This is a video from a gathering, Awesome Women, in 2011.  You will note that yesterday’s YouTube is also 2011.  Which is to say things were in flux in my life at the time and I was searching.

The question posited at the Awesome Women gathering was “How Do You Change the World?”.  And you can see the answers were varied.  Mine shows up around 1:10 on the video:  Live in the Question.

Really, sometimes I need to question my sanity because I think that claim is coming into blossom now.  And some of the dark downess I’m feeling is in the figuring out of how that works and what it looks like day-to-day to live in uncertainty.

I can live in chaos – have my whole life (probably half of it my own making since I am comfortable with it.  Yes.  I am.  It has to do with being the Adult Child of an Alcoholic and the thriving survivor of at 17 year battering relationship.)  Chaos I have a handle on.  It generally requires that I *DO* something.  I’m really good at figuring out what needs to be done and carrying through.

Living in the Question, however, appears to require that I simply *BE*.  Guess what.  I don’t know how to do that.  Relaxing isn’t something I do easily

unless I schedule it as an activity (ahem) away from the house:  i.e., a retreat, a vacation, travel, etc.  None of which, by the way, are exactly “be”ing.  More doing and calling it being.  You catch my drift?

So here I am 4 years out from claiming and writing about living in the question (in connection with a word for the year, hence it’s connection to writing about balance as a word for the year) and the call is finally coming home to roost.

In a post from January of 2012, I note:  it is not easy to ask your own self the right question to encourage yourself to persevere in pursuit of your passion.  (What Is the Question?)

Interestingly enough, I even come up with some antidotes to that doing/being thing although I don’t name it that.  (Actually, this points up the awesome thing about blogging – feed in my name and a concept and bam, the internet feeds me back what I apparently have already discovered at some point and then forgotten.  No matter how many years back.  I cannot do that with my handwritten journals, so suddenly I find myself very grateful that I’ve been doing this for 9 years).  Here is what I said:

Yesterday, instead of beating myself up because I wasn’t accomplishing anything, I read a book about zombies all day long in front of the wood stove, and then last night watched DVDs of  Boston Legal which I only caught just before it was going off the air.  Brother-in-Law lent us all the seasons.  And I did not once tell myself I should be doing otherwise.  It felt like being on vacation! Tip 2: When you talk to your Self be nice.  Berating yourself will only make the demons, the lizard and the hamster join in.  Self may not reply in kind.  That’s okay.  Be nice anyways.  Tip 3: Take a break.  Not the kind of break where you clean the refrigerator and scrub the bathroom.  Take a vacation break.  Imagine what you would do if you were not in your house but you were on vacation.  Do it.

I find myself interested in the fact that my plan for today – which has started very late for me,  but I think I finally changed to West Coast time now that I’ve been back from Camp/West Coast for a week, and also my body is anticipating the time change, tho my head is not – was to go looking (shopping without necessarily knowing what I’m looking for, try out some new places I haven’t been), maybe take a nap, blog (which is doing but seems to reach down into being if I just type what comes to mind instead of trying to fashion it into a beginning, middle and end with some purpose), read all my new books, etc.  So perhaps once we “get” it, we do keep it, and remember it somehow if not precisely when we are pushed up against whatever the issue is again (darkness, wondering about tomorrow, when if fact isn’t going badly at all, that kind of thing).

So apparently my way to change the world is to accept the offer I am currently receiving of living in the question and seeing what that looks like.  Living inside of What Does Balance Look Like is an appropriate use of my word for the year and being inside of what is showing up in my life.

You gotta love the Universe.  Sometimes she takes a while getting around to it, but if you ask, she will *always* respond.