Planning

Apparently, I plan.  Now this may not be a big shock to anyone who’s actually read my blog but it is a surprise to me, the guy who wrote it.  Or rather, the fact that my planning is the busywork I’m doing to avoid the big scary thing.

The big scary

Sometimes you get a feeling of what your stuckness is as a physical object, e.g. a small hard ball, a sticky mess or a sharp box that might live in your chest say.  Mine is big.  Mine is so big that it isn’t in me, I’m in it.  Mine is the size of space.  And I’m floating around in it with nothing to aim at but a random sea of twinkling stars, massively far away and completely surrounding me.

I don’t know where to go next, I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing.

This one is the one that’s had me frantically doing (or rather frantically reading about doing) for so many months now.  I have learnt a lot about myself and the world in that time, met some great people and started to think about my journey for the first time, but I’m still left with the big black space all around me.

In fact, a lot of the busy work was building a nice safe space around me so that I didn’t feel like I was quite so lost at sea.  But the same urge that got me to break free of my job and start looking is causing me to break down the walls of this space as I build them.  I could keep going at that for a loooong time, but I know that it’s rather silly and so I’m putting down the trowel, leaving everything as it is, and sitting down for a bit.

What do you do when you don’t know what to do?

Do nothing.

Yeah, I know.  Durrrrrrr.  But the point about a realisation is that it takes something that you may understand intellectually and makes it visceral.  (Or maybe that’s just all the Dim Sum I ate this afternoon with Joely that I can feel).

As we talked last night, I described my space as having no air, I couldn’t breath.  But it turns out that I was just holding my breath.  In fact, if I let the weird sensation of no sense of scale pass (like when the TV suddenly seem really close or really far away after you’ve been starting at it for too long and lost all reference points) and relax then I realise that I can move around at will, turn all around (“rotations in multidimensional space”!) or just float there without any effort.  Suddenly it’s starting to feel more like a playground.

Reality

Enough analogies, as much as I like them they aren’t the real world (a bit like twitter, for the good stuff to happen you eventually have to do something in real life even if still at a distance).

So what does this mean IRL?  Well, as I said above: Do nothing.  Or more specifically, stop planning.

It’s tricky, because some stuff requires planning (like making sure I pay the right tax) but some stuff doesn’t and I’m determined to make the effort to remember which is which.  It’ll be hard and I’ll muck up, so I’m hoping that anyone reading my posts in the future will call me on it if they see it.

I have an idea around giving myself a structure for writing – but only as a reminder to stay open.  No theorising, no structures, no hypotheses, no patterns.

FYI it actually hurts to write that.

Questions

I like questions.  Questions are supremely better than answers.  So I’m coming up with some questions to ask myself each moment that I bring my awareness back to them, and then to listen for the answers with curiosity but not expectation.

I wonder what’s going to happen next?

Want to see more? Try one of these posts:

• Following a thread as far as I can
• A pile of yuck I’ve been ignoring
• Too fast to write about it