Writer Mark Nepo talks about the “choice-points” in the human journey, “places where we have to navigate extremes in order to stay in the pulsing corridor of aliveness.”[1] One of these choice-points, he says, is between effort and grace. In yoga, we talk about it as effort and ease. It may seem like these are opposing forces, but they’re part of an intricate dance. It takes effort to get into a standing pose, but once you’re there, you can find some ease—some grace in the pose-- by letting go of tension in your shoulders or your jaw.
Or imagine that you are a surfer paddling toward a wave. It takes a lot of effort to get into the right position to catch the wave, but once you are there, you can ease into the joy of riding the wave that wave all the way to shore. Gliding along on the wave is the moment of grace, of ease. Is there a better example of a “pulsing corridor of aliveness” than the ocean?
Nepo says, “Effort is how we ready ourselves for grace.” Sometimes the most important thing we can do in life is find that life-giving rhythm between effort and ease. When life is feeling particularly challenging, Nepo says we need to ask ourselves “Where you can increase your effort so you are ready to accept grace?”[2]
This often happens to me when I’m writing. Whether it’s a blog post or a book chapter, I often stagger along at the keyboard, shifting back and forth between my notes and internet searches, then checking email and scrolling through the headlines, then shifting back to my notes and getting frustrated because what I’m writing is a muddled jumble of words.
I don’t make progress until I decide to increase my effort and give myself permission to write a terrible first draft. (Writer Anne Lamott calls these sh*&&y first drafts.)[3] Once I make the effort to get that garbled-up mess on the page, I can move on to the grace. That’s when I come back to the tangled text with fresh eyes and begin to rearrange words and ideas so that they clearly communicate my message. I’m no poet, but when I get to that stage, the editing flows easily, a bit like the way that reading poetry makes me feel. Those hard hours of effort give way to hours of grace.
Sometimes we realize that we’ve been putting effort in the wrong place. A few weeks ago, one of my clients had a lightbulb moment about where she was exerting her effort. She was pushing herself to get started on a new marketing launch and becoming frustrated when she kept needing to pause the development of the marketing campaign to complete some bit of business infrastructure development. As she described it, she realized that she needed to invest a few weeks into developing systems and mailing lists and other basic structures, and she gave herself permission to put the marketing launch on pause. Once she has developed her systems, she’ll be able to complete the marketing launch with a certain amount of ease.
What about you: where in your life do you need to increase your effort or re-direct your effort so that you can find grace and ease?
[1] Mark Nepo, Falling Down and Getting Up: Discovering Your Inner Resilience and Strength (New York: St. Martin’s 2023), 57.
[2] Nepo, 69, 71.
[3] Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1995), 21.