What’s the difference between unrealised potential and late blooming?
For anyone who’s doubting themselves and feeling disheartened about their “results” despite caring, learning and risking for a long while
We live in “dangerous times”, we get bombarded with information overload daily, yet we still care extra deeply. This is the norm for people with naturally sensitive constitutions such as my clients and me too.
No wonder we often feel overwhelmed and disheartened!
The more conscientious you are, the more easily you can end up fearing that you won’t realise your potential which only tangles things up even more.
What if we relaxed about demonstrating “results” and understood better why it is that the best things in life require discomfort and time?
What if we appreciated rather then angsted over the deep processing way of experiencing life and projects?
Here is hoping that my recent late bloomer experience will catalyse your courage.
It all started in the troubled summer of 2020
That summer, I found myself stepping into a brand new archetype - of an artist.
Art seems kind of romantic but courting it during the pandemic, just as I stepped into my fifties… I’ve had heaps of discomfort and guilt about it ever since.
It happened kind of accidentally, as an idea for the staycation that year. I decided to travel inside a multimedia art journal instead of the more “normal” geographic way.
The staycation was a revelation and started my multimedia compulsion but I’ve worried a lot that it’s an indulgence and a distraction from the duties of my self-employed work.
The artist archetype has not been an easy escape but rather a source of a lot of suffering. I find it very painful to long for beauty/wonder but then to generate mostly ugly marks.
It doesn’t help that art is not something that you can push yourself with to get better results.
Quite the opposite. The art world calls this paradoxical relationship between trying LESS hard and getting better outcomes being “loose”.
I find this way challenging so my art-ing compulsion and discomfort have felt a lot like a misguided investment of energy. My art buddy could tell you how often I’ve reported angst while grappling with it all, now for four years.
And then, this morning, a revelation.
A single moment in the kitchen brought the missing coherence inside.
It was such a gift that it made me sit and write about it - on my day off - to capture the miracle that hit me.
Suddenly, yet quietly, deeply, I saw how my art-ing compulsion enhances the rest of what’s most important to me.
As I walked to the kettle to start my day with coffee, I passed a piece of painted paper from last night and I cringed with pain from how ugly it was.
“Pitifully ugly and a pointless waste of time”, the inner critic declared as she looked at the paper which included this fragment:
I made coffee and sat down to look again, ready to judge myself some more, when I remembered the question that intrigued me from a colleague demonstrating her painting process:
“What will RESOLVE this piece?”
The choice of the verb intrigued me again.
I found myself wondering, what would happen if I didn’t hope to make my piece beautiful but got interested in how to resolve it?
What would I do next if I didn’t push for acceptable results but got curious about what’s needed to resolve things here?
Suddenly, unexpectedly, I knew what to do.
As I added doodles with my black pen, it all came without trying and without knowing how I knew what to do to resolve the piece (for me ;-).
Not only that, but AS I was doodling, several other outstanding questions (about my work and life) began to resolve themselves inside me.
Aha’s came one after another, and I was in rapture and deep, all-engulfing gratitude.
The perk of the late bloomer trajectory is the depth of the findings
Some revelations that came through this morning were quite detailed and unexpected, on things I didn’t even know I had been incubating questions about still.
(Such as why Ursula K. Le Guin described herself as an anarchist even though she was devoted to researching societal rules and options.)
What I couldn't understand logically, through a linear enquiry, about Ursula, about my art compulsion AND about my coaching work were now coming through - FROM DOODLING.
In a way that I could not begin to explain to linear evaluators, despite so much discomfort and seeming delay, the late blooming “harvest” was so deeply WORTH IT.
And my “ugly” mark-making was the portal and the illuminator of SEVERAL precious understandings, including how some of the marks were finished and some - on purpose - showed an “in progress” status:
It’s not completely surprising that art delivered precious value to me
I HAVE received pointers about the value of art and the non-verbal before, for example by learning from Sarah Peyton that engaging the right-brain more increases healing and lived wisdom.
But it’s been hard to remember this value when the inner critic deploys its “motivation”.
Yet, these newest “ugly” marks showed me how special the act of art-ing and the path of late-blooming both are.
Both, art-making and processing life deeply, sensitively get you to BE with everything that’s living inside you and require you to relate to options in a non-direct, non-pursuing way.
Otherwise you try too hard and the output goes painfully ugly: blocked, uncomfortable, unresolved.
What engaging in art-making and late-blooming brings about is NOT escapism but compound-effect progress with things that matter most.
Both, art-ing and living sensitively catalyse deeper, truer progress
It’s often hard to see the value of the less-trodden paths because the revelations on these paths emerge on their own terms. They do not comply with social conditioning nor with pushing for “shoulds”.
We cannot rush the timing or the outcome of art-ing (nor resolving questions that matter) so to our linear perception the process can feel uncomfortably insufficient. Or wrong.
Yet, when it all comes together, when you feel that not an ounce of your soul’s compulsion was accidental or wasted, you see how it was all more than worth it.
The difference between unrealised potential and late blooming is the difference between concluding wrongness and staying in the process until gratitude-filled resolution.
Joy braides itself into there too, I’ve found.
I wonder if life works like this too. Something tells me that it might.
3 Journalling Prompts to Appreciate Your Inner Late-Bloomer:
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