#63: what does it mean to be ready?
you don't need to have all of the answers to take the first step
Above is an audio recording of me reading this post for those who prefer listening. Thank you, Philipp Kaspar, for the intro music!
I’ve never been ready for anything in my life. Nothing good, anyways. Or said another way, the best things that have happened in my life so far are the ones that I wasn’t ready for at the time.
I was not ready to move to New York a few years ago. I spent a few weeks there spontaneously and realized that my desire for change was greater than my fear of it.
I was not ready to leave the thing I am most proud of creating up until this point. I just knew I had to.
I was not ready to fall in love with my best friend- but our individual commitments to freedom and intimacy slowly paved the way to more than we ever could have imagined.
I was “ready” for college and ended up not really liking it. I was “ready” for a relationship in the past and ended up with the wrong people. The idea that things happen only when you’re 'ready' troubles me. It may be true. Perhaps this is just a matter of semantics or perspective and you could argue that I was indeed ready for all the things I said I wasn’t and that’s why they all happened in perfect order.
But there's something missing in this idea of 'readiness' I need to explore.
I was talking to a friend on the phone the other day who expressed sadness at the realization that she could possibly be laid off in the next 6 months due to a company reorg. But she wasn’t sad about what you may think. She was sad that the idea of being laid off actually provided her a deep sense of relief, which then led her to question why she wouldn’t take that leap by her own volition.
A few days later, another friend expressed similar sentiments about work/reorgs/realizing he wants to move on. He was a bit perplexed that it took the rug potentially being ripped out from under in order to realize deeper desires. But that’s how this thing works. We often need to be gently nudged or sometimes punched in the face with our optionality and free will in order to realize it’s still there.
Still though, when we are woken up to how much freedom we have to make different choices, it doesn’t make us immediately feel “ready” to jump at them. There is a process that we go through in order to get there. And that’s the piece that I am really curious about.
As someone who has always rejected my youth - preferred dinners at home with my mom and her friends in high school than going out, listens to Norah Jones unironically, and has dreamt of being “30 married to a dilf with a newborn” since I was 12 - I have been afflicted by this subconscious desire to get on the “fast track” of life by living vicariously through the mistakes of the wiser/older people I spend my time with so I don’t have to experience them myself. But as I have actually gotten older, I noticed this caused a bit of insecurity in my decision making as I was ultimately outsourcing instead of listening to my intuition and scraping my own knees.
Within the past few years though, I’ve noticed that when I am on the brink of making a big decision, I usually have a clear sense of my intuition but I will tinker gently with the opposite for a short period of time in order to gather data on what it would feel like to make the “wrong” call instead. Silly as it may sound and whip lashy as it may feel, I actually really love that I do this because it gives me confidence in the decision once I’ve actually made it. It really feels like I’ve considered all options for myself rather than trying to solve a Rubik’s cube with other people’s past experiences.
That’s part of my process of getting ready. It’s sort of like fear setting. It’s imagining your worst fears or outcomes and using them as guardrails to draw you closer to the life that you actually want to lead.
In the moments in which I have made the decisions to do things that I didn’t feel ready for, I felt guided by a connection to the brevity of life. If not now, when?
In ultimately knowing what I desire to feel like in love, I was willing to let go of someone - scary as it felt - in the hopes of something more. In feeling small in my hometown, I was willing to let go of the comfort of my family and lifelong friends in order to experience the other side of the country. In leaving projects, kindred and close to me as they may have felt, I knew that there was greater alignment to be found in values, purpose, and mission.
After being woken up to our optionality, usually via a confrontation with “the worst case scenario” which makes us go holy fuck we are all going to die at some point is this really how I want to be spending my time right now then, we take a period of time to collect our own personal breadcrumbs, and then we are “ready” to make our decision.
We think of readiness as this calm, cool, collected, intuitive knowing where you just coast into the next chapter. In reality though, readiness means you are fucking terrified, uncertain as ever, analyzing or questioning your abilities, wondering if you made the right call… and you just do it anyways.
We keep looking over the edge to ensure that the mattress is there for our landing. But in reality, the mattress forms when we are already on our way down. The mattress is the random events that you show up to in your new city out of sheer social desperation and end up meeting the most important people in your life. The mattress is the social support and cohesion that forms around you when you announce to the world that you are going full time on your side hustle. The mattress is the cold glass of white wine and turkey sandwich lunch that you have with your journal after getting out of the wrong relationship and feeling delighted by all that’s to come. The mattress is trying things that you feared you were no longer physically capable of and proving to yourself that you can. The mattress forms on the way down. You can’t see it before you’ve jumped because it isn’t there yet. It’s only there to hold you when you show it that you need holding.
Readiness is a feeling. We have a lot of thoughts about what our feelings are supposed to feel like. But those are just thoughts. Perhaps what’s holding us back are our limited beliefs around what readiness feels like.
To me, readiness is graceful. It doesn’t feel like a decision. It feels like gliding, one small bit at a time. I don’t know what it feels like to be ready. I just know what it feels like to want something so badly that you are willing to take the first step. To start. One page at a time. 1,000 words at a time. A new journal at a time. Writing the email to your boss, at a time. Booking the flights, at a time. Going to the gym again after your injury, at a time. Readiness is cultivated.
In the same way that we confuse passion and excitement, we also confuse readiness and devotion. Excitement is passion without groundedness. We chase these periods of prolonged passion imagining that on the other side of a new job or a big life decision, there is this sparkling well of excitement awaiting. But excitement is fleeting.
Passion, on the other hand, is sturdy. Passion is commitment. My coach said to me that the long standing relationships she’s witnessed have a balance of passion and commitment. There are times in which mutual passion is present and times in which it isn’t, but the throughline is commitment. I may not feel deep passion for writing all the time but I am committed to it.
Readiness is the same. We think readiness should feel like arrival, like clarity, like full conviction behind what you should do in a very binary manner. In reality though, readiness is grounded, it’s gentle, it’s devoted. Readiness is knowing what you ultimately desire and taking small steps in that direction while allowing yourself to be guided.
The best things in life are those that you don’t feel ready for. They take you by surprise, they delight you, they astound you. If you feel ready for something, it usually means you’re anticipating an outcome and clinging to it. This deprives you of the freedom, spontaneity, and serendipity that reside within not knowing how something is going to turn out. When we cling, we enter into a cycle of attachment and aversion, meaning we crave the thing and feel its lack until it arrives and once it arrives, we tend to push it away or cling to something else.
I wrote last week about how the acquisition of new information is only exciting if you aren’t fully sure of where it will lead you. But if you know where you are going, if you feel ready for everything in your life before you allow it to happen, it falls flat. It’s predictable. And this is not to say that we should optimize for instability. It’s just to say that readiness is an illusion and we should explore the beliefs we hold about readiness in order to feel into a deeper truth.
To be ready is not to have all of the information.
If you are devoted to the values that are core to who you are and want to be, if you have enough conviction behind the change that you ultimately want to make, you don’t need to feel “ready” for the final outcome in order to take the first step. Allow yourself to walk forward towards the edge. You don’t even need to look over to see if the mattress is there. Trust that it will form once you have fallen.
That’s all for this week. Thank you for getting Caught Up in Char’s Web. I will catch you here again, sometime soon.
With love,
Charlotte
Char’s Web Song of the Week
Xandra’s Curation Corner
Xandra Beverlin is an incredible art curator at Pace Gallery, co-founder of PULSE, and dear friend, who so generously pulls pieces for this newsletter each week. I text her a few short bullets about the main themes of Char’s Web and she replies with the most thoughtful articulations of the artists that come to mind. This is my favorite part of writing my newsletter. Do yourself the favor of reading her curator’s notes!
Had a deep think at 1am
Although I can definitelyyyy personally relate to the constant questioning of my own readiness for the “next chapter” in my own life that you’re diving into here, it’s the part about building the foundation of commitment and trying out new methods of doing things (rather than chasing a fleeting, elusive sense of passion or fulfillment or success) that I want to talk about here.
It’s this mentality, one of patient experimentation, that relates so acutely to the newsletter’s theme: this time, less in relation to any specific artist’s body of work, and more so to the concept of an artist’s practice in general. It’s this attitude of ceaseless curiosity and trudging onward, sometimes (perhaps, most importantly) when things feel hopeless and trying an entirely different medium, or method of proliferating your way of seeing the world.
I think of Peter Alexander, who began his career as an architect, but evolved into a prominent artist in the Light & Space movement after he discovered the material of resin while cleaning his surfboard. I think of Richard Serra and his somewhat disappointing visit to the Prado to see Velasquez’s Las Meninas: after realizing (in his words!) that he could never make a painting as good, he made the unconventional shift to sculpture and went on construct some of the most renowned works of the genre. I think of Robert Mapplethorpe, who was obsessed with tchotchke craftwork before photography, and I think even of Picasso, whose Blue Period pieces differ drastically from his invention of Cubism just a few short years later.
Much like many of these artists, we never really know when inspiration or “genius” or the coveted creative flow may be right around the corner. Instead, it does seem (proven, as I’ve shown through history) that the only real way to find out is to put one foot in front of the other, shirk any lauded expectations, and commit to the strength and simultaneous humility of actually not knowing the path at all. After all, as Char writes above, readiness is cultivated by simply wanting something more than you fear it.
All past issues of Char’s Web are available for reading here. A few samples below…
#1: A first of many.
#43: the slobs I peeled off the street
#49: we have to be orderly on the instant
#50: the soundtrack of “Up”
Love your words, love your mind <3
👏👏👏Lovely!!