My New Favorite Word (I know ya’ll think it’s “fuck” but that’s my second favorite. 😄)
I’ve been listening to Martha Beck’s four podcast episodes where she talks about the four blocks of the change cycle. This episode is very intriguing and it’s been quite helpful when it comes to my nonprofit Freedom For The Taking.
I realized that I have this picture in my mind of arriving at this place of “success” and then settling in for the remainder of my life. But as I listen to Martha, and as I learn, I am beginning to see that we are never meant to achieve a place of rigidness.
If we look at nature, it’s constantly changing. I mean, even the two small ponds that we have on our property change. Every year we are amazed at how much they continue to evolve. They have never returned to how they looked when we moved here 5 years ago. At one point, we thought for sure one of them was going to completely dry up . . . then somehow it rebirthed and now is fuller than our other pond that used to be the biggest one. The seasons change every few months and no two seasons are ever the same. The first spring we moved here our area had 23 tornadoes on the ground in one day. Thank god the rest of our springs have not been that way. Nature is wild, restless, and unpredictable. You cannot hold it back, stop it, or contain it. The very thing that we love most about nature is that it is ever-changing.
Humans love diversity in nature. Curiosity beckons us to explore places we have never been before. The millions of varieties in nature keep life from getting boring. Can you imagine if there was only one color of butterfly, one type of tree, or one species of flower? What if nature grew to one specific standard, and then it became frozen in that state forever? Sounds dreadful.
Why would we think any differently about our lives? It probably doesn’t help that our culture pushes us to achieve a certain goal and then worse, our culture ties our worth to “what we do for a job”, which puts unbearable pressure on us to perform and please. It’s a fucking trap that keeps a lot of people stuck in unhappiness, unable to dream up anything different.
While I was biking this morning, I decided to change my mindset about Freedom For The Taking. Whenever people ask me about “what I do” I usually freeze up because I don’t feel like I can offer them a solid answer - since my nonprofit is still evolving and I am unsure of exactly how it will all pan out. But maybe that’s not a problem. Maybe . . . it’s actually quite perfect. You see, if I try to stamp it with certainty, that instantly limits me from exploring. And, if I am looking for a landing spot to plant my flag, I lose the option to freely flow and change.
So, from now on, when anyone asks me what Freedom For The Taking is, I will answer with a smile, “It is a continual flow of creative ways to empower others to find freedom in their lives.”
The tricky thing is to not try to follow that sentence with explanations, but just let it sit and allow curiosity to do its thing. 🙂
Okay, it’s geek-out time. I went online to look for a word that meant ever-changing. You guys, listen up:
Dynamic
-adj.- “characterized by constant change, activity, or progress”
-n.- “a force that stimulates change or progress within a system or process
Holy shit I love this. I have used the word dynamic throughout my life to describe something huge and amazing but I never knew its core meaning was “constant change”. But this makes so much sense to me! Do you know what the opposite of dynamic is? Static. Yep.
I don’t know about you, but one thing that I NEVER want to be is static. In nature when water becomes static, it instantly starts the process of decaying. We have probably all been around a stinky, old pond that was not something we wanted to swim in. Yuck. This visual is going to help me when I feel tempted to be frustrated that I haven’t reached some made-up level of success.
I hope this blog inspires you to embrace the uncertainty of change.
I know it can feel scary as fuck, but then again, if we only did what we felt completely safe doing, we would probably never do anything worth doing.
If I am going to be anything in this lifetime, I want to be “dynamic.”
What about you?
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