you do not need a five year plan
unless you want one! then cool!
Sharing a short, ranty one today, because I feel that every time I see someone post emphatically and confidently online that the only possible way you can build a business or satisfying, rewarding life for yourself is to have a vision / a plan / to know exactly where it is you are going in the next three, five, whatever years I need to pipe my tiny voice UP and say something like:
While I understand this must have been true for you and it’s so cool you have found what works in your experience, it is not, and cannot be true for everyone.
The EXACT opposite has been true for me.
For so many years I felt like shit about it, tried to fix and change it and plan myself into a ‘better’ person and a more ‘serious’ business haver (🤢) and oh my goodness it was such a massive waste of energy and time.
A story:
When I did my first yoga teacher training I had been trying for years and years to be a writer — I was writing on blogs, my poems were published in literary magazines, I was hosting poetry readings in share house backyards. I even started a small online press with my friend.
At some point, I won an award for one of my poems and it was published in a physical anthology. All this to say — I loved writing and I wasn’t terrible at it. I knew I had some talent, and I worked really, really hard to improve, but for years I felt as if I were forever swimming upstream, pushing a boulder up a mountain, running across hot sand.
To the shock of everyone around me, amidst my feverish desire to be a writer, I enrolled in a yoga teacher training and unlike anything I had ever experienced in the past, soon after completing my first training, things began to move forward.
They moved forward with so much ease and so much speed it very often terrified me. Especially because I was used to everything feeling so hard.
The funny thing is, I had a lot more innate talent for writing than I did for teaching yoga. Or so I thought. Not only do I despise activewear, I am not a naturally flexible person and still to this day, my body does not look like one who has been practicing and teaching yoga for many years. Yoga was the last thing I’d ever thought I’d do, and yet the second I started my training, I was both wildly triggered and deeply in love. Doors began to fling open. It was as if all the unseen forces of the universe were screaming okay yes now you are on the right path!!
Despite the current pulling me forward, finally, I didn’t find this path easy. I think thats an easy, untrue assumption to make. I was in tears consistently throughout my training. Every single class I taught felt like it took a weeks worth of strength. As the last student left the room I would collapse onto the floor in a heap, exhausted. There was excitement and joy for sure, and also the feeling of every single fear I’d ever had, present and raised, pressed by the tip of a knife.
A few months in, I started to realise teaching a yoga class had little to do with my hamstring mobility and in fact had very little to do with me at all. Through my love (and my struggle) with yoga, I realised not only did I love the practice itself, I adored everything about teaching. I could never have guessed that yoga teaching would be such a creative pursuit.
I loved the movement of asana and the psychedelic nature of rest; the music, the philosophy, the addition of poetry, of teaching with the seasons, the shape of the moon. I became obsessed with yoga, with teaching, studying, reading about it and practicing. For a couple of years, I had very little time to write more than class plans and instagram captions gushing about how lucky I felt to have this job (even when I was paid $12 per class).
I am skipping a large chunk of the story here, but once I felt I had a baseline of experience teaching and wanted to share the philosophy and practice of rest with a wider audience online, it was my poetic writing (that I had spent so many years forcing and willing to make ‘work’) that ended up being one of the biggest determining factors in bringing the daily rest studio, and so much of my work today, to life.
All this to say, I understand so well, the pursuit of pouring fistfuls of love and passion into something only to feel as if the river is pulling everyone else forward, and somehow you’re left, treading water on the spot.
While speed is absolutely not the only marker of something being ‘right’ for us, sometimes we do have to let go of the way we think it needs to look and allow life to pull us in an unexpected direction, for a little or a long while, before it all (eventually) makes sense.
This is why, when I see people shouting online that unless you know exactly where you’re heading, unless you have a clear vision or a plan, then your hard work, your showing up, your baby steps will not amount to a thing and I just, it’s not, it cannot be as simple as that.
I know this because I have lived it, and I continue to live it today. Especially since moving to Tokyo in early 2024 — singlehandedly the most (on paper) disastrous and beautiful, enriching, life altering, fulfilling business decision I’ve ever made, which, thanks to incredibly strict and ever changing visa restrictions has forced me to live no further than six months in the future at any given time.
Of course, my life is mine and there are many people who would shudder at the mere thought of it. But if someone online is making you feel ashamed for not knowing exactly what it is you want, where exactly it is you are going, how exactly you can sum up what it is you do, then just remember all that shit is completely meaningless unless it means something to you.
Please don’t let anyone convince you that small steps are a waste unless you know exactly where they are leading. Even the thought of that is completely insane to me.
There is no shortcut, there is no hack, there is no solve.
Just keep going.
I am not certain about much, but I believe very deeply that a creative life is possible, for anyone who desires it. And while it might not always be easy, and will very likely be disappointing from time to time, it is always, always worth it.
Despite what your mind (or your algorithm) may tell you over and over again, no step is ever wasted on the path.
My relationship with the written word has been long, frustrating, bumpy and mostly, painfully slow. Decades in, I still feel as if I’m just getting started.
I wouldn’t change it for the world.
We are stepping into our second month of Tending The Creative Life in The Daily Rest Studio, with a new class landing on Saturday on creative eco-systems, your creative diet and the importance of friction and discomfort in creative work. Next week, enrolments for A Poetic Life open with an early bird price; a late summer writing workshop series, open to all.
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deeply appreciate the reminder ☺️💛
Beautiful and so so important!