelings (I told her was sorry and didn’t think it was working out 4 days later).

That’s beside the point.

The point is: In business as in long distance cycling, there are things we cannot dream of, until we do them.

So, go do them. And may you astound yourself with what you discover can be done, by the everyday magic of getting out there and doing it.

 

 

Mighty thanks to Jan Faborsky via Flickr for “Contemplation – Dartmoor, Devon”