Change Maven Musings: Create from Your Longing

The things you want to create also want to be created through you. What you are longing to bring into the world is also what the world is longing for you to bring it. ~The Pivot Year, Brianna Wiest

That’s the thing about longing.

It won’t be ignored.

The more you try, the louder it becomes. Longing knows how to fill your head, your heart, and your soul. It does whatever it needs to get you to fucking pay attention.

Longing knows how to run your thoughts on repeat, create churn in your gut and anxiety to rise in your chest. Longing knows how to make people disappear from your life, how to create a health scare, how to put in front of you exactly what you’ve always wanted for yourself to see if you have the balls to go after it, no holding back or overthinking allowed. Longing knows that you can’t free yourself from it, no matter how much you try to distract yourself or how much time you let pass without taking any action. Longing knows.

It won’t be ignored.

Longing longs to, needs to, create, to step into the realm of possibility, to be heard, to be expressed, to be in the world. And the world needs the end result of our specific longing. No matter how messy. uncomfortable, or confusing it may be, longing knows where it’s going. And so do we. We convince ourselves to forget or claim we don’t know because the sacrifice seems too great. Too scary. Too impossible for us to actually do anything about.

But what about the sacrifice of not listening?

What about the version of our lives that ignores our longing, that tells us we’ll get to it “someday” when we have more time, energy, money, “bandwidth?” What if that never comes? Then what? We tell ourselves, oh, well…it wasn’t meant to be? Or worse, we encourage others to ignore their longing so they can be complicit with us, so we don’t have to face the fact that we didn’t listen, that we didn’t create?

Self-Reflection Questions:

• What is your longing telling you, right now, in this moment?

• If you can’t hear its voice, what’s one thing you can do so you can listen (for me, this often involves early morning solo time or a walk without my phone)?

• If you hear something, anything at all, what’s one small thing you can do to create something? Something small, something incremental, is always a step forward for your longing and attunes your ear for the next step that’s sure to come.