It’s Not What You do, It’s What You Don’t Do
Other than adhering with dedication to physical distancing directives (it’s for all of us, people), there is little effect we can have on how much our lives are dramatically changing. We are surfing in conditions we have never previously known.
Gathering data from experience informs us on how we do what we do, so we can decide not to do what we do, and then a new thing can happen. Let’s say I’d like to reach a vase high on a shelf, and I need to come up on my toes to do that. A dynamic pause gives me a window to notice how much tension and preparation I believe is necessary. Another dynamic pause provides time to cheerfully, non-critically refuse to make those preparations. Maybe I don’t have to do any of what I have now noticed. I see the vase, and my attention leads me up on my toes with invisible support and overall elasticity. The effort I had believed necessary evaporated, and the more interesting work became not making it hard in the way I thought it had to be hard. My means has become a happy curiosity rather than a fear of being wrong.
Refining the instrument of self in daily activity won’t change the upheaval of the times in which we are living, but we may learn how to learn as we hang 10 on the wave. We rise to demand.
