Reaching for Unknown Destinations
Last week, Rebecca wrote about getting on our Growth Edges. (If you missed it, you can read it here.)
This week, I write to you from that razor’s edge: Where the road you came in on meets the road you’re about to take into the future.
Hello, you.
One of the themes that comes up rather frequently in the consulting work that Rebecca and I do with clients is “grounded expansion.”
By expansion, we mean that you are looking to expand your work in the world, or perhaps deepen it, or make it richer, or shore it up, or make it more robust. (Sometimes, it can also look like pruning what you’ve outgrown – cutting away that which is not the fullest expression of that work so that what remains is even stronger and more vital. Like deadheading flowers or cutting scapes off garlic to make the bulbs grow bigger.)
And by grounded, we mean that acknowledging and sitting in deep appreciation of your own journey has a way of rooting you into presence and new possibilities. Which, it also should be said, that those who just keep achieving-achieving-achieving or pursuing-pursuing-pursuing simply won’t ever be able to access.
On a personal note, I’ve always been one called to expand what’s possible, both for myself and for the people with whom I’m in cahoots.
I’m also one who’s decided to make a habit of what artist Cassandra Ott LINK TO: https://www.cassandraott.com/calls “investing energy with unknown destinations.”
In the salad days of my youth, I sought romance with people who were very different from me and one another. I travelled to the most remote and faraway places. My first job out of college took me to Japan, where I didn’t speak the language and knew no one.
I left a stable job at a prestigious law firm to become a wilderness guide, taking teenagers into the backcountry when I didn’t really know how to light a camp stove. I ended up leading long distance cycling trips across continental Europe and the U.S. even through the first time I got on my bike, I didn’t know how to clip out of the pedals and fell over at the first stop sign.
I turned down an offer to assume the Executive Directorship of a vibrant arts center in a resort town in Montana to move to Miami to see about a new relationship (with no job, and no local contacts).
I mention all this to underscore the lengths someone like me is willing to go to live on her growing edge.
Through it all, I never made these decisions with complete certainty about how things would, ultimately, turn out.
And truth be told, while many of the things that matter most to me now arose from these gambits (to wit: the deep connection I have with Japan, the marriage and business that came from that ill-advised move to Miami, the kids that came from improbable IVF success, the extended family who moved from Taiwan to our house last year to help us raise said kids), some of them didn’t always bear fruit.
The nineteen hours it took to fly from my house to a business event in the Philippines in the hopes of sparking new relationships with great clients and collaborators.
The tens of thousands of dollars I spent on specialists and social media ads in 2017.
The tens of thousands of dollars I spent on sponsorships and speaking spots at coaching events.
When I was a classroom teacher, what is beginning to feel like several lifetimes ago, I hung a quote from Miles Davis at the front of the room:
“When you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note that makes it good or bad.”
And from this spot, as someone who has been practicing how to appreciate all the notes – and the silence of the rests – in the song that I believe we’re each singing with our lives (and through our businesses and work in the world), I also hear him when he said:
“Man, sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.”
