After an intense period of endless activity, travel for work, and summer coming and going without an opportunity to blink, I started to feel like I’ve been “stuck” – How can I untie my lines if I’m stuck?? How can I balance this intense desire to set my own course and captain my own ship if I’m plastered to the planner and my computer screen, an airplane seat and the seat of my mom car that has become the only place I can:
- Get a good meal from a stranger through my car window (oh, how I LOVE hot fries!)
- Have a meaningful conversation with my children
- Find time to call my parents
- Therapeutically sing at the top of my lungs
- Cry the tears that only happen when you are alone with yourself
- Get intel about the social plight of teenage girls when the car is full and they forget I’m there
- Make the plans to fix the things that I forget by the time I get home
Sometimes I wonder if I end up busy because I actually am too scared, intimidated, self-conscious, boring, *insert other self-deprecating thing here*, to actually pursue the things that untie me from the shackles of making money for someone else. But it’s not true. Because we ARE busy. Well, if you have kids, you ARE busy – if you are pursuing a career, you ARE busy – if you are trying to check all the boxes instilled by our culture (bigger couch, better clothes, the right gadgets), you ARE busy. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t making progress.
Progress is not linear. I was reflecting on the last couple of years this morning and was noticing how it felt like I was roller-coaster’ing my way through life. I picked myself up over and over and over again and didn’t give up. And then I gave up over and over and over again. And then picked myself back up. So, I went back and read my own words from this point one year ago and two years ago. And I was shocked to see what I found. Last year, I was getting deposed by my ex-husband’s attorney after the sudden death of my step-dad. Two years ago, I was trying to figure out the meaning of being an “adult” – I actually did internet research to figure out how to become an adult. After years of being in an emotionally abusive relationship, I was realizing I didn’t have the basic skills for primitive functioning.
Ok, so maybe this seems dramatic – but wow. I was finding myself in this frustrated stuckedy place. And turns out, each time I gave up…and picked myself back up…and then hit a wall…and dragged myself back to bare minimum operations (which felt like the hardest work EVER) – I realized that each of those swings resulted in my coming back somewhat more progressed than the time before. My improvement looked like a classic line graph from middle school:
And that’s progress –and when we are in it, we don’t see it as progress without the perspective of thinking about where we have been. Definition of perspective:
“the capacity to view things in their true relations or relative importance”
Interesting that we simply need the capacity to view things in relative importance. Line the things all up together and view them. See yourself making progress. We are never actually “stuck”, we are growing.
From the encyclopedia on the process of growth:
“Growth is seldom random. Rather, it occurs according to a plan that eventually determines the size and shape of the individual. Growth may be restricted to special regions of the organism, such as the layers of cells that divide and increase in size near the tip of the plant shoot. Or the cells engaged in growth may be widely distributed throughout the body of the organism, as in the human embryo.”
Growth happens in the right region at the right time. Sometimes there may be widely distributed growth that can be felt by the entire organism. Sometimes, it’s restricted to a special region. Stuck periods mean that growth is happening in a special region. We all simply need to trust our growth patterns to know what needs growth when.