This too shall path: the first 30-ish days of being indie
Playing with language, happy accidents, dancing with the tensions and letting the journey reveal the path(s)
Journeying through the liminal
Time doesn’t feel real. I’m not sure if I’ve simply been hyper-aware of the velocity and density of things over the past 30-ish days or if maybe the concept of time is becoming decoupled from that sense of busyness and urgency that I’ve felt working a 9-5 corporate job.
I’ve always appreciated and leveraged my ability to exist in the in-between, the liminal spaces. This feels like a liminal space. Except it’s not really a “between” as in time and space between a clear start and a clear ending. If I look at this journey, I’m not sure there is an ending and I’m also not sure there has ever been a clear beginning. Yes, I am writing this looking back on 1 month since I stopped full-time work, a clear marker in time and memory, but I’ve been working, thinking and living towards this kind of path for much, much longer. The path has been slowly revealing itself and I’ve been dancing in the liminal.
This too shall path
I love happy accidents that are born out of conversations…A couple of days ago, I was texting my husband some words of comfort and affirmation during a stressful phase. I meant to type “this too shall pass” and accidentally typed “this too shall path.”
And I LOVE THIS IDEA. The journey is the destination. This is our guide, our flashlight illuminating all the possible paths. This is the work, how we navigate and grow through it all. As in: this too shall reveal new paths. Maybe it’s more about how we live those moments as the paths reveal themselves…how we respond and adjust…it’s a circular flow of inputs and outputs, a combinations of intuitive sensing and clear-headed action, our principles doing the tango with our responsiveness to the changing currents and emerging signals.
My husband and I have always talked about spirals as a way to describe reoccurring themes and ideas in our lives and relationship. That when you are exploring something that feels familiar or like you are circling around a theme over and over, you are just passing the same part of the spiral but at a different elevation. The biggest difference here is that I see the spiral widening while my husband sees it tightening. We often joke that our underlying philosophy is the same but we may be looking at it from opposite angles. We’ve found this may be true for the way we make sense of things and understand the world and our role within it. One day he said that generally, he wants something to mean everything. I want everything to mean something…
Spirals hold tension - a new experiment
Looking at the (outward widening, obviously!) spiral and the paths revealing themselves as I go along, I’ve decided to use this newsletter for my next experiment.
One of the themes or ideas that I keep circling around is about open-ended sense-making, connecting-dots, and exploring a topic or theme widely, but anchored in a prompt or stimuli. It’s the rabbit hole as a micro dose of a journey without a destination idea. A jumping off point for a free fall into the beautiful mess, an acceptance of the “100-tabs-open-at-all-times-lifestyle”…
In one of my past roles in an innovation agency, I started a weekly newsletter based on the main pillars or verticals in which we worked. At first, I collected signals, articles, events and developments within each of those verticals. It started small, as an internal inspiration prompt for our teams of designers, strategists, researchers and everyone in between. Eventually, I started inviting teams and whole business units to guest-curate the newsletter. This might have been my favourite phase, where it evolved to be a wide, exploratory collection of items loosely related to a space or a theme …It eventually evolved into a Business Development tool used by leadership to share with current and potential clients.
As I continue on this path, I keep wanting to explore this idea of prompted and curated content again. So I’m exploring different type of inputs or provocations, like memos, works of fiction, art, songs, cities…and the list goes on… And all those are interesting, but I realized that all of my explorations have been living and thriving in the tensions. Each prompt or input is an output and to me this is a circular not linear relationship. This is a flexible space, not a rigid vessel of inspiration. There is always a push and a pull, not an on or off, this or that. Instead these are levers we slide back and forth as we go through our journeys and lives. To me these tensions can guide us, enable responsiveness to the ever-changing environment, all while holding us steady, in a kind of pre-set-rhythm and pre-determined movement pattern…if only we are open to the dance.
Especially now, I find myself dancing more with the tensions in my life and explorations…maybe it feels amplified because I have more time now that I’m no longer traditionally full time employed or maybe I have more bandwidth to play with the tensions that are always present…
So Im going to experiment with a series of newsletters prompted by a set of tensions. I plan to explore these tensions through readings, art, snippets of words and visuals, sounds and my own reflections on it all.
Dancing in the tensions
At first, I had planned on including my list of the tensions that have been percolating, but decided instead to leave it out and let it emerge as I step onto the path.
But here are some examples of where I’m feeling the push and the pull…I’ve been intrigued by the tension between “focused making” and “unfocused thinking” or creation vs distraction (or the “downstream of screwing around unproductively” via @visakanv). Some others spaces I want to explore are growth vs maintenance, grace vs discipline, abundance vs scarcity mindsets (ie trust vs fear), independence vs interdependence and our online personas that exist between “messy lived experiences” and “curated and narrated storytelling”.
I’m not promising a regular cadence for this experiment but I’m committed to dancing the dance. I will hold steady to the beat, step into the rhythm, and sway back and forth, humming along intently.
What tensions are you dancing with?
Sincerely,
This too shall path, for now…