Living Organically

I've been experimenting with a new way of life. One that has been gradually evolving over the past few years, even though I didn't know it was happening.

It's about letting life evolve naturally, trusting my intuition, believing that things are going to get done without having to resort to timetables, to-do lists and day planners.

Back when I first started working totally independently, I would structure my day to begin at 9 am, stop for lunch precisely at 12 .. you get the idea. It was like I needed to punch my own time clock in order to stay on track.

A lot of this was born from the need to get things done and be "productive". How I measured productivity was by the number of words written, number of phone calls made, number of minutes of sound and documentaries composed. You get the idea. That's the way I used to define productivity.

Well, in the last couple of years in particular, I have not been able to define myself strictly by that criteria. My life had changed in a way that I was needing to define myself by other values. And ya, it was a struggle (and still is) to redefine myself in a way that doesn't rely on the merely quantifiable or definable to determine what has and hasn't been a successful day.

These days, I get up when I want to get up. I eat when I am hungry. I go for a walk when I want to. I play the piano. I go to the computer to send out emails when I want to and I "work" when I want to.

And do you know what? Things get done. The money has come in, I have food on the table and everything I need.

I still have a hard time trusting that following my own schedule and intuition will get me to a really good place. I want to fall back on that old tendency to run headfirst into my work with singleminded determination to achieve "results". The concept of "surrender" is something I still have a great deal of trouble with, yet when I run headlong into something, it has often turned out to be a wall (ouch). And I usually don't have a helmet on, either.

It's not that I haven't been "working" lately. Far from it -- in many ways, these past few years have been some of the hardest work of my life. Getting to the place where I am now has required great amounts of focus, trust and a firm idea of what I want. I don't even know if I even should use the term "work" .. it just doesn't seem to apply to the way I do things anymore.

And where am I right now? I am in a place and in a space I am really liking to be, doing things that really resonate with my soul. I am becoming the person I want to be, rather than the person I thought everybody else wanted. It's not been easy getting here, and I am sometimes (often, even now) really sad at what I've had to surrender up to be where I am now.

Yes, it's been hard work. But yet, the good things in my life haven't happened through any great design of my own ... I've often said to my friends that I've been living my life most recently on grace, luck and skill ... in that order. And much of the time it hasn't felt like my success has had very much to do with my skill, either. Things just evolved and took their own time. And no, I sure didn't often trust that I was headed in the right direction.

Still don't sometimes. I still want to fall back on my To-Do list and plan everything within a minute of next week. But the thing I've learned that is more powerful is that if we trust ourselves, trust the people around us, trust the universe, god, goddess or whoever, our To-Do list will take care of itself.

And there will be much more rich things when we review what we've accomplished than if we'd written everything done and done everything on the list in our usual singular, too-focussed compulsive way.

Because many of the best things that happen to us won't even appear on our list at all ...