When you’re passionate and curious about your work it’s easy to become so immersed that you loose perspective on your life as a whole.   

When I say your work, I don’t mean your job. I mean the work you do to make change in the world around you. 

If you’re lucky that’s part of your job. I feel lucky that for me it is. 

And yet working with your passions is no easy ride. Like the hero’s journey it’s a rolling epic of crisis, epiphany, breakthrough, in the work, and with yourself. Sometimes many cycles can be going on consecutively. It’s simply part of the journey as a life long learner. Do, reflect, act.

If it’s not painful, and you’re not getting stuck, feeling threatened or failing from time to time, you’re not learning. 

To nudge change you have to be prepared to do the hard work to change yourself. That’s the hardest work of all.

I’ve spent the last 18 months a hermit. My altar has been the digital connection to work, the comfort of home, and creeping the boundary of the corridor in between. Unhealthy avoidant behaviours towards going out, or taking exercise which is good for the body and mind, have been allowed to dominate. The illusion of a simple life. 

We don’t do anything alone. We need the support of loved ones, friends, colleagues, in our work to be ourselves and do our best work, to nudge us when we go off track; challenge our assumptions. Make us think.

I was grateful recently when a friend and colleague I visited gave me a tiny book called ‘Sit Moments’. it made me stop and think differently.

A glance through the tiny pages in a ‘sit moment’ even in the car was powerful. Looking out at the garden, reminded me that in the chaos of your work and the passion to push for change, there is more to life than work. Time out and moments with loved ones, friends, and in nature, just sitting and being,  and looking around, are what we need to be inspired. The creativity bubbles. The breakthroughs come. We have to take time to allow it.

The same ‘Sit moments’ friend told me once, ‘We are human beings, not human doings.’ A balance of both is probably the truth. The practice is in ‘being’ to make the ‘doing’ richer, more thoughtful, more effective. 

I’ve made a change. I got up today early and went for a run. It was good for my body and untangled my mind. Perspective. At the end I stopped for a ‘sit moment.’

As I looked in the trees around me I noticed a tiny bird; a tree creeper creeping slowly and steadily doing its work to seek out out food on its way up damp bark. Tree creepers can’t go backwards; they go up to the the tree back to the bottom and start all over again. 

Watching that tiny bird made me think of all sorts of things. Like just stopping to really see nature and being in that moment; how we’re all just going in one direction up the tree of life. There’s no going back. All we have are these moments and living them to the full.

It also made me think when you’re doing your life and work, sometimes you have to stop and start again; and that’s ok. We’re learning; We’ve never done life before. 

Like nature what matters is healthy balance to sustain your body and your mind, to be yourself and do the work only you can do in your life. 

Epiphany and breakthrough. 

Me, run, nature…Tomorrow?

I’m a human being. Change takes commitment. Committing to exercise healthy balance and wellbeing is my next challenge to master.

Just start.

Thanks to Rachel Cox for ‘Sit Moments’, and to Megan Macedo for making ‘crisis, epiphany, breakthrough’ visible, and normalising it as a natural part if the human creative process.