Fighting the Flow

"Go with the flow. You can't control the whole sea -

the only thing you can control is your own ship."

-Unknown

How often do we create problems out of nothing? As in, the problem's severity is entirely fabricated in our minds. Like when you sit and freak out about the 10,000 things you need to get done, and realize after writing it all down that it's only five things. We've all been there. In fact, we were just there.

Lauren: Once upon a time, the 2023 holiday season happened. Between us making product, packing and shipping boxes, home-life schedules, and everything else that goes along with the holidays, the ability for us to get together and write the January blog was getting further away. Cut to December 31st at 5:00 pm when I was trying to get anything at all down on paper. I was freaking out because I was fighting with the post, trying to finish it so it could come out on the 1st like it always does. I was saying to myself, "We still have about 15 hours before it normally posts. We can still finish it." But there was nothing working correctly when we were trying to come up with the post. Honestly, the photos were all wrong, the words weren't working, and it was all bad. After spending some time on the phone discussing logistics and scheduling, Taylor was able to talk me down and we decided to put off the post for a week. What would the consequences of putting off the post for a week be? In my mind, it would be all the things that would go wrong. But in reality, well, nothing.

We have a bubble, in which our ideas live in perfection. They happen exactly how and when we want. But then one thing happens to pull it out of our vision of perfection. There is generally a minor inconvenience that happens and we twist it and blow it up to create something much larger that could have easily been avoided. We get stuck on the way something should happen - or at least how we feel it should happen...then we get irritated when it doesn't unfold the exact way we envision. New Year's resolutions are often that way: we decide what we're changing, it doesn't happen the way/speed/amount/whatever that we want, so we give it up 20 minutes after we started.

Instead of remaining rigid in our ideas, we have to be able to bend and pivot. It's not always possible to make something happen just because we want it to happen. Being able to exist in a flexible state is both a gift and a skill that can be honed. If something goes awry, we need to be able to use what we have to enter the new flow. Being able to pivot to the new "normal" of the situation removes all of the resistance. If it doesn't, then we're still stuck on the previous idea - not going with the flow.

When we're doing anything related to ApothoGothic, it's all about the flow. When we've told people how we work, it always hits differently. We expect for everything to happen easily, so it does. That doesn't mean everything happens perfectly - but we look for simplicity. If there's something we're developing where we hit a wall, we give it time and space, and if it hasn't become clear by then, we've decided it doesn't belong to us. Every single time that has happened, as soon as we step back we're able to see the door directly to the side of where we were banging on the wall.

The fact that we've been doing that for a year now makes the sequence of events leading up to the writing of this blog funny (in hindsight)... That very thing that we've been getting so much practice in completely left the building when we were confronted with the schedule that we had set for ourselves. And what would really happen if we didn't put the blog out on the 1st? Absolutely nothing. It was a minor inconvenience that we'd blown up into a mountain.

Once we made the decision to put it off for a week until we had the time to get together in person and figure it out, all resistance left. Not only that, there were a few other things that'd we'd been working on that ended up falling into place within moments of us going from rigid to flexible. When the river is coursing, it's a whole lot easier to kick back and float downstream than it is to paddle upstream and fight the current.