It grew until I realized I created all of it by the expectations I had placed on myself and on reality. More specifically, the expectations I had regarding this site and what I considered I “should” do with it, by when.

See, I had the idea of “launching” the site this month (by “launch” I meant having all the foundational pieces together and announce the site to my different networks). I wanted it to be up and running before leaving for Tibet in May, where I’ll be spending 25 days traveling for a creative project I’m involved with. And for that I needed to complete the design, write a bunch of posts ahead of time, get clearer on the purpose and the “target audience”, the scope of the topics, etc.

That’s on top of the complete overhaul of my SleepTracks biz website I also wanted to complete before leaving for Tibet. The straightening of finances. And the tax reports.

I’m dropping it all now. Aaah.

Are you asking yourself the right questions?

The kind of questions you ask yourself determine the kind of reality you live in. If you ask should-based questions, in the like of:

• What should I do now?
• Should I do this or that at first?
• What would be best?

… Then you’ll get answers that pull different parts of you in different directions, and you’ll feel torn, in conflict with yourself. You’ll feel pressured, anxious, bounded, uneasy, at war with how your life unfolds — just like I did.

Because these questions are not all that useful. I feel stressed out, heavier when thinking them — because they presuppose there is just one correct answer. They are brewed by fear itself, and are aimed at solving a problem, not creating.

Here’s a simpler, more creative and much more useful question:

What do I want now?

No guilt, no should allowed.

Asking myself this question and sitting still with it for a few minutes showed me that:

• I want to take my time regarding what I do with this site, and keep exploring without putting unnecessary and artificial pressure on myself with deadlines and publishing calendars, at least for now.
• I want what I write here to be the embodiment of creativity, awareness and freedom in action, so I really want to maintain a spirit of open curiosity to everything I do while I develop this site, at all times. In other words, I want to keep my options open, and tinker some more.
• I really want to renovate my SleepTracks website before leaving for Tibet.
• I really want to complete my taxes and straigthen my finances also.

So there it is, all I needed to know. I can drop everything that is not aligned with what I truly want here and now:

• The idea of a launch date
• The pressure of needing to “figure things up”
• The necessity of a publishing schedule
• The necessity of devoting x amount of time every day to this project in oder to not feel guilty about it
• The need to push/coerce myself
• The fixed notion of what this will look like, by when.

I feel better, lighter, and with a renewed sense of excitement about what lies ahead. I’ll keep devoting most of my daily writing periods to the exploration of themes I’ll be talking about here eventually, and I’ll keep getting better at writing in the “blog” format in English — even if I don’t publish now.

I’ll keep jamming up ideas — just had a potentially great one this morning for an ongoing, year-long series I could be doing at some point.

But don’t wait for me! I know you aren’t, but it makes me feel lighter just to say it I’ll be there when I’ll be there, when the time has come.

What about you? What is cooking in your pot, and what questions are you asking yourself? Are these questions helpful or stressful?

I’ll feel even more compelled to honor it every single day

Which is precisely the point. And why I’m posting this on a blog that isn’t even ready for public viewing yet.

I’ll probably write at some point about the perils of pseudo-freedom and how it sabotages our capacity to create what we most want, and prevents us from experiencing real freedom. But for now let’s just say that I’ve been having this tendency to be um, flaky when it comes to maintaining and honoring habits that serve my ability to create.

Or any habit for that matter.

You too? Happy to meet you…

But for now, instead of musing about why we sometimes believe that regularity and creativity don’t go together, and why we tend to approach rituals as if they were going to stifle our so-called freedom, I want to jump right into the rituals I’ve decided to initiate for myself.

Because this post is not a “how and why you can do this”. It’s a “here’s what I decided to do”.

I decided to create clear and defined entry and exit points to my workweek days. Clear and defined as in “consciously decided” and “deliberately applied”. Effective today.

I’ve recognized for a long time that clarity of intent and conscious action surpass I’ll-wing-it-when-I-feel-like-it any day of the week. Especially when it comes to creative output and the ability to do meaningful work on a consistent basis, without unnecessary struggles.

Yet, not so surprinsingly, my intentions are not always followed by tangible results — another way to say that I still revert back to the old, default, obsolete tendency of just doing things when I feel like it instead of doing what I previously consciously decided.

When we recognize this we have two choices:

Beat ourselves on the head for being so lazy. Or be kind and clever.

I prefer to be kind and clever. And even if you’re still in the habit of beating yourself on the head, I bet you would still prefer not to. So let’s not to.

The best way to be both kind and clever is to organize the environment so that it supports what we want to create. In that case, what I want is to:

Start the day clear, calm, inspired and focused

… So that I can really give of myself and create what I most want to create, and do so fully engaged… without falling into busyness, reactivity or avoidance. At the heart of such a start is a writing period, accomplished before anything else is done — because I know that, for me, writing on a regular basis is the single most important thing I can do to express myself fully and make my projects come into being.

And the corollary to that start is to:

End the day with a sense of closure, purpose, and creative readiness for what lies ahead

… So that I can let go of the day during the evening, and be in an optimal position to continue tomorrow.

Now, what would best support such an inspired entry and a graceful exit?

An entry ritual and an exit ritual

A set of small, simple actions stringed together when I enter my workspace in the morning, and another set of simple, small actions when I leave at night. Introduced progressively over an 8-week period  to ease into it in an easy and relaxed way, without overwhelm.

I must credit Charlie Gilkey for reminding me recently of the importance of having such entry/exit rituals, and Leo Babauta for easing into a new habit over an 8-week period instead of jumping right away into the thick of it.

Here are screenshots of what each ritual will look like (the left list represents what I want to do, and the right one what I’ll start with at the beginning):

Some of the points on each list might be a bit cryptic. If you’d like me to elaborate, let me know and I’ll clarify in a follow-up.

I’ll post daily updates on how I stick to those entry/exit rituals on a daytum page, and, to make good measure, on twitter. Simple accountability, yet another way of being clever with our own dumbness

If you’d like some specifics on how to implement a new ritual like this, I’ll be happy to go into more details as well.

What do you think? If you’ve been reading despite the headline warning, then you might be already toying with the idea of trying something similar. How would you start your day to really support what you’re up to? How would you end it?

Would you feel such a ritual to be freeing, or constraining? Any resistance or objection coming up when you consider such a thing?

In the meantime there’s not much to see, and things are moving around constantly.

If you want to get in touch with me, the easiest is to send an email at yan at yanmuckle dot com.

Check back soon!

You don’t know if you’ll indeed create what it is you envisioned. And you know even less if what you create — should you complete it and should it look remotely like how you initially saw it in your dreams — will have the impact, the reach, the effect you hope it will.

You just don’t.

And it’s ok. It’s how it is supposed to be.

Because now you’re entering the unknown, the unpredictable.

The true effect of being engaged in creating something is that it will bear fruits that are beyond your imaginings.

That’s why we often don’t even start. What if? And what if? Isn’t that horribly scary?

No, it’s just pure life unfolding. Because now you’re acting, you’re actively engaged in letting something emerge through you.

You’re living the life of a creator. And as soon as you do, as soon as you get up off your chair where you’ve been imagining and dreaming about and fantasizing about this beautiful thing that you’re going to create and ACTUALLY START AND DO IT… then you unleash forces and powers that are way beyond the confines of your brain and body.

It’s life doing its thing through you.

You can only go ahead with whatever weapons and tools you’ve gathered up to this day in your existence, the sum of your experiences, values and thoughts, the maps you’ve traced of the territory ahead with the route you intend to follow marked in red across the paper… all the while knowing that you WILL be surprised. That life will do it’s trick and use you.

And so it is. So it must be.

This is also where most of the fun is, if you only get past the fear that your stories about the unknown generate in you. If you can only escape velocity from the tendency to resist change and become an agent of change yourself, become change.

Creating is only allowing change to happen. Not resisting it.

Take me, for example. Change is happening as I type the first words of the first post for the blog residing on a domain that uses my name. And I don’t know where that’ll lead me.

I’m writing this in English, who would have thought? Not me. I’ve never been at ease writing in English, and now that I type, the words come in this language.

I’m sitting in a plane, going to San Francisco for the first time — for, of all things, a business conference. I say “of all things” because if you’d told me that a few years ago, I would have said never in a million years. I would have said I don’t have a business bone in me, nor do I have any interest in gaining one. I considered myself an artist, a writer.

I considered myself a creator, and it’s only now that I can appreciate and understand how much more of a reactor I was than a creator during all those years.

But life did his thing, it created through me, and now I’m sitting in an airplane, banging in English the first words of a first post for a site whose time has come — for me at least.

I have big plans, sure. I have a vision of what I want to create here, and I’ll elaborate on that in future posts. If you follow along you’ll see themes emerge…

What it means to create.

What it means to be free, and happy, and useful as we live our life as creators instead of reactors.

So, yes — I do have plans and visions. I do have a specific intention to serve people and be an instigator of their own creative potential, their own inner freedom, their own happiness.

But I just don’t know how it will go.

And I don’t know what will be created out of that, what will emerge and happen and flourish out of that creative activity — if any!

And I don’t know how the thing itself will evolve. Because as soon as I get past the imagining and dreaming stage, all hell will break loose as the forces of change — life itself in its own amazing generative capacity for growth and transmutation — and evolution are set in motion.

But that is how we begin.

We may never be ready, because we never know what will ensue.

So we have to jump as soon as we can.

In my experience there are only two things necessary before turning a dream into a project:

1. Some sense of the direction (if the end point is blurry, that’s ok), and
2. Having our inner ducks sufficiently aligned so that we are not pulled in conflicting directions (I’ll be talking a lot more about that in upcoming posts).

As soon as we can feel, “Yes, this is what I really want to create”, then… Even if we don’t know where it will lead us…

We hit Send, and boom! It all starts to unravel.

Welcome to the beginning.