5:47 am on a Saturday morning. Coffee, window open, whole house asleep. My favorite hour of the week.
To the one who has known for a while.
For years I have written about writing the future into existence. I have spoken and led workshops about the power of your imagination, how your pen is your permission slip. But I have been leaving out a big piece of this — the part between the script and the life. The stretch of time between one workshop and the next, between deciding to write a book and actually writing the book. This is where I spend most of my time. And starting today I will be writing from here, from the space between the promise and the becoming.
The plan is to write these letters every Saturday morning. The letters will give insight into life behind Courage to Create and the journey that the author is on, holding down a full-time job and, on top of that, running various workshops and developing herself as much as possible. The author does this all as she continues to become the person she has not yet become. This will be an experiment of a 3 month period (Q2). In the end of Q2 it will be decided if this form of expression will continue or if it will be a season that was a season in life for the author.
That is to say, I will promise you the real version of how this is working out for me, regardless of whether it turns out to be a great version or not.
This is a letter for you if you know something in your life needs to change and you already know what that is. Year after year, you wake up knowing. For four seconds, you might even pause to write an email about it. No? I used to think I was being so responsible writing those emails and I was just avoiding. I read lots of stuff about burnout (Brené Brown, etc). And then I read a lot of stuff about boundaries (that one book everybody talks about). I got so much better at knowing about my own burnout. But nothing changed for me.
After I finally acknowledged that I was burned out, I read a lot of books about the subject, including Brown’s work on vulnerability as well as a great book on boundaries that seemed to be recommended to every exhausted creativer I know. But reading about it didn’t change anything for me.
The one sentence is what moves us. One line of truth. If we were to write down what we really want for ourselves (before we hit delete because it feels so uncomfortable) – that one line would become our blueprint for living into our dream already. It would be our rehearsal for the life we have yet to lead. It would be our mental, emotional and physical rehearsal all condensed into one sentence of truth.
Here is this week’s letter, while the ink is still wet.
Friday I led a session of Courage to Create where we mapped out the strengths of every single person in the room on a screen. Not one of them looked surprised. They already knew. What they were struggling with was stopping to acknowledge and celebrate those strengths instead of pretending they didn’t exist.
That same afternoon someone I valued walked out of our group, right before Easter, with no warning and no conversation.
After the group session I went to my car in the parking lot and sat there for a while. What I couldn’t get around was that life was moving. And even though I was a part of facilitating this space to recognize people’s strengths it didn’t mean that real life would pause for me to prepare for it. And it hasn’t. The question now is, will I continue to circle around looking for ‘right’ conditions, or write the next line of my life? I have circled. I know what it costs that, and what it feels like to stop.
So the letters I will be writing are real-time accounts of my journey. I will write about my workshops, about my parking lot encounters after hard days, about the single sentence that I wrote at 5:47 am that suddenly moved me to action in ways that I had not anticipated. Sometimes I will share the stories of other people who are in their own in-between space. We are all in different spaces similar to one another, but we each have our own stories to tell. I will write about these things as they happen, without waiting to see how they ultimately turn out.
If you are already a member, these letters will arrive at your mailbox every Saturday. If you are not a member yet, you can join here and the next letter arrives at your mailbox next week.
Same stolen hour next Saturday.
Magdalena
P.S. I almost did not send this letter out. It is way easier for me to write to you about the magic of writing the future into existence with a pen and paper then it is for me to actually pick up my pen and start writing when I know someone can watch me!
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