Back in the middle of last year, I felt like I was done writing for a while. For the first 2 years of this work I was writing 5 days a week, and while it was sometimes hard, it was very therapeutic for me. Then after a confluence of events in October of 2019 I cut back on the frequency of pieces, and somewhere in the middle of last year my desire to write had left me.
I hadn’t stopped learning, changing, coaching and growing, but I didn’t feel the urge to share in the way that I had done before.
I think part of that might have been burnout from everything that we have experienced with the pandemic, and part of it was a desire to just focus on being able to change without necessarily sharing that with others. I’ve found that sometimes I lose the power of an experience because I’m too busy figuring out how to share the lesson I’ve learned.
I also understand that ‘figuring out how to teach the lesson’ can become a form of dissociation… a way of not experiencing the full emotions of a situation by distracting myself from what I am actually feeling.
Yet over the months since I last wrote, I have started a number of pieces, not knowing what I was going to do with them, but wanting to explore thoughts, and see where my mind would lead me. All the while feeling like there was something moving, shifting, changing somewhere deep within me. It was fleeting, like something forever caught in the periphery of your vision, so the moment you try to focus on it, it moves out of your view.
Until it comes clearly into picture.
Over Christmas I started watching some Youtube videos of people who were living very simplified lives. One is a young Russian guy who goes into the woods and builds log houses to live in on the weekends. This led to the videos of a 23 year old yoga teacher living in a tiny house in the middle of nowhere, and finally led to a 30 something woman who lives in a small cottage in a rural area of Washington.
She documents her simple, timeless, beautiful, classical life.
And over the last few weeks I've realized I am becoming drawn to that life way more powerfully than I was originally aware of. I think she caught me with her incredible cinematography, her beautiful choice of simple accompanying music, and the quiet grace and kindness with which she carries herself. But once I had moved past admiring the sheer perfection of her craft in making videos, I discovered the deeper truth that was driving my attention.
I wanted the simplicity of her life.
And while I understand (and she is very clear to explain) that her videos do not reflect the difficult moments of her life, I am in awe of the decisions she has made to allow herself to live in such peace and simplicity. She reads and creates art that she sells online, as well as making beautiful timeless videos that have created over 800,000 subscribers on Youtube (with many more to come I expect).
And I realize that I have some difficult decisions to make if I am to transition to that kind of lifestyle.
I’ve actually been working on the concepts of a huge change for a while now. Slowly putting pieces together, formulating ideas and concepts. Although I could ‘start at any time’, I’m trying to work through my fears and worries about what would be a pretty significant alteration in the way that I coach, and seeking a much larger audience for the change I want to make in the world.
Because honestly… it scares me.
Back in 2017, this work began as a form of self therapy, and a way to share what I had learned. It became something more when people were commenting, and telling me how my words had helped them, and in some cases changed their lives. While I’ve been comfortable coaching people for longer than I have been writing, the idea that my work could have a broader appeal was sometimes a little overwhelming.
But I also realize that in order to make the change that I want to be in the world, I have to take a deep breath and ‘do something’.
And there are many days when I struggle to believe that I have anything ‘worth sharing’.
I think we all have times where we wonder if we have any value, and I think that comes double when you start actually ‘putting yourself out there’. I find myself worrying about how other people will respond, and how it could change our lives if things go the way I want them to. I realize I am struggling against my ‘British Roots’ when I feel the conflict inside of me of the voices from generations past, telling me to ‘stay in my place; not to get ideas above my station’.
Madonna once wrote that in moving to England she didn’t realize that she was ‘moving to a country where ambition was frowned upon’.
But I know that in order to become who I wish to be, I need to move beyond who I am right now, and sometimes that can feel like a very strange journey.
—Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings