I have been writing you about setting achievable weekly goals and lists of tasks each week and letting that be enough for your dream building work. And then there are weeks – like last week where you write down these goal and tasks only to have curve balls thrown at you each day – a.k.a. the art of business building during a pandemic and in a rapidly changing world. For example, the space to set-up and reconnect your pattern printer is not ready and the person at the local printing shop responsible for large-scale printing (the back-up option) is sick, and another crucial collaborator is quarantining and so on and so forth. So in spite of your best effort to make steady progress, all of your assumptions about what you thought would be possible as you planned for the coming week go out the door and you must bob and weave with the new information.
And so, at some point, to properly grasp how to move through the week, with so much uncertainty, I thought of surfing and needing to respond and stay present in the moment. A surfer has no control over the waves that move towards him/her. The art is working in that present moment with what is before you, to respond to it. This thought brought me peace. My only job was to show up in each moment, to take in the waves and to respond to them. Stepping back, after a year of so much death, I felt blessed to have the opportunity to live and interact with life.
Last week wasn’t an aberration. It would be nice to assume deep uncertainty and rapid change is behind us. However, I’m sure that it is not. So we will have to make friends with it – we will have to learn to surf. We will have to balance the act of laying out our building blocks, our timelines and then putting our head down, staying in the moment and surfing. For me that meant taking advantage of delays with the blouse project logistics to languish away hours on a Sunday with a new blouse pattern – a huge creative reboot. No computers, no internet – just pencils, rulers, pattern paper, an awl and my favorite Portuguese music station.
