“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” ~ Leonard Cohen, poet, novelist, and singer-songwriter
We don’t start a business because our plan isn’t perfect. We don’t invite people over to our homes because our decorating isn’t quite done. We shelter our writing, canvas, or song because it isn’t just right. An addiction to perfection is what keeps us from sharing and asks that we hold ourselves to an impossible standard. We will never be perfect and nothing we make or do or witness will ever be perfect. Perfection is unnatural.
Whenever I feel the little monster of perfection hopping up on my shoulder, tugging at my hear, and whispering counterproductive, sour nothings into my ear, I remind myself of Leonard Cohen’s beautiful sentiment. We needs these cracks and flaws much more than we realize.
So start that business on the side, have people over to your home, and share your art with others at every step of the way in its creation. We are all in the process of becoming – it’s a very human thing to do. In becoming, there is always something just a bit out-of-place and we must learn to love each other, and ourselves, for those glaring, exquisite imperfections.
As an efficiency fanatic, I am constantly looking for ways to do more with less. In this season of gift giving, this proverb reminded me that we can do more with what we’ve already got. Keep this in mind as you consider what goes into your cart this holiday season. We have more resources that we think we have.
A few weeks ago, I tried a new beginning that I haven’t been happy with. I thought I was going to turn this blog’s attention to business issues in a more traditional sense. I also thought I was going to stop posting on weekends and that my layout and tag line “Curating a Creative Life” would change substantially.
Forget what I said.
How I see business:
Business to me has a much broader sense than many other business sites. How you make a living has to fit with how you make a life. In the great words of Pam Slim, author of Escape from Cubicle Nation, “If you don’t consider your life as a key part of your business model, you may find yourself outwardly successful and inwardly miserable.” Turn on our work persona in the office and our social persona once we head home and pretty soon we have absolutely no idea who we are. I look at business through the lenses of yoga, service, art, books, technology, and finance. They all fit together for me, and denying any one piece leaves an incomplete picture. I need all of them at my disposal.
Posting every day:
My friend, Monica, recently coined a phrase on her blog that I really appreciate: “I’m not traveling to find myself. I’m traveling to be myself.” I feel the same way about my writing. Over these past few weekends when I haven’t posted, I thought about posting. After posting every day for almost 5 years, it’s become an integral part of my life. I love writing on this blog every single day. My friend, Kristin, has a very cool posting format going on at Writerhead. Some days she posts a very bold, simple quote to inspire writers. I’d like to experiment with that fantastic idea. Regardless of the format, I’m back with you daily.
Curating a creative life:
If ever I had to string a few words together to explain my life’s purpose, this tag line would be it. It’s really too good to give up – in writing or in practice – so I’m sticking with it.
I’ve learned so much about the art of beginning this year. Above all, learning to begin is a practice, a muscle. What I love most about keeping this blog is that even though times flies by so quickly, this writing helps me to remember, appreciate, and celebrate all that’s happened in that blur called time. It gives me the courage to keeping beginning every day. A new beginning doesn’t always mean change – sometimes it just means deliberately choosing to do the things we’ve been doing, not out of habit, but because they are the best way forward for us.
“Being ‘spiritual’ simply means being willing to look into the nature of life, to ask questions and to wonder, and to listen. It also means seeing art everywhere.” ~ Quang Ho via Daily Good
I’m often asked by friends, family members, and students who are new to yoga whether or not they can do yoga and still maintain their own religious beliefs. They’ve heard about yoga being a spiritual practice and they’re concerned that they will walk into a yoga studio only to have a competing belief system pushed onto them.
My answer is always the same – yes, there is a spiritual side to a yoga practice and yes, you can still keep your own religious beliefs. Yoga respects and welcomes anyone and everyone, just as they are. With Quang Ho’s beautiful words in mind, yoga will ask us to check in, observe, ask questions and wait for the answers. There is no way to hurry the process of getting to know our true nature – it unfolds in its own time, on its own terms.
And if we can be both persistent and patient, we will find that our true nature is indeed a work of art.
Ganesha - our great friend and the keeper of obstacles
“The obstacle is the path.” ~ Zen proverb
On Sunday I was thumbing through the new prAna catalog and found this proverb. Obstacles tend to be things we want to jump over, crawl through, duck under, go around, or blow up into miniscule pieces. And with good reason – they prevent us from doing exactly what we want to do exactly when we want to do it.
Or do they?
What if we could find a way to weave our obstacles together like cobblestones that form a path up and away from where we are right now and on to the path we’re meant to take? Obstacles, just like triumphs, are teachers. And they are generous. They force creativity, give us grit, and usually necessitate the formation of partnerships and relationships to overcome.
My path has been loaded with obstacles of all shapes and sizes. They have made it difficult to navigate, and yet I am now a better navigator for having them on my course. I wouldn’t trade them; I needed their presence so that I could work with my yoga students with compassion, authenticity, and empathy. To make the decision to pursue Compass Yoga full-time, I had to face obstacles in the other areas of my professional life. If that other way had been free of challenges, I may have never found the courage to leap.
This is how life goes – in the moment, we don’t understand all of the change swirling around us. In hindsight, the pieces settle and we understand why the exact path we took was exactly the path we had to take. Those obstacles are the inflection points that caused us to take a necessary turn so that we could live up to our potential.
May your road and mine be littered with obstacles of real value!
Frank Lloyd Wright's iconic emblem that he weaved through most of his work
“Love is the virtue of the heart. Sincerity the virtue of the mind. Courage the virtue of the spirit. Decision the virtue of the will.” ~ The Organic Commandments by Frank Lloyd Wright
During a recent business trip to Phoenix, I made a quick stop at Taliesin West – one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most famous homes, on the advice of a friend. “It’s really something you should see,” he said. I expected Taliesin West to be a museum. I didn’t expect to be immersed so fully into his life. The compound remains a revered school of architecture, a working studio, and an ongoing experiment in sustainable design.
Enormously difficult, arrogant, and brazen, the only thing that overshadowed his infamous personality was his genius as a designer. He broke every rule and then some, personally and professionally. Extraordinarily, he had only two semesters of formal study at an engineering school. It’s reported that he left that second semester, contacted his mother, and told her he wouldn’t be returning in the Fall because he knew more than everyone else there. His prolific life proves he was right. (However, imagine the legacy he could have left if he had a bit more humility to save him the years of struggle in his 40s and 50s.)
And this brings me to the very point of this post. I am very hard on myself. Brian can often he found laughing out loud as I explain to him that at the age of 35 I should be more accomplished by now. This is somewhat related to the curse of fully understanding on such a deep level how fleeting and short life is. I sometimes wish that feeling would subside for just a day, but it’s never happened. It’s so engrained that my mind automatically and consciously charts time, and keeps pushing me to seek, find, and do.
As if sensing my constant internal struggle with time, my tour guide at Taliesin West started the tour by saying, “Mr. Wright’s legacy truly began after his 60th birthday, and he is best known for the work he completed after he turned 80. He worked until 5 days before he passed away right here in this home. So don’t worry. You have plenty of time to make your mark on the world, too.” I breathed a little sigh of relief and an audible thank you to Frank. He may have been a selfish, conceited old coot, but his ability to create exactly the life he imagined at every age is damn inspiring.
Frank Lloyd Wright used his youth and most of his adult years as a way of building mastery. He experimented and reinvented. He tried, failed, and tried again. He never gave up, never lost faith, and never second-guessed his own gut – even in the face of very staunch criticism and shunning by his colleagues and contemporaries. Perhaps we could all do with just a bit of his confidence, dedication, and determination – he did have plenty to go around.
Take it from Frank – now is always the best time for a new beginning.
To see all of my photos from Taliesin West on my Google+ account, click here.
A few of my friends are in the midst of starting to craft their own businesses, either as incremental income streams or as a replacement for their full-time jobs working for someone else. The companies vary from an online stationery store to career coaching to senior care, and some have mentioned that they’re worried about the originality of their ideas. Differentiation is important. A wholly original idea is not.
Facebook was not the first social network. The iPod was not the first MP3 player. Amazon was not the first online retailer nor the first online bookseller. These founders saw an idea in the market that met a need and then they used their own spin on the idea to delight customers. It’s that delight factor that truly made the difference.
There are a lot of yoga teachers in the world. There are a number of them who are interested in working on the healthcare industry. I know Compass Yoga isn’t unique in that pursuit but we’ve got a few surprising insights, and a few plans to set us apart and help more people in the process. And that’s really all anyone needs to get going on a new venture. Just be your best version of you.
“The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.” ~ George Eliot, British writer
Yesterday’s post was a call to action and it caused me to think about all of the things that may prevent us from acting, from getting our creative ideas out into the world. We’re afraid of criticism, we’re afraid we don’t know enough, and we’re afraid that our ideas just aren’t good enough. I don’t think that fear is the main reason we fail to act. I think it’s our addiction to perfection. I get this need on a very serious level. I used to pride myself on my perfection. I gleaned most of my self-worth from it, and in the process I wasted a lot of time. And time is more valuable than perfection.
Our addiction is well-justified: we are highly protective of our intellectual property (with good reason) and we want to find our groove before we offer the big reveal. But here’s the rub: we find our groove by acting on our ideas and collaborating with others. We can’t find our way by sitting on our couch. We have to get out into the world and try our ideas on for size as we let others do the same. Perfection stands in stark contrast to that truth. Perfection leaves us sitting on the couch.
Get out the chisel and break yourself free of the need to be perfect because it’s not a need at all. It’s a perception, a legacy system that needs to be left behind if we are going to progress. Thank that tiny voice of perfection for its input, turn the volume all the way down, and get your creative work done. The world needs you just as you are – perfection not required.
Last week I read a reprint of an article from frog design that originally ran in Fortune. It nailed a tiny pet peeve of mine in the world of creativity. Companies and individuals often trumpet themselves as innovative, out-of-the-box, creative thinking “idea people”. It sticks in my craw a bit because there is nothing remarkable about having creative ideas. We all have them. ALL of us. What I think is rare, and much more extraordinary and ultimately valuable, is to be a person of conviction, to be someone who believes so much in a creative idea that she is willing to do whatever it takes to bring it to life and share it with others.
Creative folks get a bad wrap, too-often characterized as lazy, unfocused, and spacey. The most successful creatives I know – meaning their ideas are out in the world and people are benefiting from them – are nothing of the sort. They make a plan and drive to completion. They work hard, have laser-beam focus, and an unbelievable degree of attention. When I’m in their presence, they are there with me 100%. They’re present, aware, and relaxed even under great pressure. Those types of people are the ones I hold up and say, “Yes, that’s it! That’s creative living at its very best.” Conviction is required.
Creative ideas are all well and good. I want something more. I want more creative ideas out of our heads and onto the page, screen, canvas, pottery wheel, and stage. We don’t need permission, a business plan, or even funding to take action. We will figure it out as we go. So much creation is free or close to it thanks to the ludicrous amount of open-source tools that are literally at our fingers. Our only barrier is us.
Creative ideas stuffed into someone’s mind without an outlet for expression are just clutter. And quite frankly, it’s selfish to keep our ideas to ourselves. If ever the world needed more creative doers to fix the complete wreck we’re making of this world on every level, now is the time. Act, act, act!
Yesterday I wrote about the need to begin over and over again, to never give up, to take our punches and then try again. It’s also important to understand that it’s okay to try a lot of different avenues. You don’t need to beat your head against the wall trying the same idea over and over again until you get it to work. Give your idea a fair shake, but if it feels like the battle of your life and the fun’s drifted out of it, there’s nothing wrong with cutting your losses and going in another direction.
A friend recently told me that some members of her family don’t think highly of her because she’s not focused enough, because she’s taken her life in so many different directions. But they’ve been purposeful. She’s taken up new ideas with enthusiasm and the desire to learn something new. It takes courage to have curiosity, and it makes for a rewarding life. She wouldn’t have it any other way, and neither would I!
There’s no universal rule that says we need to be one-dimensional, that says if we get this degree or have that job then this has to be our sole purpose. I always love to meet people who mix it up – dancers who are passionate about zoology, physicists who love to cook, corporate attorneys who design clothing. It’s a healthy thing to follow our interests wherever they lead. It’s important to explore and grow. That’s what this life is all about – taking in all the wonder that the world has to offer and then finding a way to give it meaning in the pursuit of a worthwhile way to spend our time.
So you go right ahead and wander. Travel with conviction, and make it valuable for you and for others. Keep your head up, your eyes open, and your ears attuned to your surroundings. You’ll be amazed by all you find on your journey.
“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” ~ Leonard Cohen, poet, novelist, and singer-songwriter
