One Cool Free Idea

I got an email today from Victoria’s Secret with the headline: Get it Now! The Perfect Body!

When I clicked through, the copy on the next page read “I Love My Body.”

OK, so there’s a classic split of an idea. Do I want to GET the perfect body or love the one I’m in? Well, honestly, the answer is both, but I’ve come far enough along in life to finally grasp that loving your body has a hell of a lot to do with how much you love your mind. And how much you love your mind relates in large part to how genuinely and actively you’ve cultivated its authentic hardwiring.

So this led me down another cerebral pathway, that of a chat today with my friend Ann. Now Ann and I have been walking/talking our creative dreams for awhile together - she’s a writer, graphic artist, photographer, and web-designer in the making. We talked about how often we define our success (or perceived lack thereof) by whether or not we’ve wound up holding some “product” of our labor. (maybe that’s why so many folks say their kids are their finest labor - you go to work, you get something to hold onto).

I was reminding her (as she learns new web coding stuff) that so often along the journey you forget that every little step is a huge accomplishment in and of itself. That it’s the pursuit that matters as much as some “end” product.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bcymet//cc-by NC2.0

I remembered the day 4 years ago when I had my own “big” wake up call to start doing my music again - a move prompted by a young mom dying at our church, and me being struck between the eyeballs with the random shortness of life. Back then, my vision statement-to-self went kind of like this: “I need to do this, however scary, because if I had gotten hit by a bus yesterday, the talk at my funeral would be about how I was a hardworking public relations person who is great at gardening, cooking, laughing, and being a good mentor to her kids. However, if I resurrect my musical self today - and start on some unknown path that actually matters to me (doing what makes me most fundamentally happy), and then get hit by the bus, at least I’ll have gone down trying.

And I thought then, as I do now - Why do so many of us wait til we feel death staring us down to act in accordance with our true selves? Why do we need to equate the worth of the pursuit with the product? And why do we find it so hard to just accept the joy that comes from simply practicing our art or creativity?

Renowned psychic Sonia Choquette wrote a great book called “The Answer is Simple” in which she tells of a youngish middle-aged woman who comes to her for a psychic reading after being told she has terminal cancer and little time left on Earth “to live.” The woman, distraught over the fact that she has lived a full life caretaking her family - is beside herself feeling that she has been stockpiling time waiting for the freedom to be and do who and what she really is. What, she asks, is she to do with no extended time left to finally pursue her dreams?

Sonia tells her this: go back and spend your days telling the people you love what you love to do; tell them what it IS that you love, and in doing so you will give them forever that aspect of you that you didn’t get to actualize, but that defines who you are. She does. Later her daughter dialed up Sonia to say “I never knew what you told Mom, but she died happy. I’ve never seen her as radiant as she was after your call - she shared so much I felt like I finally knew her….it was a total gift to us from her.”

So it’s the articulation of your loves that is the first (and sometimes only) step along the path. By simply expressing your loves and creativity, you share some aspect of it with the world. As you travel, your creativity may take physical form, and that’s another step. But it’s not the form that defines whether or not you’ve attained perfection - it’s loving the body you’re in, and doing something every day to fulfill its potential.

And I ponder how we assign value in our culture to these two distinct endeavors - that of “becoming” and that of “arriving.” At least in our culture, there’s an awful lot of emphasis on the “arriving” end of the trip - even though we mostly agree that you never know if or when you’ll get to where you’re trying to go. (Hey, even when you do arrive, you usually have to keep going……somewhere.) So maybe it is about enjoying the ride - and more importantly - about re-labeling how we perceive our personal creative endeavors. Can we learn to see our work and practice and creative outreach as intrinsically valid and valuable - whether or not we end up with some “thing” to hold to symbolizing achievement.

So today I had my own epiphany of sorts. I used to think it would matter to me if I “left behind” some musical memento of my labors so the other folks left hanging around the planet will have something to HOLD - some proof of the story I tried to tell of who I am and what I was trying to actualize.

Now I know better - it’s not about the stuff you leave behind that validates your journey - it’s simply showing folks that you had the courage to try.

And even though I don’t have those CDs or scores (yet), I feel pretty good that if the bus rolls up and I end up under it, I will have “accomplished” what I set out to do four years ago. And that was to live a life (and engage my mind) in a way that is true to form.

Do I have a perfect body? Nah. Do I love the one I’m in? Well, I’m closer to that self-loving place than I’ve ever been. And I know it has alot more to do with my happiness about what’s going on inside that body/mind, than it does over how I might feel after I dress it up with one of those perfect pushups I could (still) grab over at the Victoria’s Secret sale.