It’s been a month since I decided to come back to my business, Crooked Calligraphy, in a completely new way.
(Read the business manifesto I published on February 15, 2023.)
Here’s something my unconscious revealed to me today: This experiment is WAY more important than I realized.
I NEED to do this business experiment because I NEED to know THAT there is something else out there taking care of me, other than myself.
It’s like a trust fall with the universe… if I let go of the productivity, the “value add”, the to-do checklists and laundry baskets… will I still be ok?
As I type this, I feel myself starting to cry because this isn’t just a BUSINESS experiment, it’s a RELIGIOUS experiment.
I’ve held on so tightly for all my life. Gripping the wheel like I was in charge of steering the entire bus of my security and well-being. Surely if I got up from that driver’s seat and laid in the backseat to play video games, the bus would crash, flip over and spontaneously combust.
And now as I’m typing this, goddamnit, I’m realizing how similar this all sounds to the whole “Jesus Take the Wheel” idea.
….And that makes me go “ick” because I went to a very dogmatic, Baptist Christian elementary school and I witnessed a lot of hypocrisy and hate.
But this idea of mine is NOT new, for crying out loud. This idea that we need to let go of control; that our feeble, rationalizing, socialized, pre-frontal cortexes can’t possibly see all the solutions.
I need to believe that there’s some kind of magic in this world. Whether that’s called divinity or source or the universe or nature or just the whole of our bodies taking in and processing more millions of bits of data than our “logical” minds can know…
This past year hasn’t just been a “break from business” or sabbatical or even a well-deserved “rest and recharge.” It’s been, and continues to be, a radical act of FAITH.