are you banging on a closed door?

on agency, will and the art of allowing

Hélène Béland - "Light catcher" (2012)

Whenever I don’t write for long enough, my inner world starts to feel increasingly opaque, cloudy, uncertain. Before I notice that this is most likely just because I haven’t written in a while and therefore don’t really know what’s going on inside my head, I will invent a million reasons why I feel blocked and cloudy: I’m in the wrong place. I’m doing the wrong thing. I’m around the wrong people. I’m not doing enough. I need to be pushing harder, moving faster, doing more.

Because I grew up doing competitive gymnastics, I think that my default impulse following any “I’m not good enough” thoughts will always be to push harder, do more, to try and force something to happen through me. We were taught that the only factor that determined whether we were or were not getting what we wanted was how hard we were working. This conditioning has served me well in many ways. Sometimes the world needs you to be relentless, stubborn, intense and forceful to make what you see in your mind’s eye happen, to get what you really want.

But as I’ve gotten older and paid more attention to what happens when I flow through life a little more gracefully, curiously, and effortlessly — with less certainty and rigidity around how things need to look — I have noticed that if I make the space to actually notice how the world is responding to my pushes and pulls, I tend to see that there are much easier ways of doing things, and we can sometimes get an even better result by pausing, listening and redirecting instead of merely forcing your desires into existence through will alone.

One of the most obvious examples of this is the process of writing.

When I try to force my writing, I make it into a grand task that I need to Show Up For. I will identify with it as “work.” I create narratives saying I need to approach it at the right time, in the right state, to produce the right words.

But when I relate to writing this way, I simply Don’t Do It.

I will try to do it. I will plan to do it. I will schedule to do it. But I simply won’t do it. When I try to do it, I feel confused, lost, and frustrated that I don’t feel like I have much to say. When I schedule it, I will find something more important to do instead of it. When I make writing into Work, into a Chore, it becomes a new object for my mind to resist. Something I can make a game out of avoiding.

But when I treat writing for what it actually is: a mechanism to clarify my inner world, flesh out what is stirring inside my mind, and a tool to make sense of the way I am seeing the world in that moment, it just Flows.

Life is like this, too. When I try to force things too much—make things happen in exactly my image of how I think they should happen—it’s as though life resists me. Life doesn’t want to be pressed on so hard, forced into a shape it wasn’t naturally trying to move towards. It’s like pressing clay too hard when you are trying to make it into a smooth, round, pleasant shape. You need to be patient with it, let the material speak to you too, tell you how hard to press and where, instead of letting you have your way with it, recklessly and impatiently, and expecting it to look exactly as you hoped.

I believe that there is an intelligence in Life itself. A wisdom that acts not only through our intuition and the inclinations that pull us towards or away from certain things, but also in the things that find us, and in the things that resist us. There are always little cues around us that want to be noticed. Cues that we only do notice if we are moving slow enough to see them, and not pushing so hard and fast on Life that we leave no room for wonder and surprise.

Being human is a little complicated, because while we are viscerally connected to everything around us, we are also individuals—forces of agency, creativity and intelligence contained in a solo vessel.

But I believe that peak human flourishing happens when we act out our individual will in tune with the forces and wisdom of reality around us. It is when we balance the stubbornness, vision and assertiveness with an openness, curiosity and receptiveness. When we allow yin and yang, masculine and feminine, force and receptivity, to exist simultaneously within us. Embracing these polarities allows us to pay attention, to notice what is needed of us, and then to assert ourselves strategically, skillfully, wisely, and perhaps most importantly: enjoyably—instead of thinking we always need to be pushing so hard on life that we exhaust ourselves in the process. Yes, follow your inclinations; pursue the connections that feel ripe and alive, open the book that calls to you, email the person you look up to. Act out your unique will and intelligence. But equally, when you find yourself repeatedly banging on a closed, unwelcoming door, attempting to force something to happen that is just not working, it is also essential to pay attention to that, and to occasionally divert our effort and will elsewhere. Somewhere where it can more effortlessly, well, flow.

In short: the lesson I’m currently learning is how to balance will and ease. Assertiveness and attentiveness. Pushing and allowing. The only way I have found to effectively do this is to simply pay closer attention to your life. To notice how the world responds to your intentions and convictions, while leaving space openness for surprise, wonder, and for a little wink about how to make what you want happen without having to try so hard—without having to push, force or resist life so much. Instead, when you’re paying attention, and you know what you want, new ways of moving towards it seem to appear that don’t require so much energy, that simply allow you to flow.

Additional resources:

Hone in on your desires and clarify what is stirring inside of your inner world through my 1:1 work, Clarity Coaching.

Tune into your intuition, identify your natural gifts and unlock your unique creative intelligence with my self-guided course, Creative Liberation.

Cultivate your own writing practice with my free daily journalling guide.

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Part 2 of this essay is coming soon on how to mythologize your own life: