Timing
Kate Northrup talks about working and doing things in accordance with your cycle of being, particularly for women as we ebb and flow with our natural energy cycles. I haven’t been able to stick completely to her theory, but it has helped me when I am sitting with something that does not want to budge.
“The distance between here and there is the answer to the wrong question.” - Maria Popova
I am all for a deadline and things reaching their necessary fruition. But in writing this book, it has worked me to the core on being focused and flexible, pliant and determined.
Let me ask you a question, have you noticed how many more emails have to send an updated link, or sorry for the typo? Emails used to be such a big deal, like phone calls. You would go write your emails. It was an event. Now they are dashed off from the toilet or a traffic light. So when I see the increase in correction emails it makes me smile. In some ways, in some circles the veneer has come off that we can be all things on all platforms at all times. I think last year really tugged at that when VP’s on zooms had cats and children and spouses. Last year the ardent separation between worker and human dissolved a bit.
Separation is necessary. Believe me I know. I am hidden in a playroom, hiding and writing. Not my favorite, but an interesting combo. While separation is necessary, denial is deadly. We cannot work and be in denial of who we are, what our lives need and our own nourishment. I mean we can. We have. It just isn’t good for us.
That’s why that quote about the distance from here to there being the wrong question is so intriguing. I don’t know what the right answer is but I like how it tugged at my peripheral understanding. Opening more to the idea of the journey and the process and the timing.
I had been ignoring my manuscript for two months. I mean internally it has been taking up a lot of space (which is another topic to discuss, how things take up space even when we don’t acknowledge them) but I could not do anything with it. Instead of wasting time and sitting there with it and increasing my frustration, I took a page out of Kate Northrup’s book and let it gestate. Let it be in the void and not ask it to be or do more in this moment.
Two months after my extended deadline with a gracious publisher, I was able to hermit for a weekend and work through the whole last draft in a pace and perspective that I could not access before. It’s not the distance between first and second draft, it is the perspective from which I accessed them and what inner-standing had to be accomplished to work quickly through what was needed. What doubts needed to be dissolved. What space needed to be created for a constructive perspective.
Maybe that’s it. If you attend to what is being asked in right time and action it opens up a pathway, but if you force it, you might get to point B and have no idea why you are there.
Small changes may not cause large differences, but small changes, invisible because of our inability to measure exactly, can mask our ability to predict whether, when, and where large differences can occur. - Michael Frame
*image and quotes sourced from The Marginalian