Are Your Feet Dragging Across The Ground?

Do you have the patience to wait

Until your mud settles and the water is clear?

Can you remain unmoving?

Until the right action arises by itself?

Lao Tzu

I’m writing this while listening to one of my favourite Rolling Stones tracks, Winter. As Mick Jagger sings, It sure been a hard, hard winter, My feet been draggin' 'cross the ground. I don’t know about you, but I certainly feel like I’ve been dragging mine across the muddy parklands of London!

For me, the start of 2021 is proving less a time for initiating new projects (as a new year often can be); rather, it’s one of clearing and contemplation.

I spent much of the past two years immersed in new motherhood, as well as completing and publishing a book. Along the way, my flat became a cluttered mess, thanks in no small part to the surprising amount of paraphernalia that accompanies a tiny person.

I’m finally knee-deep in a huge clear-out. Sifting through years of accumulated stuff is slow and laborious work. With each object, I’m asking myself, does this really belong to the life I lead today, or carry a profound enough resonance to justify keeping?

I try on a pair of vertiginous designer heels and realise I’ll never be that young woman heading out to a Saturday night party and longing to find love. I pick up a book on fertility and recognise I’m no longer that woman yearning to conceive.

While I’m looking forward to eventually living in a more orderly home again, I have a sense that clearing out what’s extraneous will also help make space for new energy to come into my life.

For as the intensity of early motherhood softens, and my book is out there in the world, I’m asking myself, what’s next, what projects are waiting to be born (alongside, of course, my yoga classes)? Again, this involves sifting through the various ideas that bubble up – some, mere whispers, others, a little louder and more insistent – and sitting with them, to gauge whether they might be a good fit, or are best left as flights of fancy.

I don’t yet have answers. And living in a culture that values action, productivity and moving ahead, at times this feels unsettling. A waste of precious time, even.

I have to then remind myself that it’s ok to not have answers. That marinating in the not-knowing is in itself a valuable and interesting process, and is what will ultimately create clarity. When I do act, I’ll be doing so from an intentional place, rather than rushing into something simply for the sake of doing.

As nature reminds us, fallow periods are as necessary a part of the cycle as the ones of full bloom. And that even when the winter soil is bare, beneath the surface spring is being prepared for. It will burst forth when the time is right.