Let go of being powerful all the time to embrace your life purpose. Leave room for wonder, beauty, and the spaces in between.
The Powerful Life Purpose
Are you on a relentless, full speed productivity schedule? Do you love being organized, too? The sense of accomplishment that results from attaining your goals not only makes you feel good it keeps us motivated for the next task. Besides, I am committed to living and working my life purpose. Stepping away from that seems counterproductive at the least and heretical at the most.
Spaces between
Yet I propose (with both my personal and professional opinion) that stepping away from our hyper focus and allowing room for a space of uncertainty permits additional growth than driving onward at full speed. Taking breaks from unflagging activity is a good thing. It doesn’t mean we have less motivation or have lost our sense of purpose. In fact, taking breaks has true long term benefits, including increasing our creativity, solidifying memory and intensifying our attention span!
When we continue to move forward relentlessly, we hit a level of diminished returns. At that stage inspiration fades and the connections between the ideas have less meaning. Therefore, new concepts are less likely to form.
When we open up to take a break and allow air to get in, we leave room for new growth. The unexpected landscape can be scary and that’s the point. This doubt we allow ourselves to experience permits us to consider new possibilities.
Nature has its own patterns and rhythms but they’re seldom if ever, a straight line. Humans are part of nature. It would be unnatural for us to expect to fit ourselves and our lives into a straight trajectory.
Revealing beauty
This month’s featured life of purpose, Charla Miller, is an example of a someone who has consistently helped others by showing them beauty in their life and revealing hope within, while she dedicated herself to faithfully living hers. Whether she was aware of it or not, she’s healed hearts and souls.
Her name may not be widely known, yet she’s literally reached millions of people as she’s created beauty. As a make-up and hair artist, she brings out the unique character and beauty in countless actors, actresses, movie stars, and every day people — transforming them so they understand their specific beauty and are able to convey it. Everyone they encounter, whether on the screen or in the grocery store, is impacted by her work indirectly as her “living mannequins” communicate.
Charla’s artful work of revealing what was perhaps untapped before sitting in her chair, opens up to a new level of wonder. “Wonder” is both a noun and a verb. The noun “wonder” fills us with the miracle and astonishment that the open space of time we’re allowed once we pause in our relentless activity. That pause provides us with a little gap in which to meditate if we choose, which is what the verb “wonder” would prompt us to do. Or, if we feel particularly free, just to allow the space to be.
Detours
Life often takes painful detours and Charla’s was no exception. She recounted it in her memoir, Wonder and Beauty: My Journey from Heartbreak to Healing through the Wonder of Horses. While it could have broken her, instead it led her to a path of equine therapy and healing, so that she could then encourage others.
Letting go of our power and productivity to allow room for the unknown may not be the only way in which we see the possibility of learning and healing but it is the easiest and fastest, as well as the most gentle. The blank days in which we’ve let go are far from empty. Even if you never experience a like Charla’s, why not let go of constant productive power and take a journey of creative discovery?
Trust the pause in the process as part of the creative stage of life overall. It isn’t even a detour. It is part of the path. We are all simultaneously doing profound work and whittling away the hours — much like ants. To watch them is to see them scurrying around carrying grains of sand. Every one of them has an important role and purpose. Together, they create intricate structures and life organisms. We are just larger units of nature fulfilling our role here.
Some would say one filled with more wonder and beauty. But that is in the eye of the beholder!
