Yesterday, the book proofs arrived in the mail. Just the day before, I had drawn a card from a reflection deck and the card was “Patience.” Picking the card made me sigh: I had had it with patience.
Yet, just like the pages in my own book on the first day I got to touch it, feel it, observe all the details of it, trying to push ourselves into the next phase of life, never works.
Limbos exist for a reason. The emptiness creates a rich space for reflection, where decisions don’t need to be made quite yet, and we can explore, more freely, by considering the weirdest of options. Many of us, like me, get irritated with the limbo, because our white-supremacy culture has educated us to measure our worth on our productivity: so limbos drive us crazy. We think if we’re not producing anything that is complete, that we are not producing at all.
But that ignores that some pages take days to turn. Some take years. Some decades.
When I opened the hardback cover of MY book for the first time, I cried. It took two years to finish this book, but nearly 30 years to conceive and learn enough to start writing it. The Limbo of the past two years made the birthing of the book possible. In the face of total upheaval of everything in my life–the book was the one anchor, my meditation directing me to the book every single time I prompted for clearer directions.
And even with all these expectation and yearning for the new, even with my mind’s rushing ahead and failed attempts at surrender, yesterday, the arrival of the book was nothing like I expected.
I expected to feel relieved and yearn to celebrate with a bunch of people and get drunk.
Instead, the unwrapping of book brought exhilaration mixed with a sense of completion: a serenity that had me celebrate yes, but by solving the small issues in the way of the Launch Party and then crashing, asleep. The book also arrived on a day I was reflecting on how the completion of this stage was ushering in a new me, how it was challenging me to think of my leadership beyond how I thought of myself, beyond what I could generate and what I could control. A friend was coaching me when the package arrived–so as giddy as I was, I could feel the energy of my new so strongly, that I felt like a whole new human being. I couldn’t have felt that way without the book actually arriving.
Rushing is silly. the only think that can give us the insight into a chapter that closes, is when It’s actually done.