I keep asking multiple versions of the same question: What am I supposed to be doing with my life?
This is a hilariously dramatic question, considering that, at the moment, my life is actually pretty fucking good. Literally nothing is wrong. I am safe. I am loved. I have meaningful work. A beautiful home. A husband I adore. The best puppers. I actually live in a daily rhythm with nature, its mountain plants and its mountain animals. I’m surrounded by people I love. I have a body I am learning how to listen to and we’re getting along quite amicably. And I’m deep into a spiritual practice that has become less theoretical and more woven into the fabric of my everyday life.
And somehow, underneath all of that, I keep looking around like:
“Okay… but what happens next?”
For most of my life, I suppose I have been very good at next. Give me a problem and I will solve it. Give me an idea and I will build it. Give me a complicated mess of information and I will find the pattern, create the system, name the thing, make the deck, launch the business, build the team, organize the chaos. Understanding something has almost always meant doing something with it.
I don’t really have any practice around knowing something and leaving it alone.
This may explain exactly why this particular season of my life feels so strange. There is nothing obvious to build, and I keep receiving the message from the universe that I am supposed to wait.
UGH. I fucking HATE WAITING.
FLOATING IN SPACE
A few weeks ago, the image that kept coming to me when someone asked how I was doing was that I was floating in the cosmos. I kept telling people it wasn’t scary; it was actually beautiful. Quiet. Expansive. Stars in every direction. I described that I could probably start swimming toward one if I wanted to, but the problem was that none of them were calling me. And because I couldn’t see a path, some part of me wanted to pick a fucking star anyway.
Fuck it. Any star. At least then I would be moving.
But underneath that impulse was something speaking much quieter and it was consistently arriving: Not yet. Wait. Rest. Feel. The path is coming.
I hated this advice. I hated it because it didn’t feel wrong, it felt so damn right, and it wasn’t the answer I wanted to hear. There is a very particular kind of frustration that comes from receiving exactly the wisdom you don’t want. I call it “fuck off, universe” energy. You don’t know me…
Ha. It does. Better than I know myself and I hate that. I hate something knowing me before I know me. I fucking hate know-it-alls who are right! Yes, I can feel my own anger, thank you very much.
Anyway, what I wanted was coordinates. Instead, I am having my patience tested. I wanted a clear purpose. Nope. I get to experience presence. I asked for vision and now I’m sitting with a blank calendar.
APPARENTLY I ASKED FOR THIS
Over the last year, I have been slowly removing myself from the machinery of my business. For the past 9 years, I was deeply embedded in almost everything. Strategy. Marketing. Leadership. Finance. People. Problems. Decisions. Details. There was always something that needed me and if it didn’t actually need me, I convinced myself it needed me–you know, just to be thorough.
Then I did the thing leaders are supposedly trying to do–the very thing I have coached business leaders to do for the past 14 years: Empower your people and make yourself obsolete.
At Maven I built something capable of existing without my constant involvement. I built the team. I delegated the work. I stepped back. I watched them carry the torch. I gave feedback. We worked collaboratively. I stepped back further. They carried the torch with more confidence.
Now I work primarily on Wednesdays in Salt Lake, with a little administrative work and remote meetings on Thursdays. That’s it. Of course I could do more, but it would be superfluous. It would be micromanagement. It would be creating work out of fear. My team isn’t perfect and the systems aren’t fully baked, but this is their circus and this is their monkeys. My job is to sit on the sidelines and cheer them on. Remind them of our purpose and the strategy. Be there when they have questions. Yes, I need to watch the game and ensure we’re all playing the right sport as time goes on, but it is no longer about inserting myself into the game as a player. I’m the coach. How absurd would it be for me to go onto the field? They’ve got this. I have to trust that they’ve got this.
All this means that on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays, I am largely… err… open?
Five days. Every week.
For years I dreamed about spaciousness like this. Now I have it and I am mostly bored out of my fucking mind. Oh my god, am I a fascinating creature to witness or what? I am stressed when I’m doing too much and want it all gone then I’m bored when nothing is happening and whining for action. The goddamn irony is not lost on me, I assure it. It’s swirling around me like flies on a corpse. And it feels as yucky as it sounds.
I have officially reached a first world problem and I’m in privileged crisis. Fuck. Me.
Let me be clear. Life is simultaneously beautiful and I am drinking it in. I am in no reality actually bored, I am just struggling with the feeling of boredom because I just exited the rollercoaster I’ve been riding my whole life (which was making me physically ill). Now I’m standing around in the amusement park watching everyone else ride a rollercoaster and having the most heart aching FOMO I’ve ever had. Why am I not on the rollercoaster?!
Right now, life is unimaginably epic because I am completely alive. I’m not following some elaborate schedule for what I am supposed to be doing. I am resting when I want to rest. Connecting when I want to talk. Laughing at the most mundane things and being completely immersed in how perfect they are. I am moving toward whatever feels alive in the moment. I am truly in flow.
Then I hit these weird empty spaces where the questions return.
“Yes, Rocky, yes, presence is lovely. Absolutely delightful. I hear you. That sunlight through the window that casted a prism that turned into a rainbow, boy, oh boy, that was really special, you’re 100% right… BUT… what in the actual fuck are we DOING with our LIFE?“
Ah. There she is. My sweet little productivity demon.
Even Ayahuasca Wouldn’t Give Me An Assignment
I went into my most recent ayahuasca ceremonies with plenty of openness, but somewhere inside me was probably also the hope that the universe might slide a manila folder across the cosmic conference table labeled: ROCKY’S NEXT CHAPTER.
Ideally with bullet points.
Instead, the ceremonies were remarkably peaceful. There was love. There was witnessing. There was quiet.
Instead of being in the middle of the experience, purging or doing the work or receiving some enormous revelation about myself, I felt guided to simply observe. Not gonna lie, one part of me was genuinely disappointed.
Where was the drama?
Where were the visions?
Where were my hard-earned aha moments?
Apparently even enlightenment can be unsatisfying when you’re addicted to plot.
I started realizing that a part of me doesn’t simply want life to be good. She wants life to be interesting. She wants transformation she can see. She wants before and after. She wants revelation. She wants the moment in the movie where the music swells and suddenly everything makes sense.
Peace is considerably less cinematic. Peace asks you to wake up the next morning and make breakfast. It asks you to meditate. Walk the dogs. Do the laundry. Feel your feet. Notice the tree. Love the person standing in front of you. Go to bed. And then do it again.
That isn’t exactly an Oscar-winning blockbuster, but it’s the truest human experience, isn’t it? All the special effects and witty one-liners and unexpected dramatic twists that I’ve held up on a pedestal for so long are really nothing more than noise…
THE SAME DAMN MESSAGE EVERYWHERE
As I’m learning, apparently I require fuck loads of repetition, so I started studying my Human Design and Gene Keys again. What? I’m not fully enlightened, sometimes I give in. Sheesh.
Welp. There it was. Again.
Stillness.
Orientation.
Naturalness.
Being.
Detachment from expectation.
Different language. Same cosmic eye roll.
One distinction hit me especially hard: There is a difference between direction and orientation.
Direction says: There. Go there.
Orientation says: You are here.
I have been desperately asking for the first while life seems to be teaching me the second.
Where am I?
What does my body feel like?
What feels alive?
What feels contracted?
What happens when I stop manufacturing momentum long enough to notice what is already moving?
What do I know before I explain what I know?
Who am I when there isn’t a problem requiring the most capable version of me?
These questions aren’t producing a five-year plan. They’re doing something stranger. They’re making me more intimate with my own life and it’s causing me to break out into a rash–I’m so uncomfortable.
BUT I STILL WANT TO MAKE SOMETHING
This is the point where I keep getting tangled because I don’t believe my lesson is to sit on a mountaintop forever becoming increasingly good at being. My body needs a lot of stillness apparently, but it does move towards things and it will again move towards things less mundane than food and rest at some point (maybe?).
Because I like creating. I like language. I like translating complicated things into something someone can feel and understand. I like sitting with another human while something inside her rearranges itself. I like intuition. I like bodies and systems and beauty and belonging and the strange territory where apparently contradictory things turn out to belong together. Heart and head. Spirit and strategy. Being and building. The unseen and the extremely fucking practical.
I can feel that there is a new body of wisdom forming inside me. I don’t know what it is yet, but it’s no longer the old pattern where my job was to figure a thing out and build a container for the thing. Now I’m attempting to live the medicine fully before I define it. I’m trying not to turn something alive into another identity or project.
Hindsight is far less exciting than knowing, but something tells me that living is far more exciting than knowing. So I’ll order the hindsight with a side of temper tantrum in the meantime.
THE LAUNDRY & THE AWAKENING
As much as I’m doing my best to quiet my brain, it still swirls in oceans of questions.
How do you be spiritual in a three-dimensional world?
How do you hear the unseen and still pay payroll?
How do you float in the cosmos and still come home to your hips?
How do you trust intuition without abandoning discernment?
How do you follow the body without turning every sensation into prophecy?
How do you experience something enormous and mystical and then unload the dishwasher?
My intuition says this is the work. We are not here to escape humanity. We are not here to transcend the ordinary. We are here to integrate all of it. Mind. Body. Intuition. Spirit. Logic. Mystery.
The monotonous laundry and the exalted awakening.
I’M PROBABLY NOT LOST
I keep calling this a liminal space. Between worlds. Between versions of myself. Between one way of working and whatever comes next. And this could all be true, but even my current language suggests that this moment exists primarily as a hallway to somewhere more important.
Jesus. That’s the new lesson I’m supposed to interrupt, huh?
What if this isn’t the waiting room? What if this is my life?
Buddha would be so proud of me right now.
