The Value of Mis-Steps
I hate re-working stuff.
Like when you do stuff when you’re only half-baked with your ideas or sense of mission, so you get really industrious, but seem to end up on a tangent that feels wrong after a while.
Which means you have to stop and pull back what you’ve done because it doesn’t really reflect where you want to be and you only did because you were caught up in the momentum of the trajectory.
You know, like when you have a coloured wool on your knitting needles and you don’t change the yarn to the next colour at the right time, and then you need to unravel what you’ve done in error. Or you’ve assembled a kit all wrong and then you go and read the instructions.
Mis-steps. I call things like these mis-steps. The longer you ignore them, the harder they are to rectify without destroying the work altogether.
However … there is value in mis-steps.
Despite my grumbling, I don’t mind making mistakes. After all, it’s how we learn.
The trick to making mistakes is to make different ones each time. Well, no more than three times, maximum. The first time, you are testing the waters. The second time is a miscalculation of your original correction. The third time, you really should be getting the hang of this by now. Any more errors, and you are just being sloppy in your awareness.
My young adulthood was an exercise in making the same mistakes again and again. Because I wasn’t listening to my soul at the time. I was only listening to the programming that I was immersed and trained in, and determined to implement it. My life was a clusterf*ck of self-caused pain and anguish. Particularly in forming healthy relationships and in finding my right livelihood.
However, was it REALLY a waste? Or was I just enrolled in the ‘University of Life’ where I was learning what I would later teach?
Think about all the mis-steps of your life. You know, the ones you give yourself grief about, the ones that you feel guilty or regretful over.
Admit it. These actually brought you a rich harvest of insights and wisdom. Or perhaps they were pivot points that forced you into a different direction that you had previously stubbornly resisted.
Mis-steps help you to pause and to go deeper, searching for the alignment with your heart, your Soul (same thing) that seeks expression.
So whenever you feel that your mission output feels bland or boring ... you're mis-stepping. Go back and revisit. What is it you TRULY want to say or do but feel inhibited or restricted from saying or doing?
Yet ... (devil's advocate here) ... there WILL be boring and bland periods of your mission where you will you'll be putting in grunt work in laying the foundations of your venture.
Where you may need to invest with time and/or money and/or attention in skills-building and infrastructure development. Well, these are the common ones for me, anyway.
So what I'm saying is that your quest, your mission, won't always full of peak experiences. But what you WILL feel, if you are on task, is a smoothness to the grunt work, the chop-wood carry-water aspects, because you sense that you are furthering your purpose.
And this is a totally different feeling to being on the wrong track of busy-ness.
I enjoy on-point conversations, and I'm quite willing to dig deeper on this topic.
Let me know what isn't clear or that I haven't addressed ... either at all, or to a satisfactory degree.
Be as personal or as general as you feel comfortable being. But be aware that in order to infuse more power into this package, I will likely use your query to help other participants as well.
Your questions and comments will help me to make this a stronger and more useful package.