Dancing Geek

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?

Today was pretty damn good.

Today I was in the flow.

I’d struggle to tell you any of what I wrote about without checking my writing, but for the first time that I can remember I feel like I really started to get a grip around how this writing lark will work for me.  I’ve spent so long just writing and coming up with various bits of gunk and bleurgh and yuck but today it felt like it flowed.

It made sense, it sprouted more thoughts, it made me go look up interesting facts in books I had read and then read a bit more of the book and understand a bit more of the book.  Insights rolled onto the page, patterns were found and laid out bare for inspection.

I don’t have anything in particular to show for it, not a finished project or piece of work, rather I have a sense of progression, of moving forward.  This, for me, is huge.  Having normally measured my progress according to boxes ticked and to-do items done, it was amazing to spend hours concentrating on something constructive but not necessarily productive.

I feel clear, fresh, like flowing water.  I feel like I managed to let go for a while, to float down the river and move forward in my crazy, haphazard, bouncy journey without needing to have a goal or endpoint set, but rather in the joy of the journey.

I captured lots of useful thoughts and insights to keep me going on my ever-changing path.  (So I guess I do have something to show for it, but they’re the jewels found along the road rather than the ever retreating prizes at the end of the path).

I’m not sure what it all means but I know that I liked it and I’m going to try and do it again.

I’d like to put some stuff together to share, but there’s no promises; as selfish as it may sound, this stuff is for me and until I get to a place where I’m stable enough to work from it has to stay that way.  Once I learn how to swim in this river then it’ll be a whole different game.

So passion seems to be the theme of choice at the moment.

Passion confession

I ended up admitting that mine would be dance, specifically contact improv.  Only I hesitated to say it, and I hesitated to acknowledge it.  Now, I thought I was avoiding it because I had some basic ‘fear of success/fear of failure’ type thing going on with it, only in truth I know that’s a pile of bull.  I know I can do it (it’s one of the things the group I’m in do best) and I know I enjoy it.

So I had a think about why it is that I’ve been avoiding it and I suddenly realised that I was shoulding myself.  The voice in my head was going something like this: “if it’s a passion you should be wanting to do it all the time, you’ll have to do it every day and travel all over to get more of it”.  Now I don’t know about you, but that sounds more like an addiction than passion, and it certainly wasn’t attracting me to the idea.

Today I worked out that it was because of this quiet little voice (you know, the kind you don’t hear out loud until you start doing things like Shiva Nata) that I had been worried, and that actually, when I think about it, all I need to do is look to make sure that I’m getting some contact improv in my life – as much or as little as I want.

So I’m going to chat with my dance buddies and see what happens.  We meet on Mondays, so feel free to call me on it after that

I’m allowed to have more than one

My other passion would be self-growth.  This is the one that more closely fits the “whatever I’m doing I’ve got to get me some of this” type of description.  Though again, it’s less of a craving and more of a drive.

Another should warning

Now, the whole “What is your passion?” question (which should really be ‘What are your passions?’) first got on my radar because I was looking at what my perfect job would be.  And so I’ve got in my head a line of thought that goes: Work out your passions – Practice them to get good at them – Go make money at it.

This would be another should however.  I don’t have to do that at all.  It’s simply a shorthanded way of saying that if I practice what I enjoy so that it becomes a marketable skill then I could paid to do something I love.  That’s too far down the road to know what’s going to happen however, in this crazy, churned up, constantly changing world, so for now I drop my shoulds and simply state an intention: to keep living my passions.