Finding our pace

Finding our pace

You have not heard from me in a bit. I have been in a struggle to find my pace. I write you to make sense of my life and to share an honest week by week journey of entrepreneurship. And the reality is that it is not easy. It is so not easy that we often don’t share lest people worry about our struggle, worry about us or lose faith in us. But I am opting to share here, because so many of you have expressed how much you relate to this struggle. So here it is, I am settling into nearly 9 months of working a full time job and having a business that requires me to consistently learn and grow new skills, pattern making, fine sewing, hardware and software and then all the other big and small things we learn with our business endeavors. There is so much that there is very little space for anything else. But the reality is that there is so much more to life than work.

Late last week a very close friend shared with me that she was having some serious health concerns. This is very distressing. I struggle to make the space to deal with this and figure out how to support her. This past weekend I was feeling pretty hopeless. How can we do the hard work we must do to create our dreams, when there are so many other difficult things in our lives? There are a lot of hard things going on in the world around us. Those things are part of our lives, whether it is concern for someone we know, or sadness for a lost ecosystem or people that are being treated badly.

And then it pushed me to consider working alongside the anger, worry and sadness. As entrepreneurs, creators we have to work alongside all this. We have to work with what we got. There is no other choice. So we have to find the pace we can handle to be able to work alongside the challenges of this world, not to push them away or bury ourselves in our work or endless distractions.

What I am trying to express here is that we all likely have a bunch of very hard things to deal with alongside the beautiful dreams we are creating. It doesn’t mean that we need to put those dreams on hold or shove away the tough stuff and not deal with it. Perhaps we have to find a way to coexist with those hard things. Today I can make time to feel through the pain of worrying about the health of a childhood friend and then find loving support from another close friend who teaches me how to dye the blouse I created at Penland – the original blouse where I began the made to measure blouse project. I can bring the love and heaviness and caring to that work. They can coexist.

This is not a usual place to be for most of us. We are taught to separate our work from our personal lives. Not to share when we are in struggle, lest someone think we are weak and not worthy of the investment. But I am seeing now that this must be our future. We must find a different way forward. We can take our work seriously and make space to be there for the people we love who need us and to be there for ourselves. We can make tremendous progress and create innovative, world changing projects and be there for our parents or our community. We are being called to work with more humility and more humaneness. And at the same time we cannot wait to act on our dreams until tragedy leaves our world. Indeed we are acting to create the sort of beauty to provide healing and hope in the face of such tragedies. Yet it is SO hard. It is OK for it to be SO hard. But let us be there for each other. I need your encouragement and will always be encouraging you.

Thank you very much for walking this walk with me.

Go, fight, win.