Creating
On Stability, Rest, and the Unfamiliar Feeling of Having Enough
On the Path: A letter for those reclaiming their voice, rewriting their story, and walking the path of purpose with presence, creativity, and heart.
I am coming in to write this newsletter for the fifth time.
This has been over two weeks.
Three different drafts.
Three different attempts.
None of them quite fitting to be on the list for scheduling.
Not because they are not good. Not because they are not interesting.
They just aren’t On The Path kind of newsletters.
And the inability to find a newsletter, to find a story for the purpose, has been, as it always is, intimately linked to the inner flows of process present in life right now.
Life is shifting.
An increase in a feeling of safety. A step being taken toward creating in sobriety. Creating without crisis. Creating without an immediate problem being solved in life.
Over the past year, maybe longer, I have been building systems.
Necessary systems. Life support systems.
Means of growing the way in which single parenting alone can be more like single parenting with mechanical co-parents.
Savings accounts. Automations. A business that acts like a second income, resembling, somehow, a second adult’s contribution to the house.
And perhaps predictably, but utterly unbelievable to my nervous system, the systems are working.
They are growing.
They are making the daily life and the long-term life stable. Settled. Safe.
So.
Now what?
What now?
Room to rest?
Room to take it easy?
Room to recognise that life is sober?
That life is stable?
Julia Cameron writes in The Artist’s Way about how she had to learn to write sober.
How when she began AA, it became clear she had to learn to create again, from scratch, without the fuel she had always used.
Many of us do not have an AA type of addiction to a a substance.
Many of us do, however, have our favorite worries.
Our favorite areas of life that we should attend but don’t, and silently, at the back of our minds we spend energy on the unresolved.
The life shakes us and we no longer can ignore the leaking energy.
Sometimes, when we begin again, when we are on the bridge of change, as I wrote last week, we must not only learn to create sober.
We must learn to do everything sober.
The Fuel We Don’t Notice We’re Using
For those of us who do not tend to freeze un crisis. Who are wired for action, for resolving by movement, know the other side of the coin of this effective way of functioning is that crisis becomes a means to approach things, which are not by their nature crisis at all.
A particular quality of aliveness that comes with urgency.
A sharpness of focus.
A clarity about what matters.
When survival is the question, the answers come quickly, because they have to.
The creative work, the problem-solving, the reaching and building and doing: all of it runs on adrenaline that you didn’t choose and didn’t ask for, but that is there, reliably, every morning.
And then the crisis lifts.
And you sit down to write, or to build, or to create, or simply to be, and you wait for the fuel to arrive.
And it doesn’t.
Not in the same form. Not with the same urgency. Not with the same familiar electric charge that used to get you out of bed and into the work before you’d even decided to.
This is the moment most people misread entirely.
They think something is wrong. That they’ve lost it. That the clarity was the point, and now it’s gone, and so perhaps they were only ever able to do this under pressure.
Only reach the feeling under the affect.
What’s actually happening is different: you are being asked to find a new engine.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Rest
Tiredness used to be on the score tables of assessments of the present moment for years.
Sometimes when we are used to creation from crisis, creation under the affect, tiredness, the feeling of de-pression, when the system lock us down into rest by force, is seen as a problem.
Most people who burn themselves down, not once, but again and again in the same pattern, do not have a productivity problem or a boundaries problem or even a self-worth problem.
They have a rest problem.
Specifically: they stop too late, locked down into rest by their system. And when they stop they stop the resting before the rest is complete.
When you are forced to rest, you might rest for a few days, maybe a week. You start to feel slightly human again. And then, along with this failure to continue, familiar feelings of guilt arrives, or the anxiety, or the identity that is so tightly wound around doing and producing starts to pull.
Not fully restored. Just restored enough.
And so the next cycle begins from a slightly lower baseline. A little more depleted than before. A little less resilient. A little more dependent on the adrenaline, because that’s the only thing that can get you moving from this depth.
Until one day it can’t.
The radical, genuinely countercultural act is this: rest until you don’t need to rest anymore.
The interesting this with these cycles is that the insight of this reality becomes unavoidable if you have built systems which tell you, you are now free to create out of choice. Not because creating is the only way to save you.
You are being asked to rest until the rest is actually complete.
This process is what it means to break the cycle, not in a single dramatic moment, but a the quiet, unglamorous, deeply uncomfortable choice to stay in the rest long enough for something real to restore.
What Stability Feels Like When You’re Not Used to It
Like with all new experiences, safety, when you are not accustomed to it, does not feel like relief.
It feels strange.
Slightly suspicious.
Like waiting for the other shoe.
Like a body that has been braced for so long it doesn’t know how to unbrace, and finds the unbracing more alarming than the tension.
The nervous system, shaped by years of navigating instability, does not simply recalibrate because the external circumstances have changed. It keeps scanning. Keeps preparing. Keeps generating a low hum of alert that has no current object, so it finds one, or invents one, because at least that is familiar.
This is not dysfunction.
That hum is not a reason to go deep into self work and look for a childhood root for what is wrong with you. That would actually strengthen the crisis programming.
This is biology doing exactly what it was trained to do.
But it is worth naming.
Because when the systems you built start to work, when the savings grow, when the automation runs, when the business becomes something that holds itself, and you feel not relief but a kind of disorientation, that is not ingratitude.
That is the beginning of real change.
The question is not why don’t I feel better yet?
The question is: what does it mean to learn to live here?
In stability. In enough. In a life that is sober and settled and no longer requires a crisis to feel real.
Where the crisis that shaped you, that sharpened you, that made you you in some fundamental way, is no longer present.
You are left with the much quieter, much stranger, much more demanding question:
Who am I when everything is okay?
I don’t have a complete answer to that yet.
I suspect life as a whole seldom has complete answers.
But questions, new questions are often we way we know we have changed.
Writing it sober.
Living sober.
Sober of survival.
Sober and safe.
From the quiet.
For the fifth time.
And that, I think, is enough for today.
As always, with love.
K
On the Path is about the journey of becoming, more present, more honest, more fully yourself. Some letters come from insight already integrated. Some come from the edge of something not yet understood. This one is the latter. And that matters too.
What does it feel like for you to rest, really rest, until you don’t need to anymore? What comes up when you try?
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