We. did. the. thing.
After nearly a year of inspiring collaborations, ambitious visions, and healthy(ish?) doses of stress and anxiety, I am exceptionally proud to share that Michael and I are now married humans.
Our wedding was an experience beyond what I could have ever imagined.
It rained, it stopped raining, it rained again, it rainbow-ed, and then the sun made a surprise entrance in the middle of the ceremony that we couldn’t have directed better if we tried.
We had about 7 different plans that changed 7 different times up until 7 minutes before go time about where it would be and where we would face and how we should probably go lie down in a vineyard and take photos in the rain and should people eat appetizers before or after because maybe the sun would get the hint if we planned it just right?
We make beautiful plans and then they change and we experience a more beautiful kind of beauty we could never have anticipated.
Doesn’t it feel like the quality of our life is determined by how we show up in the spaces between those shifts and changes—what tone of voice we use when we switch to plan B and how we treat other people when we are actually going with plan Z and can we still locate our bodies and make a breath or two in the midst of all of the muchness?
Mostly I feel like I am at the beginning of the greatest adventure with the most extraordinary man and I cry every five minutes at the wonder of it all.
NOW…Let’s talk about Act TWO of 2019.
Hands up if you are not exactly where you thought you be at this point in time.
(You can’t see me but all of my hands and toes, including the webbed one, ARE RAISED)
If you and I were to have a conversation right now about the second half of your beautiful year, I would:
1. Ask you to share both joys and sorrows (both matter equally)
2. Give you my most inspirational halftime speech (in another life I think I was a very encouraging and nonviolent football coach)
3. Invite you to get honest and specific about your visions and plans for the second half of the year (and probably dare you to dream a bit bigger)
4. Make a wish for unexpected delights and experiences beyond what you can see or imagine right now.
We need visions and plans.
Visions and plans enroll our collaborators and communities on our journey.
Visions and plans enable us to wake up and create days that make us proud.
Visions and plans establish the conditions for magic to unfold.
They are also not the bible.
A few weeks before the wedding, my sweet, amazing mother sent a text that read:
How are you two?
Everything going according to plan?
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL.
Oh, absolutely, Mom!
In fact—It’s soooooooo relaxing planning a wedding and running a business while simultaneously trying not to abandon my creative practice that I cancelled all my spa appointments this week because I DIDN’T EVEN NEED THEM because I am feeling so much relaxation from within.
I really have no idea what people mean by decision fatigue and just feel so empowered—like each napkin color decision makes me more energized for the next one.
I’m grateful that my spiritual maturity and years of work on myself means I definitely HAVE NOT been going down the rabbit hole in bridal facebook groups comparing myself to other people’s timelines or using this event as an opportunity to evaluate my entire life up until this point and whether I have amounted to anything significant.
Oh! Also! As the only couple in the history of weddings to be thoroughly under-budget we have started a charity with all of the money we’ve saved.
And it’s been so great having zero family drama. Speaking of zero my inbox is zero and in all my free time I’ve written blogs for the next quarter and scheduled social media for a month and actually completed a manuscript of a book because I just had so much extra time and bandwidth!
Everyone on my team has all of my deliverables a month ahead of schedule—it’s just so peaceful not being the bottleneck on any projects and not ever having to pay for rush shipping or get angry at customer service people since I finished all of my online ordering months ago so now in these last several weeks I’ve taken up meditation and incorporating all 10 superfoods at every meal that I prepare from scratch.
😉
Does this resonate?
Asking a nonlinear duck if everything is going according to plan is like asking a potato farmer how the avocados are growing.
Yet when our lives intersect with traditional markers of time — weddings, parenthood, graduations, new years, half-way markers, birthdays — anything with a cultural story about how it is supposed to go — we can quickly label ourselves failures for NOT growing avocados—even if we never truly WANTED to grow avocados!
If you are on the other side of this letter, you are trailblazing a unique path. You are a farmer of the most singular variety, making new creations we don’t have names for yet and exploring frontiers the world very much needs you to expand.
I have a hunch that if you executed your visions exactly as planned, you would be bored.
You were born to flow, not stick.
This doesn’t mean that you don’t make action plans, and create meaningful strategy and have the capacity to be unstoppably prolific and productive, but it means that you are engaging in a wildly creative experience that is much bigger than an exact plan.
My vision is for you to have a remarkable rest of the year, and I made a video* with 4 ideas for your Act Two of 2019.
We talk about how waiting for clarity is like waiting for Godot, saying yes, wondrous eyes, and how your timing is #perfectAF.
*In January, I made a goal to make more videos for you. It’s only taken me 6 months and a lot of crying through seemingly “simple” articles about how to get videos to imovie to vimeo to your inbox—next time I will tell the wind to be less boisterous.
After you watch it, I encourage you to spend a quiet, un-rushed moment with the following questions:
What do I want to go big** on in the second half of this year?
What would bring me most alive?
THEN:
What is the next brave thing I can do in service of this vision?
AND:
What would radical support look like?
**Let’s work with an expansive definition of going big…BIG can be a thread in your creativity you can’t stop thinking about, a relationship that matters to you, a healthy relationship with money, spiritual development, civic action…
Most importantly, may you grant yourself grace in the space between the plan and the incredible now.
The wedding I planned is not the wedding I will remember for the rest of my life.
The book you started writing is not the book you will publish.
The year you envisioned is not the year you are experiencing.
Thank goodness.
This does not mean you are a failure.
This means you are a human.
(And a creative genius.)
I love you and I believe in us.
Here’s to making space for the magic to enter in.
With love and big encouragement for the songs you were born to sing and the imperfect dance of their unfolding,
LOVE,
LK