Show me what the work is asking of me now.
Field Notes 20260718 - Saturday
“Show me where the becoming-work is asking to go next” was today’s cast during my usual long-er weekend meditation session. The typical process over the last few months has been identifying the general theme of the week and then letting these sessions cast more light on the subject. In some cases that looks like an in-trance vision, contact, post-session immersive altered states such as projection, lucid dreaming, bilocation, Liminal encounter at the thresholds, or synchronicity and intuition delivery hours or days after. Heck, even dreams are a big part of it, and rightfully so.
There’s another possibility that sometimes happens, and that possibility includes absolutely nothing. Today the ground was laid for that possibility to arise.
Today’s Field Notes illustration:
The Tower - Major Arcana XVI. A rendition of the sixteenth trump of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, drawn by Pamela Colman Smith in 1909. In the canonical image a grey tower stands on an isolated crag, struck at its peak by a jagged bolt of lightning. The strike knocks the tower’s golden crown clean off, flames pour from its three windows, and two figures fall headlong through a black sky scattered with twenty-two flames shaped like the Hebrew letter yod. The rock beneath the tower is untouched. It speaks to this week directly: a cast that returned absolutely nothing at the threshold while the strike had already landed elsewhere, part of the tower knocked down, the foundation holding. In meditation, hold the image and notice which part of you grips the crown and which part stands on the rock. What falls was never the foundation.
The irony in not getting anything out of “Show me where the becoming-work is asking to go next” is oh so sweet. I mean, think about it, would it ever be that simple for a query like that? Might as well change it to, “Tell me how I’m going to get rich right now!” To be clear, there is nothing about the actual query to suggest any expectations of riches, but it fits into the same kind of question as the hypothetical anecdote one does.
As I lay there on the daybed in the office, seemingly miles away from the threshold, I kept turning the question in my head and realized it was a lot more about the “how” than the “what.” The subject of the query, “the becoming-work,” reeks of the how, and then “asking to go next” is yet another finger pointed at the how. A better approach would have reshuffled the query into, at the very least, “Show me what the work is asking of me now.”
It’s not necessarily about stating what in the query so specifically but rather being neutral in the approach to “the work,” as I know very well that it always moves forward and evolves, and it’s especially efficient at that when I don’t press on the muse by cornering it with qualifiers such as “becoming.”
I’m being a bit harsh here, but in light of recent decisions and moves regarding my practice and Percept Index, I believe it is important to recognize and hold the line where it must be held. Earlier this week I wrote an essay on what this project means to me and what I want from it, a statement that was long overdue and came as if directed by my North Star.
In this essay I outlined from where this project originated, what it was in the early stages, and how it evolved into what it is now. The fact that it has moved from one stage to the next naturally, broken down and rebuilt in realtime. Perhaps part of the tower was knocked down so a better version could be built on the already-solid foundation. Moves like this can become frightening, paralyzing, and miserable — if that is your default mode, and let’s be honest, most of us have operated out of this mindset for a very long time.
Why? Because we grip what we have. “If I let go, then I might not have anything left!” the ego shouts. The very first thought during these internal conversations is typically “How will I build it back up?” You think through various scenarios, the effort it will take, what to do first and when to do it, how much time it’ll take, and on and on. Paralyzing, I know, I’ve done this.
I’ve done this so much over the years that I found myself absolutely convinced that it’s impossible to know what you want without the details on how to achieve it. This sounds logical at first until you reread the paragraph before this one.
So, what do you do?
Demolish what’s not working, cast aside fear about it all, and trust yourself that you are already handling the how even if you haven’t thought about what that means at all. In fact, don’t think about the how, let the action of rebuilding dictate the details of “the how” in realtime.
All of this reminds me of training sessions I run at my agency. 99% of the time, the trainees are apprehensive to downright terrified of a new system, process, and way of doing things. Prior to these sessions, I encourage users to jump in the new system and kick the tires. When the training session finally arrives, I ask and find out that they haven’t even thought about touching the user interface or glanced at the guides/SOPs.
The training time is then often mired in alleviating anxieties and walking folks off the ledge. Follow-up questions from the gallery at the end of the training are usually chock-full of situations easily remedied by logging in and clicking some things without knowing anything about the interface at all.
Surprising? Not really. I’ve lived that exact life myself for a long time. We figure something out, it helps us in some way, be it money or other resources, and then we’re forever afraid to change anything about it because the ego might be threatened and we’re revealed to be some kind of idiot frauds that don’t deserve what we have. Maybe I was harsher on myself than others, but I truly see this in so many people, professional or not.
Just like the Major Arcana card “The Tower,” when we are faced with a change, big or small, we have a choice to see it as destructive and miserable or exciting, new, and necessary. I add the word “necessary” because it is the biggest aspect of change to bring about what you really want.
Your perspective shapes how you experience your reality, how you react (or don’t) to challenges and change, and ultimately what you manifest in your life, about your life, and after your life.
