I love being good at things.
I love achieving and performing.
It drives me.
I want to be the best at everything.
I want to learn everything I can about the world, so that I can use that knowledge to help improve it.
I have this innate need to create harmony and make everything better.
Maybe that’s my calling here. Maybe it’s my purpose. If you believe in that type of thing.
Knowing every angle of every single thing gives me comfort. I told someone the other day, “I’m like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. I’ve mapped it all out already. It’s just a matter of which way it’ll go.” When you can control and know your situation, it makes everything easier. Any additional variable can be weighed at that moment because everything else is defined.
Except…right now nothing is defined. Our business and lives are in a state where I don’t know if we’ll survive this thing. I feel like there have been stages of grief with that.
Denial.
Anger.
Sadness.
Despair.
It’s something to give up EVERYTHING for a business, to have it expose every fault in your relationship, to have it rip everything from you materialistically and financially, to have it occupy SO much time and brain space and constantly be failing and fucking shit up and then having glorious successes… and then, when you finally think you have it and you’re slightly less exhausted and things FINALLY seem like, hey, maybe we can let off the gas and actually focus on GROWING and improving this thing…. then just not really know, all of a sudden.
I can’t market to people in the traditional way that we do.
I can’t throw huge epic food festivals.
I can’t bring people in for my new exciting trivia idea.
I can’t host Silent Disco.
I can’t really sell beer to anyone.
That’s fucking scary as fuck.
I stayed up until 3am on Saturday night after I bartended all night, researching and coming up with ideas and trying to pick apart every little strategy to balance the ethics of bringing people together during this time with needing to make money. There was nothing.
Every time the leadership team sat down (and it happened a few times), whatever we strategized got turned around by another new rule or the disposition of the public, or a circumstance outside of our control.
Weird things were happening. I kept dropping bowls of food and breaking them, I knocked an entire glass of water between my kitchen cabinet and fridge and had to move the fridge to mop it up, my to-go fork broke into my salad and the entire salad fell into my lap. My lights have been flickering like crazy, and I cannot figure out how to fix them.
And I sat there, and I was trying to figure it out. And then I realized – I’m in resistance. I’m literally resisting the flow of energy in the universe by trying to control literally everything or ANYTHING I can. I’m grasping so tightly to this thing that we created that I cannot let go of because somehow at some point I allowed myself to believe that it’s all we have. It was my worth. That failure in this one thing was EVERYTHING.
But it’s not.
I have beautiful children.
I have incredible friends.
I have an ability to connect uniquely with people and elevate their energy.
I have writing.
I have singing.
I have books and reading and learning.
I have laughing.
I have love ALL around me.
So, I took a shower Sunday. And I let everything flow off of me. And I just, gave in. I decided to stop trying to control it. To stop worrying about what would happen and how we could ever make it through 2 weeks closed, let alone the months that could come. I stopped lamenting, I stopped considering all the angles.
And then today – it just kinda came. I was at Publix (it was RIDICULOUSLY busy) and some old man was looking through the Apple Cider vinegar, FaceTiming his wife. They were trying to figure out which one to get. And while we were trying to get in and out as quickly as possible, I stopped as I heard him reading the labels to her, and I said, “If you’re getting it for your immune system, get the organic one with the mother in it,” and I pointed at two bottles. He was so grateful.
I smiled so widely, because I realized that this virus is giving people the perfect opportunity to see where they can improve their diet and immune system and overall health and wellbeing. And that’s MAJOR for the elevation of the world. It all starts with yourself. I know this because it was my journey, too.
I realized that this isn’t the time for me to connect people with beer and causes and food events.
This is the time for me to connect people with themselves… to go deep inside and bring out the people that we can be without all the noise. Without the rat race, without the politics, without the toxic masculine energy that seems to dominate our world today and without all the garbage we consume.
So, as I’ve told every single client of mine since I started marketing and NEVER STOPPED, because it’s goddamn good advice:
Be a resource.
Be what your people need.
Identify their feelings and their fears and their worries and concerns, and help them.
And I started doing that. And since, the ideas are coming back. It’s like the Thought Muse is rewarding me.
Maybe sometimes we just have to let go of things we’re grasping so tightly to and let everything unfold in the perfect way it’s meant to.
There is opportunity in everything.
It feels easier to flow with things.
You’re not constantly stuck in a state of frustration.
You just have faith, because everything is working exactly as it should.
This is the movement and energetic force of the universe, and as long as you make decisions in integrity that align with your highest good, you have nothing to worry about.
So, maybe I’ll just leave you with the lyrics to a song by Trevor Hall called The World Keeps Turnin’:
Seek and hide
Come along for the ride
There’ll be many many ups and downs
Like the waves of the ocean
Return me to that sea again
First you’re born then you die
Then you smile as you cry
But the song is lovely
The melody is filled with fire
Listen closely
Lifted higher
But all things
They must pass
I say all things
They won’t last
We can go a thousand miles in the blink of an eye
When our loved ones leave us we often cry
We don’t know where we’re going
But we know where we’ve been
With this love in our hearts
There can be no sin
Give it all to the sky
And rest your mind
The world keeps turnin’
It gets merry like a merry go ’round
It gets cold like a frozen winter
Well I change like summer fall
But I know love is all in all
Seeds we’re always sowing
The grace is always blowing
We’ve just got to lift the sail
And we’re bound to hit the shore
We’ll finally calm this storm
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