If you’re anything like me, you might love those damn leaps. Freeing, dangerous, wild and energizing. Sometimes there is clarity as you leap off that life ledge.
It’s kinda like the movies when boy meets girl, takes a chance on girl and the music peaks in the background. You get the warm and fuzzies because you just KNOW that as soon as you leap, immediate results show up.
But what if you leap and instead just keep falling?
I was talking to my good friend Tom recently. He asked me how things were going and I told him the truth. I was struggling. Like really.
What do I really care about? What’s my purpose right now? What’s my next move?
I felt like sludge. I felt like some sort of lazy primordial ooze that was dragging its ass through life. I thought I had leapt. Earlier this year, I had decided I wanted to be a writer. A full-time autonomous writer. My friend Tom was by my side cheering me on. He too had found something he was excited about. Fast forward 6 months and I am still sitting here wondering–is this the right decision and if it is, shouldn’t I be more excited? Shouldn’t I be on fire by now? Meanwhile Tom was plugging away and getting past the resistance that seemed to be slowly suffocating me.
“The leap of faith always sucks,” Tom told me. “And it’s a long ass leap.”
That’s the part I’ve been missing. The faith part. Back when I was religious, people told me that sin was just separation from God. True faith meant believing that you were going in the right direction (toward God) even when you no longer felt his presence beside you. Even when you felt abandoned by God, true faith was pushing past it and continuing on. After all, it’s easy to be inspired when you’re connected. It’s easy to do the work when you see miracles before your eyes. It’s easy to love someone when they’re nice to you. It’s easy to believe in your success when you’re booking interviews with Oprah.
It’s not easy to believe in yourself when the people you love think you should stop trying, or when you see absolutely no proof or guidance from anything or anyone. But, no one goes into the arena untested or unpracticed. THIS is training. It may be mental and emotional, but it’s essential to success.
I have often been told that I should just be happy with the ways things are. “CeCe, why do you always need more? Why do you need to be doing something huge? Why can’t you just be comfortable with this?” Sometimes I wish I could. I wish I could be content with a 8-4 job, find a decent (not great, but good enough) man to spend my life with, comfortably, relatively okay. I wish I could do that. Oh God, sometimes I curse myself for having any kind of ambition. Ambition, if not properly channeled is sheer torture.
Unrealized ambition and desire will slap you silly until you are a broken mess, a shell of what you started with. Pair ambition with inaction and lack of direction and holy fuck–talk about a recipe for apathy and depression.
But I have come to realize something: what works for one person will not work for someone else. We HAVE to stop judging each other and our dreams. What feels right in your soul could be wildly different from one person to the other. It’s not about seeking to be better than everyone else, or about soothing your ego. This road will bruise the hell out of your ego.
It’s not about anything quite that small. It’s about opening up your lungs and with the full force of all that you are singing the note that you were born to sing (according to Tama Kieves) .
If we don’t reach that harmony, that alignment–we will ALWAYS be feeling like there is more…because there is.
Desire is the gateway. If reality and possibility got all pelvic and had a baby–that’s what I would want to make love to every day. The edge between gratitude and desire for more, that’s the space I want to live. That’s where I do my best work. That’s where I feel the most alive and grateful.
If I have to go through a million lulls between the leaps to get to my sweet lover, I shall. I shall.
365 Days of Freedom 