I don’t know about you but I think human beings tend to be somewhat crisis oriented. We don’t really reach down into ourselves for answers until everything we’ve tried to do to control the world around us fails.
As long as you have the familiar sights around you – things that you think you know – there is a sense of security. But when you leave the place that you know, and things aren’t working (e.g. Thomas Edison’s 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at a light bulb), you have to reach deeper into yourself to keep going.
This post is #5 in a series of 12 in which I share my names for the archetypal steps we take in the creative journey of personal awakening.
Step 5: Go deep and look out.
The fifth step in the journey is to go deep and look out. Station five in the Wheel of Creativity is Isolation. Isolation is the moment of despair. It’s the place where everything thought was going to happen didn’t.
If you’ve ever set out to try to create something and found yourself on the verge of failure, where nothing’s working and you’re ready to throw your hands up and give up, that is this place. Maybe sometimes you’ve noticed that if you just hang in there a little bit longer, something shifts.
Something keeps propelling you forward: faith, confidence, a belief in what you’re doing or a sense of a power greater than yourself at work. You have to find something deeper to stabilize you in order to navigate the unknown and often rough waters to a solution that you have never seen.
Whatever that is, now is the time to dig down find it and rely on it, even as you keep an eye out to see the solution when it appears. And that leads you, ever so gradually, to…
Step 6. More here tomorrow.
Learn more.
For 12 days, I’ll reveal one step each day… 12 distinct steps on the road of creating your life, as outlined in my book, The Wheel Of Creativity: Taking Your Place in the Adventure Of Life. To be sure you don’t miss one of the steps, move your cursor up the sidebar on the right and type your email address into the box beneath “Don’t miss a post! Get blog alerts.” I’ll email them to you.
At the end of the 12 days, on September 15th, I’ll also be offering a free half-hour Discovery Call in which you can learn more about the Wheel of Creativity and an in-depth course I’ll be offering this Autumn.