Millions, perhaps billions, of people are waiting for a return to normal after the pandemic.
A dear friend related a video she’d watched describing the two ways people are dealing with pandemic life.
One group is on pause, waiting for things to go back to normal.
The other group is simply living their lives.
THIS is the moment we’ve got to be fully alive. Not after however many days of mask-wearing and hand wringing lie before us.
“There was one group that didn’t die, and one group that came back to life. You’re not dead but you’re not celebrating life. And you are weighted down and the world is a dangerous place, and you are not to trust anyone outside the family.
“And then there were those who came back to life. How, in the face of adversity, do you continue to imagine yourself rising above it, connected to joy, to love, to pleasure, to beauty, to adventure, to mystery, to all of that? They were charging ahead at life.”
Esther Perel on Holocaust survivors, quoted on the Tim Ferriss Show podcast
I realized that I’d been waiting to come fully alive, too.
There’s a novel that’s been asking to be written through me, a mind-bending story of spacetime travel and multiple dimensions. At the center of the story is a woman with no sense of past or future who lives only in the present.
The story calls out to me. It has so much to say.
But I told myself that I needed to “figure things out with my business first,” and then dedicate a day or two weekly to writing this novel. After all, there is always so much to do.
I was waiting to pursue my desires instead of living them now.
“Why am I waiting?” I thought. “The only day to do anything is today.”
So I signed up for the National Novel Writing Month challenge to write 50,000 words in the month of November. (You can track my word count and cheer me on here, if you like.)
Still, waiting is a part of life, too. It can be a gorgeous time.
When we are pregnant and full, waiting for the birth of a new creation that dances in the spacetime between the formless and the form.
And yet, too often we defer the creation of what is emerging now to a mythical day without worry or uncertainty. A day that will never come.
I wonder, what are you waiting for?
If there is something stirring within, let it move you.
You’ll know that it’s time because your mouth opens and the words drop from your lips. Your fingers flex and you find yourself creating.
Don’t wait for another day.
Let the aliveness emerge through you now.
Yours in creative play,
Steph
