Percolate & Cultivate
I’m not a New Year’s Resolution person, really. January isn’t often when I feel most focused and attentive to what’s serving me best.
Instead, I tend to have that feeling right around now. The end of the year is my stock-taking time. It’s when the days get colder and darker, and my autumnal reflections start to distill into clear feelings and thoughts. This is when I feel like my motivations are the precipitate from high school chemistry class: the solid that’s settled out of the swirling liquid after going through a series of experimental state changes. (That’s how I remember the precipitate from high school chem. I like the metaphor. If it’s not quite right, don’t @ me and burst my bubble.)
I’m back in Mapping Your Path to coincide with this end-of-year crystallization process. I so appreciate having an external framework to help me wrap up my year, acknowledge where I’ve come to, and focus my heart forward into what comes next. Anne offers various prompts and formats to help that work, and one of them is the encouragement to come up with a Finish Focus for the remainder of the year.
My 2022 Finish Focus has come clear to me, after noodling around with a variety of not-quite-right and almost-there ideas. It’s precipitated out of the experiments I’ve been running. So I thought I’d share it with you all and pull back the curtain on how I got here.
It started with dialing in my focus on people. I’m here to help give arts and culture workers supportive channels to find inspiration and keep up their change-focused work.
With that in mind, I went to the recent New England Museums Association conference, returning to the professional conference sphere in person after three years of all-digital professional group gatherings. I caught up with some friends. I helped facilitate a working session on how to meaningfully support museum staff to address the polarizing topics our institutions are more and more willing to grapple with. 70 people came and shared openly and creatively, and it was excellent!
And I met a lot of new folks. It was my first NEMA conference, and it was both an exhausting amount of extrovert-ing and deeply satisfying. It was a great chance to introduce myself to a bunch of new people with the story I want to tell about myself since professionally breaking out on my own. This was a great chance to hone this current elevator pitch and hand out my new business cards and talk to people about what I want to be doing now.
Having the word PIRATE on my nametag was a good conversation starter, especially after adding the accompanying skull & crossbones by hand. I found a lot of people resonating with my determination to find new ways to work and progress that don’t rely on the same broken systems that have been letting so many down for so long.
Settling into NEMA, though, I realized that my preferred MUJI gel pen was out of ink. gasp! Since I really hate writing with ballpoints (who’s a pen nerd? THIS KID) and that was suddenly my only option, I had to do something to motivate my note-taking. Sketchnotes always delight me, but I’ve never had much success letting my brain go more creative and incorporate more graphic and varied ways of recording. I usually take notes either by live-tweeting (which I was not AT ALL interested in with the current Muskian state of Twitter ridiculousness) or in bullet-list outline style in a lined notebook. But this time, with my blank-page notebook and a ballpoint pen, I took the sketchnotes leap, and it really helped me distill key learnings from each session I was in.
I share them here because a) I’m very proud of how they turned out (it really tickled my visual ASMR brain to see these pages all laid out in the end) and b) the visual approach helped connect so many different sessions’ emphasis on the need for spaciousness and care in order to achieve good things.
As I headed into NEMA, I’d been thinking of a Finish Focus around the idea of leaping before I’m ready and launching some of my new offerings before they were perfected. All these ideas I had around brave pushing and launching and forging forward were feeling harsher and more hard-driving than the space I’m in right now, though. Especially in my end-of-year precipitation phase. They weren’t resonating strongly enough to be my Finish Focus.
Seeing how much space-making and space-holding and space-saving came up in discussions at NEMA helped me figure out a gentler Finish Focus to move through the next weeks.
PERCOLATE & CULTIVATE
I began with the pairing INCUBATE & CULTIVATE, but was pleased to realize that my ideas for building community within the world of arts and culture changemakers are already beyond the inkling stage. They’re rich and ripe plans, and they’re beyond incubation. They’re ready to be tended with care and given the space and gentle handling they need to grow into being. They’re ready to percolate.
Percolating makes me think of the warming wisps of coffee aroma that fill your nostrils on a cold morning. The quiet plip-plop of boiling bubbles and the swish and flow of cozy, steaming drink filling a mug until it’s warm to the touch. My ideas have been steeping and infusing me with plans like the rich red-brown of tea leaves curling through hot water.
Cultivating goes hand in hand with that percolation. It’s the attentive watering and the providing of ideal conditions for a plant to grow. For my plans to grow. Cultivating requires action, but it can’t be rushed. It can only happen at the pace the plant is ready for. And when done steady and well, it’s what creates those resilient, tender-firm, green, little shoots that poke their heads up toward the sun and thrive.
I’ve been percolating and cultivating in conversation with so many esteemed friends and colleagues, in listening to my podcasts and reading my books, in leaning into my desire for eclecticism and beauty, in creating inspiring spaces for myself.
In treating myself gently and not pushing or forcing myself to leap all at once.
In acknowledging my financial anxieties and “what am I doing with my life?” elder millennial existential angst as being motivating voices that can be with me without being my enemies.
For years now, I have been sheltering my little seed of not wanting to work within all the same harmful patterns that have burned so many of us out. It feels like it’s ready to be cultivated into its next phase.
I have collected all the many motivators and inspirations that I’ve crossed paths with into a rich, redolent brew that is warming me up for what comes next.
I’m at work right now with the lovely Rebecca Shulman cooking up what I hope will be the first of several offerings to come throughout what remains of 2022 and what I hope can be the start of a communal, supportive 2023.
Watch this space for that announcement when the percolating and cultivating has come to fruition.
And if you want to make sure you get the news first to sign up, make sure you leave your info here to join my crew of brave, spacious, change-minded creatives.
I’m excited to share my new sprouts and mixtures with you.
Creative Prompt Coda: Take one of your mundane daily routines and give it some focus. How would you explain it to an alien first landing on this planet? What headline would you give it if it were an exciting breaking news story?
