Innovating Our Way Out

Without Tuna Fish or Toilet Paper

Current reality is somewhere between Groundhog’s Day, Twilight Zone, The Apocalypse and Mary Poppins. I know, that last one is a little out of nowhere. BUT, strangely, it may be the most fortuitous. Although life is looking remarkably more like the first three. There intuitively seems to be something in the air.

A shift in the proverbial weather of our world’s well-being.

There is a movement afoot we cannot yet see.

A quantum leap toward a different way of being. We can’t quite put our finger on it.

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” -Albert Einstein

Mostly, there’s just the epic discomfort of pinballing through boredom and panic with gratitude in between. The reality of sickness and death surrounding us providing anxiety, sadness, empathy and giving back in whatever ways we can.

There is an underlying feeling of being completely out of control in totally unknown territory with everything from schools to business to personal routines being in a chronic state of limbo.

And yet…

It is akin to butterfly goo. 

The caterpillar (us before Covid) crawls into the cocoon (where we have gone) and decomposes into an unrecognizable jelly (the way many of us are currently feeling about who we are/ what we do/ what we will become)  with the DNA of the butterfly completely intact (this weird feeling that we are in the process of being shifted into something more beautiful) until it has actually become the butterfly it will be.

The next part is perhaps the most interesting, because, it seems like after all that, it (us) should just be able to fly away into the beautiful blue sky (our future). But the next part is critical. The butterfly must beat its wings repeatedly against the walls of the cocoon (we must practice using our wings before we actually even understand what they are) in order to fight its (our) way out.

If someone was to simply cut the cocoon open (we hold our breath and wait till the government lifts the quarantine and we can go back to the life we used to have) and set it free (resume our old life), the butterfly would die (our opportunity for this experience to have change us be missed).

It’s through the struggle that its wings become strong enough to take flight.

That’s all fine and good, sort of, but let’s just say you have the consciousness of the caterpillar, even in this completely goo-like state… you’ve done nothing but crawl around, and pretty slowly at the that, for your whole life… You have been so very low to the ground you have never even had the opportunity to see what a butterfly looks like…

How are you possibly supposed to trust that at the end of all this goo, you will suddenly be able to break free of the cocoon prison, which has become the only thing holding you together, literally… and become a magnificently beautiful butterfly that will fly through the sky with perspectives your old self could never have begun to imagine. What would it take?

I ask myself this every time I turn to metaphorical goo (often) and cannot see a way out.

Trust is a tricky proposition. You can’t plan for a future you can’t see.

But that is exactly what must be done.

Every time I can’t fit the new into the known, trying harder gets me nowhere and I start feeling stifled, stuck and stuffed from power eating pints of Halo mint chocolate chip, I do the opposite of what my instincts tell me to do. I let go of productivity. I relinquish (with extreme reluctance and a fair dose of brattiness) my brilliantly conceived and expertly thought out plans.

I open up my imagination and play.

I allow my child-like, playful, curious self to rescue my serious, full-steam ahead self that has become trapped on a problem-solving treadmill of doom.

Like Mary Poppins does for the Banks family. Under the guise of a magical, whimsical story lives the truth of what we must lose in order to become who we really want to be… our kite gets lost, there’s a run on the bank, we get fired, our family is in disarray, we run away.

“The opposite of play is not work. It’s depression.” -Brian Sutton-Smith

We have to let go with no guarantees.

Everyone is in a different state of surrender right now.

Our reality has changed. We will be changed. This is true after every major personal event in our life, but this is the single biggest globally impactful event of my lifetime.

And when I am not checking Schoology, PowerSchool, Google classroom, Kahn Academy and my refrigerator, I am hoping, when this virus is over, we will have allowed it to show us a new way.

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct.” -Carl Jung