Nudges from Nature

I didn't want to get out of bed on a chilly morning to take the call from a client who is several time zones ahead of me. I did it anyway. I didn't want to open bill from my insurance provider marked "personal and confidential." I did it anyway. I didn't want to drive hours away and fight 3-day-weekend traffic to pick up an old friend at the airport. I did it anyway. The result of these actions was one less thing I had to carry with me for the rest of the day, or week, or month, or whatever time it might take until action was non-negotiable or somehow got left behind in the annals of time. There are lots of things I used to do out of obligation or social pressure or because someone long forgotten said I had to, or for no other reason than I felt that I should, that I now do because taking action is empowering and liberating. It frees the soul. I live inside my head so much. I always have. I look inward first, and often. It's not so much that I'm indecisive

Imagination is everything. In imagination, anything can happen, anything can be.  We imagine our better selves every day. A better life. We all do this. Somehow we always find a way to yearn for something to be different. In better shape. More money. Better relationships.  Now, it's best and perhaps necessary to start from a place of acceptance -- accepting who we are and that we are exactly who we should be, exactly where we should be. But that's a topic for another post. And indeed, life continues to go on regardless. Change is constant. So, as life moves forward, we have an opportunity at every moment to contribute to a world that we dream might be. To take advantage of the opportunity, we have to bring our imaginations down to earth. We have to do the work. And maybe it's that misalignment -- between what we dream of being in the future and what we are capable of doing today, in this moment -- that difference can seem so vast that it leaves us confused and uncertain as

A while back, I wrote about taking on a home improvement project that had haunted me for over a decade. I removed a hack job of corrugated steel sheets that had risked trapping water under a second story deck any time it rained or the air was thick with fog. It wasn't pretty. Last weekend, four months to the day since facing that fear, I finished the deck project. It looks beautiful, feels strong and sturdy, and has certainly been a source of pride this past week. Here's what I learned in the process: Reality rarely matches the worst-case scenario that our imaginations find all too easy; though sometimes it does Facing reality is easier than holding onto the demons in our heads; facing reality abolishes those demons, even those worst-case scenarios; it can't be any other way The cliche about a journey beginning with a thousand steps is true, and brilliant; get started on the journey; look for a Northstar, but expect the path to meander along the way; a stepping stone somet