If following inner guidance was easy, we'd be doing it all the time, right? But when it doesn't make sense to do so logically, we tend to second guess ourselves and struggle.
This morning I receive an email from a follower of my blog. She relates a powerful story about acting upon inner guidance. She recently took a new job in a field she has worked in for 19 years. As soon as she begins her new job, she feels a sense of danger she can't shake. And within a short time, she decides to quit.
Meanwhile, the bills are due. Her family thinks she is crazy. She is living 12 hours from home on an air mattress. She feels scared. And she feels something else - "the peace at times is the
most real, purest peace I have ever known. My inner most part of me, maybe that small still voice tells me everything will be alright." Even when she doesn't have anything else lined up.
It may be that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings. - Wendell Berry
This reminds me of an inner urging I felt in 2003. My husband had just been named project manager for the largest job he'd ever do, which would span at least 2 years. Our younger daughter was getting ready to enter her senior year in high school. We had no desire to move from our home. And yet, I felt compelled to get our home market ready for sale.
It didn't make sense at all. But I trusted that urge enough that we created a punch list and checked off the items on the list over the next few months. Shortly after that, my husband received word that the project was called off. The client was in a financial downturn. Within 3 more months, my husband's company decimated the engineering department. He was offered a transfer out of state. We both agreed the transfer would work. Because our home was market ready,we sold our house in 1 day.
In between these decisions and actions lay a sense of uncertainty, worry, and fear. And out of all that courage comes forward to prevail and lead the way.
When have you acted upon an inner urge when it didn't make sense?
Once again your words have "captured the moment" for me. The quote from Berry -- right on. The sentence, "In between these decisions and actions lay a sense of uncertainty, worry, and fear. And out of all that courage comes forward to prevail and lead the way," touches on the first chapter of a book I am working on. And me doing this particular book doesn't make sense at all. Thanks Deb.
Posted by: Dick Richards | April 17, 2010 at 12:08 PM
Dick - I look forward to hearing more about your book! It sounds like you are writing on a topic closer to your heart than your head!
Posted by: Deb Call | April 18, 2010 at 08:31 AM
This is a stunning post, Deb. It strikes at the root of so many leadership issues I see in my work: the failure to move into allowing for being baffled or destablized; the trust that events have their way of working out; the inner flow of decisions that 'don't make sense,' but do.
There have been any number of times when I've come up against the unknowns -- one was when I decided to leave my comfortable municipal job for the vagaries of consulting (no clients, 1st child just born, big house payments). Another was my divorce -- that was maybe the biggest one -- putting everything on the line for an inexplicable sense of inner wholeness, an 'integrity' I couldn't easily verbalize and which sounded weird and selfish at one level but which superseded so much of what was damaging and alienating about my own past conditioning. And, you know, just surviving on my own and alone for many years is another. There were plenty of moments of feeling scraped to the bone. I never really thought of any of it as courageous; more just following a path and sustaining it. I've certainly come to agree with William Stafford that "there's a thread you follow," and "you don't let go of it," despite all the time and all the changes, hidden as it might sometimes seem and against the dictates of the rational mind. Sometimes, as Ken Kesey said in Sometimes A Great Notion we "win by losing." I'd tack on that sometimes we're right by living out with great consciousness and intentionality something we once might have told ourselves was 'wrong.'
Posted by: Dan | April 29, 2010 at 07:19 PM
Dan, thank you for the personal examples you have shared that illustrate what it takes to act upon guidance. Perhaps if more of these kinds of conversations went on as a matter of course, people would learn to trust what they "know!"
You have an endearing and penetrating way of making these kinds of concepts come alive for our blog readers. Thank you for the depth of your insights.
Posted by: Deb Call | April 30, 2010 at 05:00 PM