A Day of Yes: Learning to Go with the Flow
I’m writing this from the Seattle airport after a fabulous 4th of July weekend celebrating the wedding of dear friends. It was a great wedding. It included group charades, a morning Dance Church workout, heartfelt vows, beautiful mountains, and river plunges.
Traveling again also gave me lots of insights into our new world, the world of COVID winding down. It was 107 degrees when I arrived in Bend, an unprecedented temperature. The rental car agency only had one harried-looking employee, who told me about worker shortages as we cursorily inspected the car. The Whole Foods, where I stopped to grab some trail food, had naked shelves. They, too, couldn’t hire enough people to make their premade guac or run their bakery ovens. Clearly, the workforce and our very environment are changing.
But after a fascinating internet tour of articles on the Remote Revolution, I decided not to write about workforces, or the 5th Industrial Revolution, or wildfire trends in the American Northwest. No. I’m on vacation, a time to drink in the scent of hot pine needles on crushed granite pebbles, to admire snowy peaks from every angle (including the top), to get clean by repeated river plunges, to walk through warm night air like velvet. I want to take my own advice and let vacation do its work. And the question, “What is the purpose for which I was born?” is still on my mind.
The Purpose Program for which I have been a practice client recently ended. The outcome we work towards during all twelve modules is a complete Purpose Octagon, which can be distilled into a Purpose Statement that participants then use to go out and change the world. I did not emerge with a glistening Purpose Statement. I felt that I had grown a lot but that I wasn’t yet finished. After sitting with this great disappointment for a few weeks, I decided that I still believe that a clarity and certainty of purpose is possible for me, but there is more work to do. I would continue my search for my own purpose, which I think of as an unearthing of what is already present within me. I brainstormed some things I think I’d like to learn more about in my own, next six months of Purpose Discovery:
Re-wholing
I think of re-wholing as the continued self-awareness and healing work that must be done to welcome all the parts of ourselves to the table. It’s about being physically and spiritually strong enough to hear a truth that may surprise us and letting it guide our path.
Understanding my own coping mechanisms and soul distractions
Discovering my south and west selves
Making great habits but have good reasons for breaking them
Caring for my body as the gateway to my soul
Dialogue with Soul
I think of Dialogue with Soul as those quiet moments of epiphany, the moments of clarity and confidence where the wisdom of the universe is pouring into us and we become animated by, a conduit for, our unique soul’s purpose, like when we are inspired to make beautiful art or wake from a dream to find the answer we’ve been seeking is there for us.
A backpacking Soul Quest
Writer’s retreat
Setting Sail
I think of Setting Sail as the moment of trust in which we “cast off” from the moorings of certainty and surrender to the winds of our own potential, our own destiny. It is about being swept up in the invisible currents of our own fate and our free will.
Giving more love
Days of yes
My curricular mind wants to put these Lucretia Purpose Modules into an order. First, you rebuild yourself, then you dialogue with your soul, then you set sail. You’re becoming more proficient, building the skills of emotional adulthood, until you are ready to know and embody what evolution, what Mother Earth, has put you here to do. Imagine letting go of the anchor lines of life without a plan!
While it CAN be done this way, I actually believe that you don’t HAVE to arrive at your purpose in a linear way. Soul growth can, I hypothesize, be made in swoops and leaps or slogs and grinds. When we live in our rational, conditioned mind we might fight the truths our soul wants to show us. We might change incrementally, bound by our daily routines and pragmatic concerns. But when we travel, we have the chance to relinquish responsibilities and identities, to hit the surface of an unknown place with a splash that washes our way of thinking away. Yesterday I drove from Camp Sherman, OR, across six and a half hours of Oregon Scenic Highway and two national forests. I had no service, no company, just a passenger seat full of water bottles and cherries bought from a roadside stand. I felt unrecognizable from the person I was last Monday, sweating in the New Hampshire humidity while I led a Zoom session for 45 people from the relative cool of my stone basement.
And it’s not that I want to escape from my normal life, not at all. I love New Hampshire. As excited as I was for this wedding and the Wilderness First Responder course I’m heading for, I didn’t want to leave my burgeoning crop of tomatoes, my comfortable house, my sweet puppy, or summer at home. But there’s something about the leaving process that gives us a chance to plunge into soul awareness rather than wading in inch by inch.
So I’m starting with my Setting Sail strategies. And the first one is days of yes.
What is a day of yes, you might ask? It’s a Lucretia creation. How it works is you create a day with nothing that must be done. This can be hard to do. Many of us have children, pets, volunteer organizations, religious organizations that rely on us. The important thing is to focus on creating the space, entering with a new approach, paring down to our most elemental way of seeing the world-- whether that means we bring our children or pets or significant others along with us on this day or find a way to step away from our known relationships.
Then, when your day of yes begins, you sleep until you wake up naturally. You have a treat for breakfast— maybe you make yourself sourdough pancakes, maybe you go out. Then for the rest of the day, you say yes to anything you ask yourself, or anything that invites you. Is this the right trail? Yes. Should I stop and buy some cherries? Yes. Do you want to come float the river with us? Yes. Can I take a nap in the sunshine? Yes. Maybe you even tell the people you love about your upcoming day of yes. “This Saturday,” you’ll say, “I’m going to say yes to anything anyone asks me to do.” Can you imagine what might happen on a day like that?
You might wonder, why this approach? We only get two weekend days, we might as well use them for the things we want and need to do. We won’t catch sunrise on the mountaintop unless we set the early alarm, right?
I need a day of yes because in my own personal journey with fate and free will, I’ve clung so desperately to my own notions of self-determination that it’s almost like I’ve spurned fate. Let me give an analogy to make my father the circumnavigator proud. When sailing, we are subject to the currents of the ocean and the direction of the wind. To reach our destination we trim our sails in response to the wind, we think that’s what’s taking us toward our destination because it moves us in relation to the water. We’re aware of the sails we’ve raised and the way we’ve trimmed them—it’s our free will to set our course in reaction to the life circumstances we face.
But we’re also being acted on by the current, which carries us along without us even noticing. There are currents of outside pressures that sweep us along on the quest for safety and security. There are tides, the cycles of nature moving around us. There are deep currents under the surface, maybe the impulse of our wounded selves that we may not be aware of. If we forget about these currents in our navigation, we may find ourselves surprised at where we end up. Days of yes are about floating on the current with sails limp and empty, to return to the journey tomorrow with a new awareness of the currents that may be carrying us outside our conscious choices
I haven’t done a day of yes yet, but here’s what I imagine. I imagine that with no preplanning, I’ll listen— really listen— to what my body needs. More sleep, more exercise, healthier food, more vitamin D? Perhaps all of them. I imagine that with no expectation other than to say yes, I’ll never be running late, I’ll crush my to do list with a single word (no, it’s not “COMPLETE”), I’ll feel successful at the end of the day. I imagine that if I say yes to everything, I’m opening doors for the universe to step in and guide me, like an invisible thread.
I’ll be doing my day of yes on July 23. I have nothing I must do, it’ll be my first day home from vacation. Maybe you’ll be a part of it with an unexpected invitation? Maybe I’ll be a part of yours.