I’ve been blogging and writing from the beach for the past few days and it has proven to be a far more dissonant experience than I expected or have experienced in the past. Finally today as the sun took hold earlier in the day, I realized that the issue was my lack of sunglasses. It is a truly small thing, but that small thing could’ve made a huge difference.
Yes, this is a metaphor.
And it is also a real life example of how to prepare and factor in preperation and process in order to make your experience 100% better and more effective. If I’d thought through this even a little earlier and really leaned into what I was feeling as opposed to trying to resist it, I might have had better production and better process over the course of the last few days. The truth is, I don’t think or prepare nearly as much as I should and I often fail to lean into my feelings or trust them as I ought to. Stephen King speaks of this concept called ‘the beam’ that leads to the center of everything and one can be on the beam, moving in either direction, or off the beam entirely. I live my life in range of that beam but am rarely actually on it. I was on it when I found the lady Talis. I’ve been on it a few other times so much so that I know what it feels like to be on, and what it feels like to be adjacent or just absolutely plum off. All of these feelings, which I often tend to actively ignore, are important.
That is the lesson of the day: Don’t ignore those things.