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Making Room for Magic: Six Months Without Deadlines or Deliverables
A few months ago, I wrote The Soul of Sabbatical about the strange tension between falling and flying… how flight is impossible without the letting go that soaring demands. After the forceful sheddings that last year demanded from me, the impulse to hold on, hunker down, find some small place of shelter and security in which to weather the time of Sitting With the Storm was strong, and more than once I thought I had “made it through” only to find that there was yet again another release requiring me to go further, deeper into surrender.
I drew a hard line in the sand for myself last September: six months without a deadline. Nothing “shipped” to anyone but my own inner landscape, time bounded only by the rhythms of my own nervous system.
Mind you, nothing in my upbringing or history gave me any reason to believe this was possible.
I didn’t know if I could afford it. I definitely didn’t know how to “do” it.
All the planning, organizing, preparing, executing skills in my toolkit were exactly the wrong things for this job. Instead, I had to cultivate the subtler capacities that had mostly felt like indulgence from inside my professional world as my central organizing life-force.
