Laden...
Hey friend,
I have a new podcast and post and some other goodies for you later this week, but for now, I felt the need to share this:
I don’t know who you are. I don’t know where you are right now or how you’re feeling or if you’re worried about the economy or a virus or just what you’re going to eat for dinner tonight.
Maybe you’re feeling confused. Maybe you’re a little restless. Maybe none of this makes any sense and each day blurs into the next, and you’re wondering what to make of all this.
Maybe you’re just tired. I don’t know.
But I do know that sometimes you lie awake at night and wonder if anyone really cares. I know that you do things even you don’t understand, like spend too much time thinking about what others think or wander into the pantry for another snack or keep scrolling long after you remember why you came here in the first place.
I know that sometimes you’re afraid and think you must be doing this wrong or that you are an answer to a question nobody has even asked. I know you worry that maybe you’ve wasted your life and even now that you’re being a little melodramatic. Aren’t we all, though?
I know I think those thoughts and feel those feelings, and if you do too, then I want you to know: I see you. These days, there’s a lot to feel and so little to know.
So here’s what I believe:
I believe I am more than my feelings and silly-but-often-far-too-serious thoughts about, well, everything. I believe I am more than what I do and my hair in weird places and body odor and awkward poses that I have no control over.
I believe that I don’t just have soul that I am a soul.
And I believe that all truth can be found in the eyes of a child. Like last night, when I saw my son chase a kite around the park, running into the wind. The sun began to set, and it was the happiest moment of my life—until a moment later when my daughter dared me to race her up stairs she swore were covered in lava. I have never run so fast or loved life so much.
The evening went on like that until dusk, one wonderful moment after another until I realized that everything, EVERYTHING, is going to be all right.
And in that moment I felt free: from fear, from worry, from the pressure to do or be anything other than what I am right now. Whatever that might be. I don’t know much, but I do know this:
We all long for freedom.
These days, we may feel confined to a life we didn’t sign up for, struggling with the sense that we were made for than this. Our souls may very well be screaming by now. And if that’s you, then my humble advice is: Let it out.
Whatever wants to come, listen to it, honor it, and release it. That’s freedom. That’s art. That’s what it means to be alive: to express what’s already inside you.
Creativity is the unleashing of you, in all that you are, onto the earth. From the constraints of all our “should”s comes the expressions of our souls. The art we make, the words we write, the conversations we have are all an outpouring of that something inside us.
So let the soul seek, and maybe even find, the freedom it longs for.
Towards the end of of the Second Great War, Ernest Hemingway joined a battalion of soldiers who invaded Paris and helped them re-take the city. For weeks, he lived at the Ritz and drank champagne for breakfast every morning.
In the afternoons, he would walk the vacant city streets with the woman he loved. Showing her his old haunts from twenty years before, he said, “This is it, our one and only life.”
Forget everything else I said. All I know is this:
This is it. Our one and only life.
I hope you live it. And I hope I do, too.
Best,
Jeff
P.S. More to come later this week. In the meantime, shoot me a reply and tell me how you're living life to the fullest right now, and what you feel that you are being called to create or express in this season.Laden...
Laden...
