"You don't have to see the whole staircase. Just take the first step" - Martin Luther King Jr It’s happening again. I am lying on my bed at 3 o'clock in the morning surrounded by paperwork, receipts and notebooks. It’s all iPhones, iPads and ‘iCant’s’ and I have been paralysed in my pyjamas for the past 2 hours. I don’t know where to start.
And here it is … procrastination, my dear friend. Just when I think I’ve bid you farewell and sent you on your way, you keep coming back for more. And just like a relationship that has gone sour, I find myself welcoming you back with open arms because you feel safe, because I am frightened of change, because this is what I have known for so long and the thought of actually starting somewhere, anywhere means I might end up ‘doing it wrong’.
I’m beginning to learn that these periods of indecision inevitably align with periods of my own self doubt. I become a little bit more helpless, a little less confident in my own abilities. I willingly try to pass the decisions of my life onto those around me and I find myself wanting to cry out “can’t someone just decide for me?”.
We spend so much of our lives trying to get everything right ... to be the best, look the best, have the best ... but is all this striving incapacitating us? Are we procrastinating because of our own perfectionism and is this preventing us from moving forwards?
And here in lies the key …
Why are we so preoccupied with moving FORWARD in linear straight line towards a predetermined destination? Don’t we understand that the very essence of this puts immense pressure on us to stick within straights line, to never go crazy and colour over the edges? A good friend recently told me there are no straight lines in nature. Even space itself is curved. Go outside and be amongst the flowers and trees, their vines effortlessly intertwining on their journey towards the sun. The roses spilling out of the sides of the bush, big and beautifully vibrant and uncontained. Be amongst this beauty and you will understand that just as there are no straight lines, there is no direct path, no ‘one way’. By remembering this fundamental lesson from nature, we can begin to navigate our way through these periods of self doubt. Like a graceful dance we move through and around and over and under and this becomes our art. When I started writing this article I didn’t know where to begin. Truth be told, it’s taken me over a week to put pen to paper because I didn’t have a solid direction so I decided to just write, to just trust.
This article won’t be perfect, because there is no such thing. Instead of editing it in an attempt to make it clever or more enticing, I will just let the words form on the page and trust in these outpourings, unedited, raw and imperfect as they are.
Please know that all roads, all vines lead somewhere and all you need to do today my dear is to act. That is all. That is enough. That is everything.
With love always,
Jenn
xxx