Ode to Puttering
The Great Unknown can sound intimidating. And, justifiably so, to stand on the actual brink of conceptlessness is no joke, and if you have touched that place you realize that all ideas you had about what that would feel like, and what it would do in your psyche were completely unrelated to the real experience.
It's nice to dial it back a notch and realize that the reality of hanging out on the burbling fountain of eternal NOW can also be pretty bread and butter. We often spend time bobbing along on the river of Now without even realizing that that is what we are doing.
For example, have you ever spent the day puttering?
Ooooooh. Just the word is enough to conjure happy times.
Putter.
Humor me, read it again.
Putter around the garden. Putter around the house. Putter through the afternoon. Putter in the puddles.
You may want to pause reading here and go putter. So what is so great about puttering? And how does it relate to the Not-Knowing?
Puttering, my friend, is a state devoid of needing to know what to do, a state devoid of figuring it out. The ‘I-Know’ mind is taking a nap. Have you ever noticed that when you really get into puttering SO MUCH GETS DONE? And usually these are things that you had no intention of doing, yet you end up doing them, and it is SO FUN.
We all know how to relax into Not-Knowing, but more in a second-breakfast-hobbit way than a grand-elf-master way.
When you putter, the gnarled ancient sinews of ‘I freaking have to do this right now or all will be shit’ or ‘if I don’t do this today no one else is ever going to do it’ or ‘I better buckle down and bite the bullet’ noosed up tight around joy and actual creativity magically untie in a nanosecond. It doesn’t take much.
If you’re scared to let go and putter, put a time limit on it. I share that technique with clients all the time. Just put a timer on the whole sh'bang. The I-Know mind likes this, the timer lets it relax because at least by God it knows that this risky puttering business has an end point. So set a timer for an hour and go putter. See what happens.
I have fun thinking about all of you dropping your to-do list and puttering instead. Tell me what you end up doing.
There will likely be some weird things, like ‘I scrubbed the gunk at the base of my toilet and shower tiles while shaking my butt in the air to Madonna for an hour’ (I put this one out there because it’s something that has happened to me once when I let go of my grumpy plans)
or ‘I pet my cat and my belly melted into a puddle at the base of the couch, and then I called the electric company and had the friendliest conversation about last month’s bill that's been scaring th sh** of me’’
or ‘I pruned the entire apple tree while learning every dang birdsong flitting through the yard with the Merlin app’
or ‘I watched the sunlight reflected on the ceiling dancing out of the dishwater and realized that all I wanted to do was actually listen to how psyched my kid was about video games’.
I think you get the picture. As a client recently said ‘it’s not like I’m mindlessly doing things when I putter… I’m THERE.’ And lo, that is what happens when the figure-it-all-outter takes a nap. We are THERE, and we pour love into whatever is directly in front of us.
I am offering a 3-month group course in this kind of hobbity not-knowing starting June 16th. Message me if you are interested. I can hands down say that group course is, (as my 14 yr old says), 'Fire'.
