Surrendering to the Season
So it’s my eighth time experiencing November in Canada and it still catches me by surprise every time…
The darkness.
I’m not sure why but it’s really hit me hard this year. Maybe it always does and I just wilfully forget about it every year. But over the last couple of weeks I’ve been feeling my body shutting down as the sun starts to set earlier and earlier in the afternoon. My hibernation instinct is strong I guess.
It’s got me thinking about just surrendering to it. Seeing what happens if I submit to the natural rhythm of the seasons and the fluctuating energy that comes with it. Allowing things to happen in their own time.
Just as I was pondering this approach, the topic came up in my online creative community. Somebody shared that sometimes slowly is the fastest way to get to where you want to go. It made my snail spirit so happy to read this sentence.
This idea of the slow way actually being the fast way reminds me of those times when necklaces get all tangled up in knots. When you force it trying to untangle it quickly it just tightens the knots even more. The fastest way to get them undone is actually to hold them loosely and allow the knots to relax and open up in their own way.
Sometimes the best thing to do next is actually nothing at all.
I had a recent experience with my tarot card project where I decided to order two decks from different printers. The first one arrived pretty quickly. I was kind of happy with them, but they didn’t quite match what I had envisioned in my mind. I felt the urge to go back and change a whole lot of the colours. I saw a problem and wanted to rush to fix it.
Fortunately, a wise friend told me to just wait for the second deck to arrive. Different printers can produce wildly different results apparently. A couple of weeks later the second deck finally found its way into my mailbox and the colours looked perfect. I was so happy with how they looked, but I was even happier that I hadn’t wasted all that energy trying to fix something that in the end didn’t need fixing at all.
Instead, I was able to use that time to rest. To give my brain the space it needed to properly slow down and reflect after a pretty big year of personal growth. I’m still not entirely sure what’s coming up next but I’m trusting that a season of surrender is exactly what I need right now.
It’s time to take a deep breath and let the knots unravel themselves.