I just had a conversation with my wife… and it didn’t go well. She was really excited and dreaming about something, how she wants our life to look someday, and I couldn’t see the forest for the trees. So I ended up doing what I often do and injected a dose of man-logic and reality into the conversation. It wasn’t received well.
And on the tail end of this conversation, I found myself thinking to myself, “Why am I this way? Why do I have such a hard time dreaming sometimes?”
The gist of the conversation was this: My wife and I love camping, we love being in the outdoors, hiking and backpacking, things like that. I grew up in the outdoors. I was raised in rural Pennsylvania in the Appalachians; I was always outside. Camping, backpacking, fishing, hiking, it was just a way of life, it was what we did. My wife on the other hand grew up in a major industrial area about 20 minutes south of Milwaukee and 45 north of Chicago. The landscape looks country enough in the way that pancake flat farmlands look like the country; but it’s the midwest. There’s no mountains, or any land structure for that matter; “hiking” would be taking a wlak through a corn field. There’s no wilderness and it’s within commuting distance of both the second largest city in the country, Chicago, and Milwaukee.
Vastly different.
I tell you this to highlight the irony of this conversation that we had this morning. The context was what we want our eventual life to look like. The specific is that my wife wants to spend a fair amount of time on the road, overlanding, camping, hiking exploring. Now, for the record, I freaking love this idea. It fits the type of person that I am perfectly and furthermore, I never thought that my wife would be on board for that type of largely nomadic lifestyle. But for some reason, I resisted.
Part of my resistance was a misunderstanding/miscommunication between us. And all the married people reading this (of the 3 people reading this, are any of you married?), said, “amen”, because they know that is the root of most arguments in a marriage.
But by the end of the conversation, like I said, I found myself wondering why I was struggling to be on board with this situation. It’s the exact kind of situation I would love to have. In fact a few short years ago, the role was reversed and I was trying to convince her about the viability of van-life, and she was the one not on board. And what I can come up with as to why I resisted is that it’s the same reason that we struggle with consistently being creative.
See, I am bringing it full circle to the conversation that we’ve been having in previous posts about creativity.
It’s pretty simple, though. Talking about living the nomadic, van-life, exploring, over the road, moments over mountains lifestyle is simple, easy, fun. Talking about it gets the blood flowing and gives you a quick dopamine hit even though you haven’t actually done anything about it. Actually going and doing it is scary.
Creativity is a lot like that. We can talk about it until we’re blue in the face. We can get the dopamine hit off of, as Chase Jarvis says, “optimizing our workflow even though there’s no work flowing through it”, and feel accomplished for a moment. But then when we wake up the next day and have nothing to show for yesterday’s work, we sink low. Until we actually make something, none of it matters. The talk doesn’t matter, the idea doesn’t matter, the plan doesn’t matter, none of it matters until something has actually been made as a result of all of that.
We have to take the plunge. Jump in the cold shower, no prep. Go cliff jumping, wisely of course, don’t die. Make that movie. Take that photo. Write on Medium everyday to get rid of your jerk reaction that you have in resistance to actually doing the work.
I don’t care what it is but if it scares you, run after it. And if you find out that you don’t like the decision that you’ve made, the good news is that it won’t kill you. Just turn around. Our brains are designed to keep us safe; fear is that safety mecahnism. The good news is that there’s very few things in this world that we’re afraid of that will actually hurt us.
Like going lifestyle over-landing with my wife, which has actually been a lifelong dream of mine anyways. If we don’t like it, we can just turn around. Literally.
Thanks for reading (all three of you). Much love. Peace.
