When I am anxious or uncertain my first recourse is to have a plan, a checklist, a blueprint.  I think,  let me get out my template and do  a two year and a five year plan. In other words let me get some control over this beast called uncertainty. What I have discovered over the last several weeks as I have explored and put myself back into what I am loosely calling, “the space”, is that these kinds of plans are obsolete and unhelpful.  Change is moving so swiftly that it is hard to plan beyond the present moment. If I plan for a year from now based on what is now, my plan most certainly will not be modern or perhaps even relevant.  In many ways this is wonderful because it offers so many unthought of possibilities. If of course I can control my anxiety when nothing much is happening.

Throughout my life the “elevators” that have carried me up have for the most part been institutions, like schools , organizations and agencies (social service and now on the other side of the spectrum, modeling). Yet there has always been a little disconnect for me within these structures.  I am always torn between safety and my need to be in motion. My brain and sometimes my body is always going faster than the “elevator” can take me up.  Or there have not been enough floors to take me as high as I wish to go. They also create layers and rules about those you are really there and want to  interact with. I don’t like closing doors that leave some people behind. It has something to do with how long it takes established structures to change, to move and to protect themselves. The revelation I have had this week is that I have been somewhat out of sync with all the eras and elevators that I have lived and traveled inbefore. Happily, my body and brain is finally living in a cultural moment that suits my nature. I think this is why I have become somewhat organically successful by just putting myself in this “space”.  It is diving into deep dark water and not knowing what you will find or how you might look when you break the surface on the way up.  Wow, makes me feel like getting off the elevators and taking my own little self into the big wide world.

Where would you take a “walk” to?