Your nervous system is tired of needing to know
The skill of practiced impatience
I used to think I was an impatient person. I realize I was just practicing it. A skill I used to appease the part of me that screamed, “but I need to know.” And that it isn’t a necessary part, nor a useful skill, now.
I got a 2000 piece puzzle on the weekend. It’s my first big puzzle in 12 years. The last one was 1000. After I took it apart I thought I’d pull it out again but I never did. Maybe I couldn’t stomach putting it together, just to take it apart again.
Learning to let things fall apart
But that’s all I’ve watched myself do these past six months. Learning a new level of relinquishing control. Letting things fall apart. Rebuilding with no certainty, no guarantee of what’s on the other side.
There are times throughout the day where this feels incredibly freeing. Empowering. There are times throughout the day where it feels like the bottom has fallen out and all my insides are exposed and I’m terrified. There are times when I celebrate because I get a sign of validation. There are times when I tell myself, “See, you suck,” when there’s lack of it.
Exhale.
Hitting the nerve of truth
Sometimes I say things that are hard to admit and then I tear up for a sec cuz I finally hit the nerve of truth. And then it’s like okay, we touched the thing we were avoiding. Now we can focus on the thing, and not everything else I was doing to distract from the thing.
I’ve noticed that the state of my nervous system, the health of it, is in direct correlation with how honest I’m willing to be with myself.
I’m looking at 2000 pieces of a fragmented image to tell me, “Just the next move.”
One piece of writing. One piece of content, published every day. Some pieces are obvious where they belong. Some pieces stay ambiguous until the very end, when most of the image has come together, and it’s really just by process of elimination that I figure out where it goes.
The skill of the next move
In many ways the beginning of a puzzle is the most satisfying. In a sea of brokenness two things go together, perfectly. And then you add to it, you find another one that connects. You don’t look at the whole thing and expect to know where everything goes. You just look for the next piece that fits.
And when the pieces are that small, the image doesn’t make sense yet. But there isn’t a rush to make it make sense. You see the colour, the pattern on it, and you look for something similar. You look at the shape and curve of the edge of that piece, and you look for its opposite.
This zeroing in on just the next thing is so deliberate. There is nothing else humming in the background. No “what if I get it wrong, what if I look like a fool.” It’s just trying and moving and letting your eyes do what they do, scan for what you’re looking for. All the micromovements automatic, focused, aware.
There isn’t a timeline or a rush to get this done. I enjoy this time I have with it. Because I know at the end of it, I will take it apart.
Stability doesn’t require things to stay the same
Love and creativity exist in a million forms. Countless. Our expression is not limited to whatever ideas we have of what it means. Every day I ask myself, what feels important to share? And then I have to make peace with the fact that it won’t always be expressed perfectly. That I can’t control how it’s received once it’s outside of me. All I can control is that it gets outside of me.
My nervous system is so tired of holding. Holding onto things for the sake of thinking I need it to survive, when I don’t. And I know that every time I do something new it will feel like it’s falling apart. But I can’t rebuild without it doing so.
All I can show it is that the foundations I’ve built are strong enough to hold us. Stability doesn’t require things to stay the same. It requires our acceptance that things will always change. And the practice of taking it apart, willingly. The practice of knowing that rebuilding isn’t as hard as we’ve convinced ourselves. It just requires the next move.
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The nervous system doesn’t learn by thinking - it learns by practicing. If you’re ready to stop holding everything together and start being honest with what’s actually there, book a reset with me.
