Often, I head out into the fields feeling jangly with frustration, or energetically tired from holding space. My body is tight from sitting at the laptop. You know what it’s like after hours in the office.
My habit is to head out with a rough destination in mind. Our culture engrains this in us — have a purpose! Be productive! Make use of your time! Go for a walk to relax! Take exercise! Absorb sunlight! Release stress! Track your heart rate, or hack your time by also listening to a podcast!
These are the messages we have absorbed in our cells.
When I walk, I have several choices in both length and location: upper fields, bottom fields, a loop of both, or across the road up onto the Long Walk, if time is spacious.
The deciding factor that initially shapes my walks is often time. But not always. Because I’m in midst of a creative project involving the ancient oaks, I might have a tree in mind: One I want to visit for the first time, or revisit to continue the connection, and if possible, the conversation.
However, the more I do my research, the more I connect with the oaks, the more the unfolding of my walks has changed.
I have learned to stop directing my experience.
I am a solo entrepreneur and a single mother. I am used to directing everything. I’m sure you know the feeling. To let go of control was uncomfortable for me. It felt foreign. After all, our brains are wired to protect us and protect what we know as familiar. Even when we don’t want the familiar.
Familiarity always trumps desired change.
We will always be pulled back to what we know, and what is keeping us safe, especially when life feels too much or too unsafe.
Once I get outside and allow my body to move, my mind will usually surrender as my energy to unfolds. Once I pass through the creaky, metal gate onto Crown Lands, I am able to shift. Initially, this process took longer. Because I’m now more practiced, the window of time and space for this transition has collapsed.
It wasn’t always easy. In the beginning, I wanted to check my Apple watch. Or, I would feel the need to push my pace, get my heart rate up. In the beginning, I was uncomfortable with the silence of not having a podcast in my ears.
I needed structure, direction, purpose and control to feel safe.
Over and over, I have practiced surrendering control and settling into letting myself be held by the Great Aliveness of the Living World. It took time, but it is now the most comfortable place to be — even when I have a full and busy day.
What was the lifeline that pulled me through the swampland of surrendering my logical process-based orientation?
Curiosity.
Curiosity is the thread of safety.
How do I use it?
I ask these two questions: What is here for me today? What wants to be discovered?
Then what opens for me is an experience I would never have anticipated, or predicted.
The more I let myself stand in the Land of I Don’t Know, the more I find more safety in that space. Certainly more safety than my controlled, predicted, outcome-based walk ever could.
Somehow I find myself tumbling into a connection that catches me by surprise. I become part of a resonance with the Living World. In doing so, something opens inside me. And this space is peaceful and wise.
And the tree I originally set out to see? It’s never the same as the one I end up visiting. Never.
An experience like this feels luxurious and unproductive — certainly nothing to do with leadership or successful entrepreneurship. Actually this experience is essential and foundational for being able to hold the inevitable ups and downs of entrepreneurship, leadership and parent-ship.
It is from this state that you can expand your capacity to hold it all.
Every time, I head out on an oak walk, I arrive home more supported, more alive, more connected and more ready to create the next part of the rest of my day.
I feel clearer. I find myself responding rather than bracing. This is the kind of capacity that doesn’t come from effort, strategy or discipline. It comes from my willingness to stand, even if briefly, in the unknown and allowing the safety that is there for me to reveal itself.
This is the simplest form of the work.