Pancakes and a girlfriend, is there a better combo for Saturday morning breakfast? No. Because while lingering over gluten free pancakes and eating ‘just one more bite,’ I’m fairly certain we solve the world’s problems. At least our world. During a recent breakfast, at the end of a particularly windy trail of topics, she made a comment,
“I’m not who I was then.”
Bam, Elvis has left the building. We paused for a moment realizing all the work we’d done from starting points that were ugly at best, but we wouldn’t have gotten there without the messy middle.
The part we want to skip
Already on my mind, the messy middle poked me earlier in the week during a book launch call. I’m on a team helping author Allison Fallon launch her upcoming book, The Power of Writing it Down. Honestly, being on the team is a gift because we spend an hour each week with Allison talking about the book, one chapter at a time. And the questions that arise are powerful. This week, we spoke about the question authors pose at the onset of a book that keeps the reader turning the pages, waiting for the answer, which doesn’t come until the end. Answer the question any sooner, you lack a compelling reason for the reader to continue.
But that middle part, it’s where all the juicy stuff happens. While I am not one of these people, I know there are some who skip ahead to the last page, jumping past the building suspense because they want the answer now. If only we could follow achieve answers that easily in our own lives.
The middle is where we narrate the answers
Thinking back to four years ago when my girlfriend and I began our pancake ritual (not every week mind you, we’d be diabetic by now from the syrup), our lives were like a yard sale after a tornado. I’d reached a point where tough choices needed to made and although painful, they launched me into a phase of self-discovery. Otherwise known as reaching midlife. Believe me, if I could have read a book or downloaded the answers that came to me during that phase, I would have. I was smack in the messy middle. The tears, heartache, learning, discovering, growth, joy, struggling, heartache… all brought me to today.
You see, the messy middle, or, the middle space, is where we think it through. At the onset, like the beginning of a book, we don’t have the answers yet. Experience is the road to the answers. The middle space is where we have time to examine and learn so that we can have a different answer. We’ve had time to think, process, feel the shift in our bodies and hearts and understand what our intuition is telling us.
It takes time
Depending on your reading speed, a day, a week, a month later, you reach the end of the book, and get your answer. Hopefully, if the author has done their job, it’s one that satisfies you, or perhaps provokes you – both are reasonable outcomes. If only we could zip through life’s lessons like we would a compelling novel. But we can’t. And if that’s not enough, we can’t project plan it out, setting the end date where we’ll put down our pen and be done. We cannot predict the duration of the messy middle. And truthfully, if we took a shortcut, we’d miss necessary lessons.
And then one day…
You have a situation, one which brings back the familiar guttural feelings from the beginning. But this time, you choose differently. Instead of listening to your thoughts as though they are truth, you ask yourself questions. You have new skills. You’ve developed new insights you understand yourself more completely. So, when you feel your throat tightening (in my case), or your stomach knotting (also in my case), you ask why. And you make a decision that reflects who you are today.
If you think about your own life and who you were four years ago compared to who you are today, are you the same person? Change is part of life and in fact, if we’re not changing, we’re stagnating. And the people around us, especially the ones who’ve been there awhile, they’ve had the privilege of witnessing our change. But I’d be remiss not to acknowledge that you might lose some of those people along the way because they aren’t comfortable with your change. That’s ok. Hard, but ok. Borrowing from Glennon Doyle in her newest book Untamed, we can do hard things, you can do hard things because, “You’re a goddamn cheetah.”
You have to go through the messy middle and know that I’m in it with you. One day, you’ll wake up and think, “I’m not who I was then,” and you’ll know it was worth it. Be brave my friends. Lisa
If you’ve read my blog, you’ve probably picked up that responsibility may as well be my middle name. When I take on a project, I stay all in, even if it begins to crush me. As a young mother, one year I decided that I would make the kid’s Valentine’s Day cards. Homemade cards seemed cool and these were 3D, sort of, and exceptionally unique. I have two sons, and each had 20 kids in their class. They were in Preschool. The project took me 40 hours – literally, after work each night for weeks. For emphasis…they were in Preschool. Most likely those cards ended up in the trash within a couple of days, if they made it home at all.