What I can't get used to here
What I can’t get used to here (I’ll tell you
While we hide together, you faceless
in shadow) is the smallness.
I didn’t look for only cream and honey
Nor even light and quiet—
I don’t know what I looked for then:
anything that came, and was large.
It comes, and it is small.
from “Coming of Age” in LeGuin: Collected Poems by Ursula K. Le Guin
Did you know Ursula K. Le Guin was also a poet? Of course she was. (Sidenote: If you haven’t read Le Guin, you might start with The Left Hand of Darkness! I wrote a love note to it once.)
I lived my 20s and early 30s in a fervent dance of spiky productivity. I made so many big things during that time.
I birthed and helped raise three humans. I wrote a book. I made weird adventure-type classes. These were basically an embodiment of my wish that business was more like the stories in my imagination…like traveling in a hot air balloon, or going on a caving adventure, or having my website become somehow both anthropomorphic and in love with me (how prescient!).
I look back with fondness, joy, and total astonishment at my persistent idealism and the force within me that has always wanted to make the world what I want it to be and not what we are all dulled into participating in.
My mid-to-late 30s were different entirely. I faced burnout, depression, and a confused desperation to get back to being that other person who had moved through life and work so fluidly. I went through the dark forest that I guess most of us go through at some point. I broke open, and eventually got put back together.
After that, the joyful, spiky productivity no longer seemed available to me. In my late 30s, I knew I had to learn to work differently, but I didn’t know how. I figured that since my capacity for big things seemed out of reach, smallness would have to be the way.
In The Fifth Mountain, Paulo Coehlo writes about a people whose culture taught them to plant one small seed and then leap over it every day. Eventually, all the people knew how to leap tall cedars.
In my late 30s, I decided that working differently would mean a daily leap over that seed. It seemed like the answer to my creative challenges, as well as all I felt I had the capacity for. I’ve been steadily leaping over that seed for years now.
But over time, I discovered something. Unbeknownst to me, some sneaky and well-meaning part of myself had put a little invisible cloche over my seed. I had been leaping over that every day. What steadiness and diligence it takes to leap over a seed that gets no higher than your ankle, every morning, afternoon, and night!
Wouldn’t you know, this results in predictability and overall monotony, but it doesn’t result in leaping tall cedars.
“Each of us has a sensitive spot, a core fear or discomfort that we see as more hurtful than everything else. We relate to it as an existential peril and do everything we can to shove it far away from us. Perhaps on a rational level, we know that it’s not an existential threat — it’s just another feeling. And we’re probably already feeling it: by avoiding it all the time, paradoxically, we keep it ever-present in our consciousness, in a watered-down form. Somehow, ingesting this feeling at low concentration for our entire lives does not kill us.”
from “Crossing the Cringe Minefield” by Cate Hall
I don’t know if I’m self-aware enough to name my core fear. If I did, and it was a clean, specific thing, I think I’d be making it up. My fear is more visceral, like a ball of chewed-up gum suspended in a sticky web made up of more chewing gum.
I do have many pieces of evidence that point to the fear though. Most of this evidence is probably very common, and quite boring. For example, I have had a devoted commitment to free-writing every single day for most of my life. I love free-writing. I have written notebook after notebook after notebook. I have believed that these notebooks would turn into publishing something, eventually. (I sort of made one of them into something I sort of published once.)
While free-writing every day may be therapeutic, it does not, unfortunately, equal publishing. It can be a tiny part of a larger publishing practice, but for me, it was basically talking to myself while I endlessly jumped over a cloched seedling.
“There’s something I know about you that you may or may not know about yourself. You have within you more resources of energy than have ever been tapped, more talent than has ever been exploited, more strength than has ever been tested, more to give than you have ever given.
You know about some of the gifts that you have left undeveloped. Would you believe that you have gifts and possibilities you don’t even know about? It’s true. We are just beginning to recognize how even those who have had every advantage and opportunity unconsciously put a ceiling on their own growth, underestimate their potentialities or hide from the risk that growth involves.”
from “Personal Renewal” by John Gardner
Do you know what it takes to leap tall cedars? I’ve finally figured it out. You probably already know it.
We have to plant the seed, yes. We have to leap over it every day, sure. But then we have to stop letting that instinctively self-protective part of ourselves sneakily hide away the risk that growth involves. (I don’t know about yours, but my sneaky self can be very sophisticated in its sneakiness. Who would have thought that so many things could look almost exactly like the thing I was afraid of facing; the only thing that would make all the difference? How easy it has been to fool myself into thinking that I was facing the thing! That I always have been!)
It’s time to remove the invisible cloche. It’s time to let the sapling grow fully into its cedar-hood, so we can grow right along with it. Atomic habits are good, but they can’t stay atomic. At some point, we have to recognize that the point of doing small things is that we become capable of larger ones.
Here’s to leaping tall cedars together,