"We need to chase down our authentic core. Every time we unearth a clue, every time we discover a piece of the puzzle that is “us”, we must chase it. We can’t just ignore what we know to be true about ourselves."
Read full article here.
It is 5am, and I’m downstairs on the couch, sitting right up against the front window. I reach my fingertips out, and feel the remains of the night chill on the glass. It’s beginning to get light outside, but there isn’t any colour yet - just a vague pastel blue grey. There’s a tree by the street, every leaf still and monochrome like a pencil sketch. I know that each minute that passes now will lift those leaves into more vibrance, along with the sky, the streaky clouds, and the limestone wall along our garden bed. And sometime between now and then, the sun will have risen, and the day will become distinct.
January to me feels like this time between first light and sunrise. A no-mans-land of vagary and indistinct shapes, each new day bringing a little bit more colour and clarity to the year, but, who really knows when the sun will actually crest the horizon. After the mad hustle of December, January is a reprieve for some, a recovery for others, a reward for yet other others.
I don’t know if it’s because I have kids, or because I'd shot weddings for so long, or both, but January was never any of those things for me. It was just, messy. School holidays meant a kind of responsibility-overload, paired with the hourly deadlines of editing the outstanding weddings of the last 8 weeks, and then topped off with all the existential questions one asks of oneself each new year:
“where am I going?”
“what really matters in life?”
“did I live a life worthy of living last year?”
In those past years, the only way to survive was to compartmentalise. In this moment, I am fully present with the kids. In this next moment, I am fully present with my editing. The next moment, going for a walk, spending time with loved ones, laughing at a thing.. It went moment by present moment, each of them disconnected from the other.
It’s not like that anymore, thank goodness. For something unsustainable, I sustained it for too long. But, January is still messy.
This year, I’m finding it useful to assign a plot archetype to the month of January. For me, it’s a VOYAGE AND RETURN plot. A protagonist heads out into the big world, experiences some things, and returns changed somehow. There’s a transformation, or an elixir brought back, or whatever else. So I’m looking back over the month as if I have just returned from a great voyage, and I’m sifting through my pockets of experiences, searching for elixirs.
With the sun already warming up the sky, and the leaves across the street bright and dancing in a new breeze, I find that my pockets are full of elixirs. I have a hope here, that I feel so deep. It will support us the whole year I reckon. Rach and I have communities that we can work with and play with, who love us and believe in great things. I find so many vials of encouragement, gifts from distant lands reminding us that we are all connected, and all valuable.
January hasn’t been a mess. It has just been a journey, and we have returned with dusty clothes and happy kids, a renewed focus and a burning drive to create things in the world.
We’re tired, but we are together, and we are as excited about the year as those dancing leaves seem to be about the new day.
A month ago, Rach and I joined a gym. I’ve never been any good at these things.
I tried a gym once when I was nineteen, and it was a disaster. I would put my headphones on and stride into the place like I saw the guys in the movies do, and just start loading up the weights. After three dumbbell curls my arms hurt too much to lift them, and a few leg presses later I was exhausted. I didn’t have a trainer or anything, and I didn’t know how to ask for help, so five minutes in, I’d be packing up to leave. And that was really my only experience with gyms.
That, and the time I was hit on in the gym pool by a much older man. Being alone and wearing very little, while a large hairy stranger describes how attractive he finds my body, was definitely a strong reason to never, ever return.
Anyway, 20-odd years later I'm trying again, and this time everything is better. Rach and I would go together, our own little team, every second morning at 7am. There were no monster heavyweights strutting about looking down on us, no spectacularly beautiful bodies demanding that we go harder and faster and better and one day we'll look like them. There were just everyday humans in pretty good shape high-fiving and encouraging us to do our best, but not so much that we throw up. It's been really great.
This morning, halfway through the session, I noticed something that's probably quite obvious to everyone else. I was hanging from a bar, trying to lift my knees up to my chest for the fortieth time, sweat running down my face like acid rain, and I realised that all of this, really... hurts.
Like, every moment of our 50-minute session involved some kind of pain, each muscle group getting their chance to endure a bit of hell as we moved around each station. Swinging from that bar, I looked around the room, and each face wore its own version of agony. There were grunts, gasps, panting, the occasional expletive. Everyone was feeling it. Actual pain, and the worst thing is, we had all chosen it for ourselves.
I got my knees up that last time, and dropped to the floor with a little "oof," and crawled over to the burpee station. Before I had a chance to think anymore, I was off on a new journey of pain.
I do know how exercise works. We exert some effort and the endorphins kick in and then we experience some kind of "high." Honestly, I haven't felt the high yet, which means I may not be pushing myself enough or something, but what I really, really appreciate is what happens to my mind during that hour:
When we start the workout, the rest of the world, with all of its pressure, anxiety, uncertainty, and busyness, fades away. Our attention is completely present, in this moment of our next breath, nothing beyond the routine before us. We're not forecasting or fearing the future. We're not retrieving or regretting the past. We're not processing intellectual arguments or emotional conundrums or responsibilities or anything else.
Within this 50-minute timeframe, we are at peace. There is pain, but there is also peace.
And for me, I also feel a sense of freedom. Which is strange, considering the amount of restrictions and limitations that the workout demands, but nonetheless, I feel free. By choosing the path, by clicking "attend session" on the app, I create an oasis for my mind, a reprieve from the overwhelm. For one hour, the entire world is held back. It can go wait for me over there, by the door, while I do my thing.
Stories are often crafted around a three-act structure, where Act 1 pushes a character into the conflict, Act 2 describes all the conflict and transformation, and Act 3 wraps it all up with a resolution and ultimate transformation (for better or worse).
The interesting thing about Act 1 is how difficult it is for the character to make that first decision, the one that forces them into the big story. It's a comfort-or-conflict choice, and the rest of the story hinges on the answer. But, once the decision has been made, the work begins and the character doesn't struggle with that choice anymore: life is too exciting now.
I feel like that with these workout, and I often feel like that with the rest of life. It's the hardest thing to click "do it!" on the app, and lock myself in to a session, but once I have, my mind relaxes, and I just go and do the work.
After the decision, there is peace.
Within the limitations, there is freedom.
Though there is pain, there is also pride, and transformation.
I'm absolutely not an exercise junkie yet, and I still dislike pain. But, I'm finding myself more and more looking forward to these sessions, and will even tap "yes" to them now with a tiny bit of joy.
Since January 1, there have been three specific subjects that have leapt to the surface of all the conversations I've been having. On both sides of the vax fence, across the wealth and privilege spectrum, and with no regard to age or gender, these three threads of consciousness keep spiking up, like a heartbeat monitor, or a FaceBook ad. Ordinarily I might have overlooked them as, well, pretty legitimate concerns given the world we're in right now. But, the three threads together caught my attention, so here we are.
The first thread is this:
"It's a new year, I must plan my days, make some resolutions."
The second, not surprisingly, is this one:
"The world is so uncertain right now. I feel more fear than hope. I don't know how I'll actually get through this year."
And the third, probably due to my role as a Story Coach, is this:
"I'm not a storyteller."
Maybe you can see already how these three ideas connect, but it took me a while. I had to close my eyes and just type it out - freewriting the tangled mess of thoughts and intuition in my head. As I typed, I realised I was feeling some anger, and frustration, and some hope.
I'm frustrated at most of humanity, to be honest, including myself. Every time we say "I'm not a storyteller" or "I don't have any good stories to tell" or "I just live a normal boring life" it jars my soul. Because we are ALL storytellers. We are constantly telling and retelling our stories, to ourselves, to our friends and family and kids and social networks. We go to sleep telling our stories to ourselves, making things mean this or that, blaming this person or that person, validating this hurt or elevating this piece of ego. We are prolific storytellers.
This is the whole reason I do what I do: I think EVERYONE needs to share their stories. I think it's vital for humanity, that the rest of us hear what you have discovered about the world we're all scrambling through. We are all built to consume stories, and we are all, always, telling them. And while my job is to help people craft their ideas in a way that is meaningful, the paradigm goes far beyond books and presentations. We have the power to craft our life stories in the same way.
But, when our crafting ends up on auto-pilot, our stories end up just feeding our ego, or our pain, or our pride. Even though they have such great power to nourish our souls with deeper elements like meaning, peace and hope.
(I guess this is all sounding a bit mad by now, but stay with me. I'll either bring this home, or completely lose my way. It's really 50/50 at this stage...)
For me, what connects the three big ideas together - making plans, fear and uncertainly, storytelling - is CHOICE.
A writer is constantly making choices about the events that are included in their story. While absolutely EVERYTHING might happen to a character, not everything deserves equal weight, and the writer will elevate some events, diminish others, and even cut some scenes from the book, in order to keep the focus on what is important. And we do the exact same thing in our lives. When we retell our stories, and when we are right in the middle of living a story, we will unconsciously elevate certain events and diminish others. I do this all the time, and very often I end up with a story that feeds my own ego: "here's a story of my day that shows how awesome I am..." or worse, "...how tragic my life is."
The power a writer has, and the power we all have in life, is this: We have the agency to elevate or diminish the impact of an event in our lives. And we can craft the telling of these events in such a way as to transform ourselves, and those around us.
Even with all the uncertainty, we can still ask ourselves questions like "what is valuable in life?" "what do I believe about love? Hope? Beauty?" And then we sort through the mess of life events, elevate some and diminish others, and slowly craft a story that resonates with that message.
The way we shape our stories can bring hope, encourage a fresh perspective on life, contribute to a deep insight of the world, all of those things. When we don't have so much control over the events, we still have control over the telling of the story, and it's my hope that all of us take up the "storyteller" mantle for ourselves, and curate our experiences in a way that will nourish our souls, and eventually, perhaps the soul of the world too.
Last year, I wrote about Rach's shakti mat. It was all about distributing conflict, so as to avoid one piece of discomfort becoming so sharp and urgent that it takes over our whole life. It's a great read, I think (and you can find it at nathanmaddigan.com/blog) but it turns out, I'm not done with this damn shakti mat.
Yesterday, I was lying on it again. And it hurt so much.
First I tried to ignore the pain - you know, think happy thoughts, tell myself stories, replay a tv show in my head - but that didn't work at all. So then I tried to get away from the pain somehow. I'd sit up, try and roll over a bit, arch my back so that less tiny spikes were stabbing me. But nothing helped.
It was exhausting, and frustrating, and somehow, the pain kept hurting. And it felt broad, like it was everywhere. Any mental exit I ran to was suddenly blocked by the pain. Happy thoughts, stories, the tv show, they all had this cloud of discomfort that dropped between us, so that I couldn't find the door handle and escape.
My mind felt like it was rolling around in a soft panic, unconsciously pushing back against the pain, searching for a way out.
After a few minutes of this torture, I tried something new. I gave up.
I stopped looking for exits and just leaned all the way into the mat, and focussed my attention on the needles pressing into my skin.
It was a completely different experience. My mind cleared, the panic subsided, and I felt free to just put that pain into its own compartment. Once I allowed myself to focus directly on the pain, I could see its edges, and it wasn't as huge as I thought. It wasn't all-consuming.
It was there, but it wasn't EVERYWHERE. When I was ignoring it and searching for relief, it felt like it was everywhere, and it was trapping me, controlling me. When I looked directly at it, I kind of trapped the pain instead. I could see all the exits now, I had some perspective back.
As I kept doing this focusing-thing: eyes closed, attention narrowed to the pointy daggers in my back, I began to notice something else: the pain was becoming less. My body was getting used to it, my mind was observing it, and I began relaxing, softening.
It was doing its Shakti-mat-healing thing, I suppose. The pain was slowly replaced with a warmth, as the blood flowed to areas on my skin that needed it the most.
Whatever was happening there, five minutes later I was so comfortable I had a nap. Truly. Right there on a bed of nails.
Now, please, please hear me: this post isn't really about pain, per se. I'm in no way suggesting that I have some kind of zen-like solution to pain, especially debilitating chronic pain, and I'm definitely not playing it down. Experiencing ANY amount of pain sucks. It hurts, sometimes a whole lot. Sometimes it takes over your entire life, and every day is a struggle to keep going.
With deep respect to those who experience this kind of life, it would be daftly naive of me to profess to know how you feel, or give you some kind of solution. This post is not *that*.
If anything, this experience with the shakti mat might just be a metaphor for the way many of us deal with discomfort.
In storytelling, characters will always try and avoid discomfort. They look away, turn away, walk away, avoid, ignore, distract... It's human nature, and it's okay. If a character didn't do it, we wouldn't even believe the story. It would seem somehow false.
The problem is, while the characters try and avoid all discomfort, the writer is spending all their time focusing on it. Writers know that stories need conflict. That conflict drives change, decision, transformation, all of that. So the writer will be considering the pain in great detail, finding the best way to get it right up in the face of the characters so that they must engage with it, and respond to it somehow.
I hate discomfort. And conflict, and pain. I'd choose comfort every chance I get, just quietly.
But, this shakti mat helped me realise that when there does happen to be a pain, a discomfort in my life somewhere, things do NOT go well for me or those around me if all I do is run about in a panic, looking for exits. I don't treat people well, I don't think straight, and I often don't even know exactly what it is that is hurting me. I only know that it keeps getting in the way of my exit strategy.
It's only when I stop unconsciously reacting to the hurt, and deliberately look at the source, not the exits, that I find my way forward.
So, with all that Rach and I have on this coming year, I know there will be great discomforts, great challenges and conflicts and hurdles to get over together, and as a character I'm completely terrified of that.
But as a writer, I'm wildly excited about this story. This year is going to be great.