It’s easy to get stuck in what can seem a hamster wheel of thinking, intending, planning, considering, and preparing. It feels productive but like a mirage, no matter how much you do you never quite reach a point in which the step over the finish line into actually being that instead of preparing to be that. It’s easy to make something less of a responsibility by saying that it will happen someday and then listing all the things you have prioritized ahead of it and all the things you don’t yet know how to do or even what to do about them….Passions, callings, and creativity can all become comfortable pastel versions of themselves that never challenge us and never come into being when we deny them the one thing they require to manifest, reality in time.
Just as words have meaning therefore saying something out loud makes it real and telling another person about something holds us accountable, setting a deadline for something takes it out of the ever changing, comfortable possible of our thoughts and energy giving it first breath out in the real world apart from us. Making a statement, marking the calendar, committing to taking action by a certain date makes the project real. It begins the manifestation process, giving calling form out of us through the energy of a time yet to come, but moving ever closer incrementally. Making a hash mark on the timeline of our existence, drawing a line in the sand, immediately changes our internal prioritization mechanism, revaluing and shuffling things to accommodate this new aspect of our reality. Like magic we move from the potential to actual.
What causes us to hesitate in drawing that line isn’t a lack of passion, a smaller ration of joy or desire, some missing component or a failure of will. It is the deep aversion we have to a transformative process which we do not control. We have transformed before and the resulting experiences were mixed. Growing from an infant to a toddler was full of positive reinforcement and joy. Growth spurts in the middle years were awkward, confusing and sometimes painful. Puberty is its own right of passage that most of us are glad happened and joyful will never happen again. So that line in the sand clearly defining our transformation from who we were to someone who is manifesting a new way of being in the world, is full of potentials that challenge us to our very core. As adults we don’t have parents cheering us on, willing to pick us up when we fall and making sure there are minimal consequences to our failures and false starts. We’re the adults now. Which is why the courage has to kick in, not after we start manifesting our new selves, but before we ever get started. We need courage to make that statement to ourselves in the universe, to put a mark in time saying “On this date I will be fully engaged in making this project manifest into the world.”
Time to get out some drawing tools…
