Stuckness
In the meantime, my inner voices chastised me as lazy, just unwilling to put in the time it takes to build a business. Maybe I don’t have what it takes to be an entrepreneur. Maybe I just don’t have the right support. If I only find the right person, it’ll all fall into place.
Traveling gave me a new perspective. I didn’t mind dancing 8-10 hours per day. Hardly lazy! A few of us gravitated together to support each other in a more extroverted environment. Hardly lacking support. Instinctively, I knew there was something for me to learn here (well, other than the dancing!). I continued to ponder this when I returned to the foggy place I have trouble calling home (something else to take not of…). Again, I noticed that I had no trouble putting time and energy into certain things while I couldn’t motivate myself to do other things even when my inner voices where throwing a fit.
Then, this morning, I was thinking about truffle making. I make chocolate truffles to bring to parties and to give as gifts. Many people have suggested that I should start selling them. Some have even wanted to make contracts to buy them regularly. I tried this once – and didn’t like it. Something changed when I was making the truffles for sale rather than out of joy. I could not imagine, for example, offering them as a dessert for grits (how this line of thinking got started this morning…).
That’s about when everything started to make sense: My flippant “I just don’t want work” that’s contradicted with all the work I do makes sense since my reluctance is to work inside the money-economy, the current status quo. I don’t want to have to work 40 hours per week on one project that someone else tells me to work on. I don’t even want to work 40 hours per week on something I tell myself I should (!) work on. I don’t want to apply bandages to a system that requires radical alternatives. I don’t want to build pyramids, be a slave to someone or myself. I don’t want to give up my freedom!
And that’s why I get stuck: I don’t know how to survive otherwise. Or maybe that’s where the inner resistance is, for there are people who have dropped out, though given that most intentional communities have moved away from income sharing, these alternatives are getting less and less. Partly, I don’t pursue those alternatives, then, because they, too, are part of the current system (like intentional communities selling, at minimum, training others in their way of life).
I don’t yet know where to go from here, though I sense there’s more acceptance around my stuckness: There are probably fewer inner blocks and way more outer blocks than I have been willing to admit. It makes more sense now. At least to me. Now I just have to figure out how I can remove, or at least reduce, those outer blocks. And that requires another shift: Moving away from all this analysis to action! Trying things out rather than thinking about things…
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So appreciate your musings … i resonate with what you say, enjoy a sense of companionship, and have hope for possible insight into what’s going on!
I am glad you found this helpful, Lauren!
Thank you also for pointing me to Miki Kashtan’s musings that seem to be in a similar vein: Critical of methodologies that keep us stuck in our individual worlds when we really need to change the system(s) we are living in.
What I missed in her post, though, is the emphasis that personal whatever – growth or transformation – cannot be fully accomplished as individuals. We can only do that collectively, which is why I believe that personal and social/cultural transformation have to be integrated.