Say Yes To Your Fickle Ways & Release The Need To Be Consistent Everyday
How to capture some joy today & Oliver Burkeman tells us we don't need to get on top of life
Welcome wanderer! Here you have permission to:
forget about where the hell you’re headed in your life,
possess zero goals for this day, week, or month,
not have nailed down your One Purpose, nor mastered your juicy morning meditation practice just yet.
In this little space, wandering is a highly sought-after way of life. We are seekers, making room for surprises, sacred tangents, random shower ideas, and our swirly, spiraling evolution.
I hope today’s note compels you to keep walking your unconventional path!
Read on for:
a reflection about the overrated machine-like consistency we all wish we had,
a fun list you can make today,
and some wisdom from our Wanderer of the Week, author Oliver Burkeman, on why we need to be a little kayak instead of a super yacht.
No matter how hard I try I cannot be consistent in how I show up every day.
This bothers me. It seems my weird and wiggly octopus-like states grate against every marketing and creative guru recommendation. The secret to success, they all say, comes down to Consistency. In their eyes, a weekly-ish newsletter like this one doesn’t cut it, and is destined for eventual collapse.
The bossy business people urge me to make a daily appearance with my audience, share clickbaity content, and engage with energy and enthusiasm Monday through Friday.
I cannot.
To tell you the truth, I didn’t want to write this letter today. I’m having a blah day. I feel a little down and distraught about nothing in particular. It’s just life. I know my positivity plummets and ramps up depending on the hour (or the music I listen to!).
We humans can be fickle little things.
How will I ever succeed if I can’t pull my erratic self together, push through any funk in a few minutes, and press forward as if I don’t have feelings?
It’s been a rather hopeless task, and I haven’t been able to find an answer to my predicament.
Do I need better, more effective rituals around my creative work time?
Do I need more happy hormones or stabilizing meds?
Do I need to be a part of a mastermind group?
I’m jealous of people who pop into my inbox everyday with timely messages, interesting words, and irresistible links to share. I’m in awe of their consistency.
I buy their programs, stand in the line for their secrets, and still cannot get myself in gear. They even break it down for me in the most basic terms. What they seem to all be saying is, I repeat:
SHOW UP everyday.
RE-USE your content so there’s never a lull or lag. Take the one long blog post and break it into 5 short social media posts, take your best-performing post last month and share it again, and so on and so forth.
They give me daily prompts so I don’t even have to think.
They nudge me to put myself out there, promote my work at the same time, same place, every day. They make it simple and still I deliberate.
Sure, I’m on board for a few days, riding the content creation and idea-generation high. I start to feel like a real businesswoman. I’m crushing it! I pray the Real Me stays away from this super streak!
But inevitably, as the story goes, I return to my senses.
I snap out of the success-manifestation mindset and I’m lost in the slog of being a sub-par, spontaneous human who experiences seasons, waves, and spurts.
And just like that I’m back into the start-stop, jerky motion I know so well.
Can we talk about this?
The pressure we put on ourselves to pursue a life without curves or dips, where our feelings flatline, our inspiration never wavers, and success comes to the stable is completely crazy!
Who are these unicorns who can daily resist and deny the wobbling, transitory, impermanent nature of being human?
If you need a pep talk for your wandering soul, I’m here…
I’m finally giving into the beauty of a meandering adventure. I can’t survive any other way. I eventually fizzle out. I can’t muster a monotone existence no matter how hard I try or how many business-y courses I buy.
I’ve realized I crave the nuanced life, where paradox and mystery are allowed to take root and take over. I don’t want to streamline or iron out all the kinks in my life. I wish more people talked about moving through life without a clear purpose or definitive direction, and how we can find so much meaning even there.
Just know, my friend, you are not alone in actively trying to coax yourself toward a life that doesn’t connect success with machine-like consistency or a steady stream of content generation.
We are wanderers. The rough roads, the fiery friction, the bumpy texture of being human is where we birth our best work.
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Send me a YES! I FEEL THIS TOO! if these winding thoughts let you breathe a sigh of relief!
This week’s Be Curious prompt, whether you do it or not, is sure to sink you into the present of your imperfect in-the-flesh reality and find the treasures hidden in plain sight.
Be curious about…what brings you joy!
I ran across a list I wrote last year in The Journal titled, 50 Things I Love.
And I couldn’t help but smile. It was all still true.
The premise of the piece was this:
Joy refuses to be owned.
But I think we can set up our lives in such a way that we’re prepared for our passerby friend named Joy, willing to wait for its arrival without worry, and then release it with a generous spirit.
We must constantly remind ourselves: Joy has come before, it will always come again. I need only to remember all the places I saw it last.
My list begins with,
a text from an old friend
a long walk
a deep conversation
a tall mug of tumeric, ginger tea
a smile from a stranger
a quiet morning
a child’s fort
a light breeze on a hot day
a soft hoodie
clean sheets
clean children
clean counters
front yard flowers
morning bird song
french cafe music
So today, spend a minute, scribble, paint, or jot down a 50 Things I Love list and place it somewhere for easy retrieval on those blah days.
Our wanderer of the week is Oliver Burkeman! You might have heard of him, he’s the author of two books, Four Thousand Weeks and his latest, Meditations for Mortals.
When asked about his reference to a kayak and a super yacht, Burkeman says it’s a metaphor to describe the difference between, “Fully, consciously being in the reality of life as a finite human (little kayak) versus all the ways we spend alot of time trying to avoid it and shy away from it (super yacht)…”
He further describes our problematic desire for a Super Yacht existence,
“that sense of … making sure that everything in life is going smoothly, it's tremendously productive, but it just fundamentally isn’t where we are …
this notion of finding yourself thrown into life and how on some level alot of our efforts to change and acheive security and get to that point in the future where everything is sorted out are all efforts to kind of scramble out of this situation that we’re actually in…
that very subtle sense of what I’m trying to do here is get on top of my life so as to direct and control it rather than to fully fully fully be in it here as it is.
from Good Life Project Podcast: How To Use Your Time Well | Oliver Burkeman
Thank you so much for reading! Carry your wandering vibes throughout the rest of the week and see where they take you…
I bet it will be somewhere you didn’t expect and yet delightful all the same!
Trying to be fully fully fully in it with you,
