Sometimes doing nothing is the most efficient thing that you can do - and the most terrifying.
Today I am dragging my feet. It takes me too long to get my eyes in front of the computer and I struggle
to do the work. I don't feel like putting words on a page. I don't feel like responding to my LinkedIn posts or responding to the email. I don't feel like getting to the proposals or the mountain of paper to dos.
I know all the things that I am supposed to do. Move. Go for a walk. Interrupt my pattern. Put a timer on. Do one thing. But today, none of it works.
I am just not there.
There are days where doing the work will feel impossible. What should you do when this happens to you? What do I do when this happens to me?
Today, I succumb to the nothing. I give up. I drop down and I pause. I put some trust in my spiritual director, who suggests that my current mind set is possibly not just laziness or a brain freeze but an opportunity. "This is not a limited life" she says. She describes the image of the bank of a river being a requirement for the river to hold its power. Without containment, the water would spread everywhere.
So today, instead of fighting my resistance to work, I drop down and breathe into it.
And today, I invite you all to do this work with me. My energy and my desire have restricted me, contained me. Just like the river bank, my containment is asking me to deepen something else. I am not sure what it is, just that, in this moment, I have resigned myself to the pause, to my growing desire to slow down.
I have been here before. As I get older, these requests for 'a break' get a little scarier as I am unsure if I will ever return to productivity. Sometimes doing nothing is the most efficient thing that you can do - and the most terrifying.
And here I am, trusting that the restriction will deepen the river, sitting in that space between the now and the not yet without an answer.
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