Gettin’ Things Done
On Larry Time, apparently.
This week I officially started working on the garage “studio” space.
And I don’t mean in the planning it out or finally getting organized enough to tackle it properly kind of starting, but in the very literal sense of painting a wall, placing a fireplace, and beginning to shape a space that has been sitting on my to-do list for well over a year (and before that, on my “this is total chaos” list for about six…).
This week, all of a sudden, the initial steps are just about finished—and, to my unfolding wonder, they got that way specifically without a plan.
This isn’t a new phenomenon. If anything, this project seems to have moved the same way a number of things in my life tend to move.
“What I have is a growing body of evidence that things in my life do get built, completed, and brought into form … just not through the linear process I keep trying to impose on them.”
It might help to know that I am someone who devotes a significant amount of time and energy to considering what needs to get done and the best way to go about doing it. I make lists, outline steps, and try to approach things directly. Unfortunately (or fortunately…Larry?), I am also someone who, to my continued frustration and newly developing bemusement, apparently cannot walk the linear path to getting things done. Manifestation does not seem to follow the usual laws of space, time, or physics in my world.
I’ve written about this before, at least in passing. There is still a sentence on my chalkboard wall that reads, “Maybe the problem is having a plan,” which started as a joke and has since become increasingly difficult to argue with.
So this week’s sudden sprint ahead in the garage (and in several other long-stalled projects around the house) feels like the latest piece of evidence in a pattern I can’t quite ignore. Which raises a slightly uncomfortable question: if planning and disciplined execution are not what’s actually generating movement here, then what exactly is?
I don’t have a clean answer, but the circumstances leading up to this round of sudden progress did offer a clue.
Time to Consult The Map
Several years ago, I developed the first version of a kind of internal map that organizes my inner landscape into different territories (a process that later became what is now call “Inner World Mapping”). One of the core territories on my map is what I call Manifestation—the part of my internal system where things are built, written, drawn, and brought into form. It’s the part that most closely resembles what we typically think of as “getting things done.”
There is another territory, sitting directly across from it, that has a very different function. I tend to think of it, somewhat irreverently, as the place where Larry interferes. It’s the territory of disruption, interruption, and timing that does not conform to plans. I call that territory The Fates.
Looking at this map now, what becomes clearer is that when I try to operate exclusively from that Manifestation space, the opposite of manifestation tends to happen. I can put a great deal of effort into trying to force something into existence and end up spinning in place, or retracing my steps like I’ve gotten lost in a maze I didn’t know I was in.
When disruption enters the system, however, things shift. And they seem to shift in direct relationship to how I respond to that disruption.
The moment this became obvious this week was not actually in the moving of furniture or the clearing of space, but in the color of the wall I ended up painting. It’s a warm, coral kind of pink. I didn’t set out to match anything in particular. I had been looking at a range of colors, leaning more toward something like terracotta, but when it came time to actually paint, I reached for what I had on hand.
It wasn’t until I stepped back that I realized it is almost exactly the color I use in that internal map to represent Manifestation—and a color I had already used, long before making that map, in my inside studio space.
This new garage space I’m shaping appears to be aligning itself with the part of my system responsible for making things real, without any deliberate effort to make that happen. And yet, that space only started to take form once I stopped trying to control the conditions around it.
There is probably a cleaner way to explain this. Something about balance my internal ecosystem. Or something about systems thinking, perhaps. But the truth is I don’t have a neat explanation.
What I have is a growing body of evidence that things in my life do get built, completed, and brought into form … just not through the linear process I keep trying to impose on them.
That apparently includes a garage that has been sitting in a state of potential (and chaos) for years and is now, somewhat suddenly, becoming a place where I can actually sit.
There’s a rusted metal star leaning against the wall out there right now, waiting to be hung. It’s heavy, a little decayed, and not quite symmetrical. It was on its way to the dump before I claimed it. It fits the space perfectly.
At this point, I am less interested in figuring out how to explain this process and more interested in learning how to navigate it.
I am starting to recognize, with a mix of amusement and mild disbelief, that there really is something else at work here—something that doesn’t operate on my preferred timeline, doesn’t explain itself particularly well, and yet seems entirely capable of getting things done.
Not usually by taking the route I expect, but somehow reliably enough that I’m beginning to trust, just a little more than I used to, that things will arrive where they’re going.
Exactly when and where they’re supposed to.
