It Hasn't Finished Happening Yet

As I'm about to head out for my trip to Nepal, I've had some good insights from this past week.

I was intending to share something as soon as I got back, since nothing felt like it wanted to be shared yet.

A few days passed and then I got the inkling of an insight.

So I did what I normally do in this situation. I explored it. And that tiny little spark grew into what I'm sharing in this article.

Across everything I'm building right now, the collaborations, the people I'm working with, the ventures still finding their shape, I'm holding a lot of context. Whole strategies. Likely potentialities. Six or seven moves out.

What I invite is the very next step. And for me, it's exciting because we get to explore the next thing and see what emerges in the process.

In the past I read that as restraint. Being careful with people. Handing over the safe amount so nobody gets overwhelmed.

Then I looked at what I was actually holding.

The next move is solid. The one after it, pretty solid. After that it runs 93 percent, then 87, then a trajectory that feels about right.

The other uncertain percentage is actually where the magic is. That's the discovery that brings the Aliveness.

From another perspective, uncertainty could bring about anxiety or doubt because you don't have ultimate clarity on how it will turn out.

You can hand somebody a seven-step plan. You don't know how all the other variables will affect the later steps. Walking anyone through all seven wouldn't give them more truth. It'd give them more fog and call it a map.

This dynamic is the essence of the spark that opened up this insight for me. Then the wider picture emerged.

I noticed the same dynamic has been running for years with me on the other side of it.

I used to want the whole map. Clarified certainty. The strategy, the moves, the shape of the next three years.

Much of that was rooted in my Special Forces training, which is what makes that kind of unit surgically successful in its operations. Having a clear objective and planning out all the ways it could go wrong to mitigate risk.

Somewhere in the last couple of years that turned into something else. My Infinite Game started feeling like an exciting labyrinth that I get to explore, one where existence itself is building with me rather than showing me. I often don't know what's around the corner, although I may have some inklings of ideas. What I've landed on is that whatever's there is a beautiful surprise, an unexpected gift, a synchronicity I couldn't have designed.

That process went from intention to unconscious embodiment, with lots of practice in between lol.

Here's the nugget if you're looking for one:

If the path were a known series of milestones and save points, presence attaches to the motion. You're always in transit toward the next marker. The moment you're actually in goes unfelt.

The part I can't see is what leaves me the elbow room to be in the part I'm standing in. All of it. The good stretches, the grief, the heavy ones too.

There's a forest in one of the Marvel movies that moves on its own (can you guess the movie?). It stands on our side of things, guarding the way into somewhere magical. The forest is alive, shifting, letting through what belongs and turning the rest toward a better road.

The first time I watched that scene, it moved me. Life curating and ushering the right people and the right experiences at the right time, accurate to the millisecond.

I've spent a while thinking of myself as the one being ushered.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I caught that I'm also part of the "alive forest," supporting someone else's story and journey.

Handing someone the whole strategy wouldn't overwhelm them. It'd turn their labyrinth into a corridor. Every corner pre-lit. Nothing waiting in any of them but the thing I already told them was there.

They'd walk my route and call it their experience.

So the corner stays dark on purpose. Then they take their step, find something neither of us could see from here and tell me about it. And my 87 percent moves.

They aren't executing the map. They're helping make it.

Which is exactly what I'm doing with life, all the way down.

If you work with people at all, you're probably running a version of this already.

The precision doesn't go anywhere, by the way. I'm surgical about the question I ask, the words I pick, the framing, the context I set it in. All of it deliberate.

It's just aimed at the process instead of the outcome. Exact about soil and water and light. No opinion about the vegetables.

That's what keeps it light instead of heavy. Energizing Nonchalance is a loose hand on the route while the aim stays fixed. It holds because you're carrying several ways it could go rather than one way it "has" to go. You can't grip the spectrum. There's nothing in there to squeeze.

Some stretches run smooth. Some are six things landing at once with no room to be strategic, where life says you've got a few days, giddy up. The Infinite Playlist plays both. You lean on the reps you've already done, you go nimble on the parts you've never done. The looseness holds anyway.

What comes out of it is a paradoxical pair that turns out to be two sides of one coin.

Confidence, because I can see the dynamic and I'm in it and I don't have to overthink my way into being useful. It's my nature to be myself.

And humility, because whatever I'm here to do in a given moment belongs to something bigger than me. It changes moment to moment.

So here's the invitation. It's a light one.

Somewhere in this there's probably one sentence that caught you more than the rest. Not the smartest one. The one that snagged.

Take that one. Carry it around for a couple of days and go see where it takes you.

It might give you a preview of what's around the corner. Maybe try not to spoil the surprise.

Lane

Enjoy the Journey