When are the improvements enough? When is the work finished? When is the job complete?
In almost any realm of life, effective project management requires a clearly-defined scope. The minimum viable product. The parameters that define when the work is done.
Whatever you’re building or creating, there’s a point at which you stop, step back from the work, and call it finished. It might not be “perfect” or the way you imagined it in your vision, but it’s “good enough.”
The artist puts down the paint brush. The writer stops writing and editing. The filmmaker stops filming. We ship the work.
Yet when it comes to ourselves, we often adopt a different standard.
Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say we adopt no standard. We don’t define parameters around the project that is our own self-improvement.
We are always striving to do more, learn more, have more, become more, and even to be more.
When are the improvements enough? When is the work finished? When is the job complete?
It’s easy to get caught up in the game of endless becoming to the point that we forget about being.
We need reminders to stop; moments to pause to see the work as already done, to recognize that we are already whole and complete as we are right now.
One of the paradoxes of life is that in our constant striving to grow and become more, we end up resisting what is here — the situation as it is.
We work to create change, yet we resist the change when it arrives, seeking to change the reality rather than allow it to unfold.
This resistance to what is here creates our suffering.
Life is a co-creation, There is a limit to what we can do on our own. We do not control all the elements. Like any team project, we must trust the other members of the team to do their part.
If we are contracted in fear, if we are always doing and striving, if we fill our schedules to the brim with work to keep us busy, then there is nowhere to receive life’s grace.
There must come a time for us to stop, to step away from the canvas, the keyboard, the work room — to rest in the enoughness of what we’ve created, and to surrender to what is here.
In the surrender, we create space in which something new is born. It doesn’t always look like what we envisioned.
That’s part of the process.
Like an archer shooting an arrow, we take aim as we do the work, but eventually must release it. We don’t control where it lands.
The surrender is the hardest part of the process. It’s natural for us to want to control what happens as a result of our efforts.
But in our efforts to control the outcome, we block ourselves from receiving the grace that is flowing to us.
To pause and surrender requires trust in the greater source of creation.
When we allow ourselves to be in the mystery, in the space of not knowing, we open ourselves to receive the gifts that life is waiting to give to us.
If we want to receive the grace that flows from our efforts, we must surrender and trust.
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