Flap Flap Flap: Starting Where You Are.

posted by Anjo

Eckhart Tolle tells a story about watching two ducks fight on a lake. It's a familiar scene: two ducks have a dispute, fight briefly, then scurry off in different directions. Each duck raises herself out of the water, flapping her wings wildly before settling quietly back into her tranquil duck-day. We watch, intuitively knowing that those flapping wings are releasing the energy still stored in the duck's body.

Flap flap flap... the energy is disbursed.

After 3 months of being home with my kids' for summer vacation, I find myself with a little energy to flap out. Once I would have rushed to get to work, nagging at myself the whole way about all the important things that I needed to be doing and how behind in everything I was. Pointless! I certainly wouldn't have been productive, in a negative mood, grumpily shoveling the junk mail out of my inbox.

Now I'm trying a different approach, and so it's back to work... enlightened by the wisdom of Tolle & Oprah, I have but one tiny nagging doubt: How the hell am I going to work like this?

So driving home after dropping the kids off for their first day of school this year, I find myself flapping, full of pent-up energy that has built up from 3 months of waiting to start... and now I don't have a starting point. Flap.

Guy Kawasaki in his fantastic "Rules for Revolutionaries" talks about "starting where you are" when beginning any business project. It's a wonderful business application of Tolle's "Living in the Now" idea -- the concept that fully accepting the realities of the present moment and going from there.

How do you start from where you are when where you are is flapping about without a starting point?

OK... the flapping is what is, so we'll start with that. I allow myself the treat of some time to stop off an buy a new notebook for this new project, spending 20 quiet minutes wandering through the drug store smelling the hand lotions and bath salts. Flap. Flap. Flap.

I've learned to slow down a lot this summer. There are huge advantages to this (watch Carl Honor: Slowing Down in a World Built for Speed), one of which is that I've become more conscious of my own patterns. I've learned that I can trust myself to get stuff done without strong-arming myself to get it done... so relaxed, and finished with my flapping I return to my place in the duck-pond.

Before long I'm home messing around with my new notebook "toy". I'm playing with the index cards I'd pooh-poohed in the store... suddenly they're filling with questions, with ideas that need more investigation. The pages of the notebook become divided and modular, flexible for this new flexible work/home balance. Notes appear, becoming to do lists, and a rough work schedule begins to fill itself out.

Out of my "play" I find myself project planning the very thing that has been the nagging worry of the last few days (how the hell am I going to work like this?) and I've actually written my first blog post.

Not a bad mornings work for something that started in a flap! So... What's next...

(Watch Will Wright: Toys that Make Worlds on the value of play in learning and Spore - his new Sim game that allows you to evolve a lifeform from a single-cell animal into a space-going race! Cool!)