Hello beautiful human,
I began this morning writing something about values. About knowing our values. About steering by core values rather than rules. I wanted to say something about how we cohere or don’t as a population and maybe share an exercise I created in getting to our core values—sometimes they aren’t what we think they are. I believe our core values can shift with time and experience and I believe that is really scary to a lot of us. Because our values are such a central part of our self-definition.
We tell ourselves so many stories just to get out of bed each morning.
But in all of that I had some agenda I was trying to force to quickly. The words felt prickly and scratchy and went nowhere. They were having none of it. They sat on the screen and stuck their tongues out at me. They laid down like a tantrumming toddler and went boneless.
And the trees, thank all the gods for the trees outside my windows, the trees remind me that coming from the thinky thinky place sometimes gets in the way. Having a plan or a destination in mind sometimes gets in the way. The whorls of my fingerprints, connecting with the keys of my laptop might be the map after all. The veins in my wrists branching like the veins in a leaf.
Maybe I am not a patient person. I love the spark of new beginnings and I seek them out. I have less trust in simply showing up day after day and that is why this practice in An Inviting Space is so good for me. Because there is no plan, no program, no top ten ways or super secret clubs to join. I’m not growing anything. On purpose. I’m letting this Space grow me.
One of the most interesting and impassioned values conversations swirling around me these days is the question of whether to paywall writing here on Substack and if so how exactly to do that. Every writer has opinions and often, it seems to me when I listen carefully, a lot of us haven’t sat for very long with our discomfort, our itchy places, our received beliefs, our insecurities. Sometimes passion and noise are defense mechanisms. This paragraph is really about me as much as anyone else. I’ll be playing around with my paywall this summer, trying things, feeling into possibilities and digging into what feels right to me. And chances are as I do this work, we’ll get to that values exercise at some point.
Just not this morning.
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