Last year I went on a trip out west with a good friend. I went into the trip knowing that we have very different ways of interacting with the world. When traveling, I am rigidly on time, often arriving at scheduled events long before they begin. I schedule my 3 ½ star hotel rooms well in advance and choose my meals carefully.
My friend, on the other hand, has a more casual relationship with time and destinations. He often leaves hours later than he planned, makes multiple unscheduled stops and drives well into the night. It is not lost on either of us that he is the happier person.
Since I know our style differences, I also realized that a two week trip could create great stress for our friendship. So I vowed that I was going to say YES to everything with a couple of very modest exceptions: I would not drive after midnight, and we would have to arrive at shows on time. At some point during the trip he suddenly turned to me and said “ You are agreeing to everything”. I am, I said, “ I am calling it my YES Tour. “ I told him that it would be interesting to see how this little bit of letting go impacted me.
With his discovery of my experiment, things quickly got interesting. We took an unscheduled site seeing trip into the mountains with someone we did not know, told the chef at an amazing restaurant to bring anything he wanted to bring, and made arrangements to stay on a houseboat instead of a hotel.
This was life changing. I did not know how much it changed me until I began winter in my usual way with stacks of books to read, multiple ideas for series and a 1000 art and exhibit opportunities to apply to. I made the same choice I usually make: do it all instead of to prioritizing based on the reality of time and energy. This is an old pattern passed down for generations in my family which has created various results including never missing work, a perfectly manicured yard, premature aging, needless suffering and multiple levels of neurosis.
I was shocked to realize that, unlike in the past, I was unable to complete everything that I had laid out for the winter. Not only did I not get everything done, I did not even get close. As a result of the Yes Tour, some part of me had decided that letting go was a strategy that made sense.
I am guessing now that my unconscious had a plan all along. It was a setup to overthrow the internal dictator that often over schedules my life. Life was not just one big Yes after the Yes Tour however. Although my new system was in agreement with the Yes that chose to go with the flow of life, it balked at the Yes that agreed to do everything on every list.
This was scary since I have always functioned by over-controlling. So I began to ask myself just how, if I am to work with this new system, can I remain productive without being compulsive.
More on this and the “Wu Wei” tour planned for summer.