Advice--should you ever need it.

(This isn’t really about climbing hills...)

Do you ever find yourself in the middle? You have ideas, you take steps to execute them, but somewhere between the beginning and envisioning the goals, you find you are nowhere near the foothills and you can no longer see the summit?

Maybe you feel a bit lost because you’ve been climbing for a while and when you look in either direction you simply see green expanse and nothing else, surrounded by what you did not expect or anticipate. You may not feel this way now, but you might later. Keep this advice in mind:

Maybe you think finding another hill to climb might work better. (It won’t. Different landscapes might be nice initially, but the same climb awaits you.) Don’t let yourself down by entertaining leaving the path, but do rest alongside it.

Maybe you could sit down, have a picnic, even—enjoy yourself when you’re there. No sense making mountains out of molehills, if you allow me to be a bit meta.

Breathe. Take the rest of the day to stop walking so much. Remember there is no right way forward—there’s just moving when you can, no matter how small your step may be.

Perfectionism is the enemy of your goal but progress is always your friend, be she linear, circuitous, or jagged. She may even be disguising herself as two steps forward, one step back. (Yes, progress has the ability to appear as the trickster, Coyote.)

Pull a tarot card to get a fresh perspective. Connect with a friend. Stop to brew some tea. Go spend time in physical liminal spaces like a shoreline or the edge of a forest. What you need will find you if you open up the space for it.

I am waving at you as I sit in my own liminal space today, trying and trying and not meeting my personal expectations and needing to pull back a bit and rest. I offer proof that I have been making the crappy art—I just have to trust it will get me to the good art in the end.

And I have been writing the crappy poems, putting them away and looking at them days later, believing in time they will become good poems. As Kuipers states in her poem “With Garbo in Palm Springs” from her book Lonely Women Make Good Lovers, “…we go outside to smoke/her cigarettes, to lean our backs against the white/adobe walls and kiss as long as it takes.”

It will happen when it happens—we can’t force it and we can’t abandon it; we must simply abide by it.