October | 2017 | the artist's nest

Happy Halloween!

If you’ve been a reader of The Artist’s Nest for a while, you know what a proponent I am of morning rituals and particularly my morning walk for its seemingly magical “problem-solving properties.”

On a particular day last week, though, my walk wasn’t helping. Not at all. I kept passing gorgeous ombré leaf colors and feeling nothing but overwhelm and stress.

I’d been realizing for a while that I was attempting to take on too much — too many projects, too many groups — and my energy felt scattered, my focus thin. I’d temporarily forgotten about “less is more” — the intention I set quite a while back.

I was feeling especially pained about this ongoing question (which has actually become a kind of meditation for me): How can I show up and be of service in this world and also take good and loving care of myself? How can it be both/and? (Because I truly believe it can be — a topic for another post!)

And then, in the distance, a new direction caught my eye. I mean, a new direction I could walk in, an area of my neighborhood I don’t usually traverse because it’s “out of my way.”

I felt a little intuitive nudge: Walk that way. Go over there.

Nah, I said back to this subtle prompting. If I walk over there, it will take me twenty minutes longer to get home, and my day will get started twenty minutes later.

The nudge repeated: Walk that way.

So I did. (I’ve found it’s more fruitful in the long-term to follow these intuitive nudges without a lot of questioning.)

Walking in that less familiar direction, I passed an enormous maple tree next to a vet’s office. The leaves were these unbelievable fire-red and pumpkin-orange colors. I honestly had never noticed this tree before.

Rounding a corner further on, I came across a side street I was not familiar with, even though I’ve lived in this general area for many years. I strained to find a street sign but couldn’t. I walked down it, and something caught my eye on the other side of the street — a calico cat, crouched on an outdoor window will, soaking in sun.

I looked down at the sidewalk and realized my feet were surrounded by red-yellow leaves the color of honeycrisp apples.

Crossing the street, I passed a woman wheeling a baby in a stroller. She parked it in front of a giant inflatable spider crowded into someone’s tiny front yard. The baby let out squeals of delight and pointed. As I walked by, the baby turned and pointed at me, and let out another squeal of pure joy! (Me? Prompting joy in a baby? Or was this baby just so full-to-bursting of pure joy so that it bubbled over onto me?)

Around the next corner, I saw a long-haired black cat crossing the cobblestone street, rustling leaves under its swift feet. The cat disappeared into a bush. When I caught up to it, I saw it sitting in a concrete path along the side of a house, and a few yards beyond it, further back into the yard, another black cat, like its distant reflection.

I felt like these cats were a Halloween gift to me.

***

As I made my way home, my energy had shifted significantly.

My life still contained all the same circumstances, but my mind was no longer perceiving them as “problems.” There was a spaciousness around them — and around me.

I felt at once smaller and larger: connected to something greater than my own self and my own problems, and at the same time, way more capable of handling the issues in my life than I had been giving myself credit for.

What I took away from this particular walk:

• Intuitive nudges are there for a reason. But we often don’t know the reason until we follow them. They need to be trusted.

• Breaking out of my “regular walking routine” helped me view my life — and the world — with fresh eyes. And yes, this happened right in my own neighborhood. I didn’t need to travel far away to do it.

• There were unknown pleasures (Joy Division, anyone?) on this less-traveled path to which my intuition pointed.

• My intuition pointed me not toward a “solution”, but toward the present moment — which provided spaciousness, which pointed me to the solution. As soon as I got home, I realized I was clear on the two projects I want to focus on (the others can go “below deck” for now).

My intuition also connected me to two words, in regard to my challenges with balancing self-care and showing up in the world as it is right now: kindness and openness. Kindness toward my stumbling along imperfectly, and openness to how all this might look, for me and for others.

How might you bring the gifts of spaciousness and presence to your day today? How might we, together, bring these gifts into the world, and notice how powerfully they already exist in our world? I’d love to hear from you. (And, of course, Happy Halloween!)

A couple of announcements:

• My specially-priced Autumn Transition Coaching Sessions are available through November 22, 2017. You can find out more about these sessions here. You can sign up for my newsletter, to receive updates and reminders about my offerings, here.

• Writers: If you need support in starting or finishing your writing project (or if you’re somewhere in-between) my friend Jenna Avery is offering a free trial for her Called to Write Coaching Circle. I’ve been both a participant and a coach in this Circle, and have found it to be so supportive! You can find out more about the free trial, which starts November 6, here.

Above images © Jill Winski, 2016-2017

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There is a part of me that is always in an enormous hurry. It’s a small but mighty voice within me that has been piping up since I was very young. The voice says things like: “You are soooo behind where you should be. You have to move faster. You need to make up for lost time! If you don’t get busy, you’re going to regret it!”

I used to listen to this voice, most of the time. I believed the things it said to me, the way it spoke to me, were truth.

However, over time I came to see that when I listened to this voice, merged with it as though it were actually “me” rather than just a point-of-view within me, I actually felt more behind, felt like I had to move even faster, and experienced more regret.

Hmm … curious, right? How could this be?

Well, here’s what I realized was happening (and it took me many years to see this clearly): This voice, while it meant to help, created a very heavy and desperate feeling state within me. And when I took action from that heavy and desperate feeling state, the results I created were — wait for it — heavy and desperate.

(For example: working incredibly hard to prove to my boss that I could take on a lot of work — and getting more work dumped on me by the day. Or, writing for hours after my work day so that I could feel like a “real writer” and ending up so burned out I felt increasingly like a fraud and like it didn’t matter how much I wrote, I still sucked.)

***

My partner and I make a yearly fall trip to the Brookfield Zoo here in the Chicago area. There is something about being there (especially during fall, my favorite season), that taps into childlike, playful energy for me. I connect with spaciousness there, with the energies of the animals, and my mind (particularly, perhaps, that desperate voice that tells me I’m never doing enough), calms down.

This year, we saw that there are tortoises near the duck and pelican pond at one end of the zoo. We stood and stared down at the six different types of tortoises for a long time. A trio of Galapagos tortoises hung out at one corner of their area, and one of them eventually started making its way toward us.

We were surprised that the tortoise moved faster than we’d thought it would, but what we noticed most was how relaxed and methodical it was, how it seemed to feel its way across the soft ground beneath it. It was actually neither “slow” nor “fast” — it simply moved the way it moved, at the pace that felt right to it.

When it had gone a little ways, it turned back, in that same relaxed way, feeling with its feet, head swiveling from side to side. It had apparently changed its mind and it was no big deal. Now it was going that way.

When you watch tortoises closely, you can’t help thinking they are time travelers. These are prehistoric-looking creatures, and they have — you must imagine — a unique relationship with time.

So, back to that ever-present voice in my head, which has been my frightened companion for so very long. Its relationship with time is quite like a race. It thinks it can, at some point, beat time if it just tries hard enough.

It only knows two speeds: “fast” or “slow” (too slow). This makes sense, if you’re in a race. But if you don’t want to — choose to — live your entire life as a race, this voice will quickly propel you to that desperate, heavy place it has caused me to know so well.

The wisdom that the tortoises sparked in me this week was this: It’s not that it’s all about slowing down (though slowing down is, for many of us, an excellent idea) — that Galapagos tortoise traveled more quickly than we’d imagined he would. It’s about being open to your own relationship with time, with pace — how do you want that relationship to be? What pace feels good and supportive and nourishing to you?

Since I can trace that “we’re in a desperate hurry” voice back to my ten-year-old self, who always scrambled in school to get “extra credit” even though she was already doing plenty, I know it is not purely a response to “today’s” culture. But I do think today’s culture contains plenty of triggers for this voice to go into overdrive.

So my ongoing commitment is to keep on noticing when I am “merging” with that voice, believing that it is “me.” I call it “a voice within me” because it is not me. It’s a habitual, practiced reaction, but it doesn’t have to drive my behavior if I notice it, detach from it a little, assure it that it’s being heard but it doesn’t call the shots.

And then I can ask the wiser part of myself how I want the pace of my life to feel, and recognize that I have more choices than that scared, desperate voice thinks I do.

How do you want the pace of your life to feel? How can you create more of that feeling? I’d love to hear from you.

And: My Autumn Transition Coaching Sessions are back — through November 22. These sessions are meant to support you in determining your “best next step” if you are feeling the uncertainty that big (or small!) life transitions bring. I’m finding that one-on-one support is vital for me right now, with all that is going on in our world, and I’d love to provide that support for you if it feels right for you. Learn more about Autumn Transition Sessions, here.

You can also now sign up for my newsletter, for periodic updates about my offerings and other good stuff, here.