Just shy of its 8th anniversary, I almost shut this blog down. For the second year in a row, the website renewal notice popped up in my Inbox and I thought, “I haven’t published in months. All my creative energy is tied up in my job. I’ve got nothing new to say. And no one’s listening anyway.”
But here’s the thing I’d forgotten about the still, small voice: It doesn’t care about any of that stuff. As I put the final touches on a farewell e-news, it was suddenly there – calmly spreading through my psyche like warm honey. It didn’t seem to care much whether I was saying “hello” or “goodbye”, it just sighed luxuriously that I was saying anything at all.
It wasn’t until the countdown began to 9 am, Thursday when the email was scheduled to send that the grief started. Grief itself isn’t a sign that what we’re doing isn’t right. There’s plenty of grief leaving a job, home, or relationship whose time has come. But as this grief gathered momentum, it sank deeper, down into the bones I had forgotten were holding me up all those years. There it landed on the stone bedrock I’d forgotten was missing all those months I slowly drifted once again toward hollow comforts, feeling just barely nourished.
Hours after writing to all of you that these seven plus long years of transition haven’t taught me anything about who I am or what I’m for, I realized I was wrong. I haven’t had a burning-bush spiritual calling or a joyful, soul-inspired career arise. But contemplating bringing all of this to a close showed me I may have received something even better. I’ve recognized one thing that’s endured in me through thick and thin, one thing whose neglect leaves a god-sized hole in my life: writing to you.
There are as many ways to be a writer as there are human beings. I see how trying to write in a particular way for a specific goal strangled my throat so the wild thing in my belly could no longer be heard. There were good reasons for that. I was listening to people who made a living off this so I might have more time and space to write. I was listening to people who were concerned my words were too raw and intimate and may put me in danger. I was listening to a lot of ideas in my head about what would be really satisfying, inspiring, and valuable to share.
But I wasn’t listening to the voice itself – the one I need to hear. The one that perhaps you might need to hear too. The voice that told me not to study journalism, not to seek publication, because it had a particular rhyme and meter to express, a particular way of weaving that needed the freedom to be raw and unpolished.
I won’t be a parent in this lifetime. But I’ve been shown a little of what it might be like to have something wild and beautiful entrusted to my care, something that is often inconvenient, mischievous, and definitely willful, but something that will move and astound me every day if I let go of the idea that my job is to control it. I could try, but it wouldn’t be alive. Not really. It might be well-mannered and make me proud, but it wouldn’t be sacred or precious. It wouldn’t teach me humility or faith, or that pesky on-going lesson of acceptance that allows us to truly love.
Being a manager has been showing me a similar truth: acceptance is key to the well-being of any living thing. Criticism and punishment, even when delivered gently for their intended benefit, only breed fear and rebellion that compromise harmony and creativity. They exhaust me and suffocate the life out of the team. If I have to let go of productivity, of serenity, of my image to provide space for growth, then that is the right path. For space is what is needed for living things to express, experiment, and unfold in their own time and knowing. It may be irritating and inefficient more often than it is joyful and inspired, but I believe what all organizations most need are living, breathing human beings, because the world is and will be not worth living in without our humanity.
Having a wild thing in our care teaches us what love really is: the capacity to accept something’s imperfection, its aliveness and fullness beyond what we expect or need from it. It’s letting something fully express and actualize, and standing beside it whether or not we approve of the process or even recoil from it. And what enables us to do so is knowing it is ours.
How many people have I walked away from because they felt – even on a subtle level – like a threat to something sacred to me: my safety, my values, my serenity, my reputation, my self-actualization? How many homes and communities have I left because they just weren’t right? How much have I judged, pressured, ostracized those less palatable parts of myself into something I believe is more starched and presentable, only to find myself alone and almost unrelatable.
“More, better, bigger, different” is seductive for the ego, but poison for love, the love that whispers in our hearts, “I don’t know what the hell is going on, but I know that you’re mine. You’re my person, my place, my job to do. I can let you be messy. I can let you be alive. I can trust you’ll muddle through just the way I do. I just want to be there with you.”
I want to be here with you. I want to remember – or perhaps learn for the first time – how to let you and I both be what we are without fear. I want to give this voice the one thing its always wanted: to be free. To sigh and shout and weep and rage without worrying about fulfilling my expectations. I want to really learn what it means to give what is alive all the space it needs to be free.
Today, I may just walk into the office for the first time in months without feeling afraid. I don’t have to fear the chaos. I don’t have to feel smothered. I don’t have to feel like failing to turn them all into upright citizens with rosy smiles and neatly-combed hair. I can give them space to express and explore, I can trust their process of unfolding. Because I trust my own. And because in so doing, the foundation I’ve been seeking to build is already beneath me.
It doesn’t matter if my words change anyone. It doesn’t even matter if anyone reads them. Because bringing them forth changes me. It affirms an essential aspect of my nature. It teaches me what it is like to be in genuine partnership with the unruly, vibrant chaos of life. It enables me to walk into the world in a way that allows everything to unfold because I know each of us is deeply accompanied in our endless process of becoming.
Nancy
I read your words. Thank you for sharing again.
Thank you so much for letting me know, Vlad. I feel heard!