Unstuck: Keeping Up With the Speed of Life
By Jennifer Paros
“You are and always will be greater than any conception you will ever have of yourself.”
Our cat Olive died the other day. I had to take a moment to remember we’d had nine years with her; the time had gone by in a flash. Mixed with my current experience of her death is memory of her rolling on the sidewalk, times petting her, all those moments she ran to greet me, and the first time we met. It’s all one. Life moves and keeps moving, swallowing itself as it goes.
Though I felt sad that Olive’s physical self was no longer present, something also left me feeling she wasn’t so much gone as on the go. I think there’s movement in death, just like in life. And death is part of the movement of life. In life, when we keep up with the creative energy within us and where it wants to go next, we feel fulfilled and fully ourselves, leaving behind old forms as we go. Olive was onto the next thing and, perhaps, just keeping up with life. This thought was followed by a strong impulse and desire in me to keep up with my own life better, because these days I’ve been feeling a little out of step with myself.
Every physical step we take requires we let “die” (end) the last one we took. If we remain committed to the last step, we can’t move. Mentally, this translates as same perception/same position – stuck. When we feel stuck, what we’re really stuck on is a self-concept. Our internal picture of who we are and how we are is supported by and reflected in our patterns of thought. This self-concept is either working in harmony with what we want, or is in conflict with it.
Life Coach and writer, Michael Neill, talks about believing he was shy for most of his life and then, one day, questioning that idea. He asked himself, “What if you weren’t?” At the next party he attended, he didn’t make a show of being confident and outgoing, he just didn’t “lend credence,” as he describes it, to the story of being shy. He’d been dreading the party and was surprised to find what a great time he had. “I’m shy” was just a self-concept he’d been unwittingly reinforcing, a perception to which he had committed and finally abandoned.
How does one stop lending credence to a self- concept? We suspend our assumption that we’ve got ourselves correctly pegged. This creates a break in the line of thinking that feeds the self-image and a stillness that allows us to see how life is and how we are, in this moment, without the story. We let an idea of us “die,” so we can experience more of who we really are.
“I am made and remade continually.”
In Lynda Barry’s book, Making Comics, she encourages us to adopt a different name/character while taking her “class.” She says, “It’s good to have someone to turn into when class begins. A different you becomes present.” There is value in leaving old self-concepts at the door when striving to see new things and things in a new way, in order to express ourselves more fully.
When we tell a story, we bring ideas to life; we make them more real, more feel-able. That’s why our thought dramatizations need to be in service to what we truly want and wish to communicate. Recently, I was dramatizing the story of me as a victim, making it more and more vivid and more and more unbearable. I’d been on a roll of medical issues that culminated in falling – sort of on my face - in a parking lot. Once more I found myself back at the doctor’s. They patched me up, but two days later, I started fearing the cut on my chin had opened and was bleeding again and my mind went rabid. I cried, complained, and criticized the care I’d been given. I couldn’t seem to speak negatively enough. My tirade was so extreme I soon became self-conscious and felt compelled to try to stifle the rant, though it wasn’t easy. Once I stopped dramatizing those thoughts, pumping them full of life and power, relief started to come. When I insisted on stillness, I unstuck myself from the idea of me as a victim; and that story began to die.
If we want to move forward and keep up with the originality and dynamism of our own creativity, it requires getting unstuck from how we’ve seen and thought before. Ironically, being still has the power to move us. It can dislodge us from our last self-concept, end an old story, and put us back in step with ourselves.
Jennifer Paros is a writer, illustrator, and author of Violet Bing and the Grand House (Viking, 2007). She lives in Seattle. Please visit her website.