I was walking around the block, the same loops I have done almost daily in the many months I’ve been living at my parents house over the course of the pandemic.
I was on the part of the loop that is a slight incline. It felt much steeper when I was a young girl, but it’s actually not that steep. On this particular day, it was cold and windy, and a strong wind was blowing against me as I walked up the hill.
As I pushed myself into the wind, I realized it was a perfect metaphor for how I’ve felt lately in my work and in my life in general. Pushing into the wind. Resistance slapping me in the face.
Sometimes I wonder, when will this get easy?
Deep down I know the truth: it won’t get easy.
The wind, the resistance, the friction, will always be there. There’s no magic to make it go away.
The resistance is meant to be there, because that’s the force that causes us to build strength and access our creativity.
Wind makes trees develop stronger roots. Without resistance or load, we don’t build muscle — a reality I’ve been confronting during the pandemic, as I feel my body’s physical strength deplete without access to a gym and weight room.
Constraints create the container for creativity and innovation.
If there were no constraints, we wouldn’t have a need to innovate.
The point is not to eliminate the friction, the resistance, or the constraints. It’s to learn how to use them to grow stronger, to build capacity, to innovate, to create within them.
The game is learning how to use the resistance to support us, rather than allowing it to stop us.
We build strength by walking against the wind.
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