The Tug

There is a thing that all, (or at least most of us), keep circling.

You know the one. You don’t talk about it much, because saying it out loud feels presumptuous, silly, late or slightly embarrassing. But it’s there. It takes the form of a voice in your head, the thing that wakes you up at night, the thing you mention walking with your best friend on the weekend. It has been there a while. It tugs.

It doesn’t pull, but it tugs - just enough.

I have now reframed the tug as more of a sixth sense. It’s not the scary kind, but rather a quieter kind — a low and steady knowing that runs underneath the louder senses, underneath the noise of what you are supposed to want, to do or to be.

The other five senses we have report on the outside world - what we see, hear, smell, how it feels and tastes. But the sixth sense reports to the inside you. It tells you, in a voice you have spent years learning to talk over, this. Over here. This is the thing. Remember me?

My sixth sense is painting, or making art more broadly. It took me about thirty years and a whole career to admit that, and I am sixty-something, so do the math on how long that voice was talking before I finally tuned in enough to listen.

Yours might be something else entirely.

Maybe you want to make stuff like the little crochet circles my friend makes as brooches. Or, you love singing so you keep saying you will take a class finally in your 50s, like someone else I know. Maybe you want to actually make a dish that remotely resembles something from the NYTimes cooking app, something that would impress your friends and be more than the assembled Trader Jos’s ingredients that save you every night.

But somehow, you don’t do it. You don’t take the singing class, you don’t pick up the knitting needles, get the tattoo, lean into the break up, or move to the dream town (my favorite sport). It does not have to be grand, it does not have to be broadcast, it can even be your secret.

But because you don’t do it, It just keeps tugging.

The trouble is that it is so easy to ignore.

The sixth sense doesn’t shout. It annoys you, it whispers to you quietly at night.

It is not the voice that reminds you about the dentist or the deadline or the thing you said you would bring to the potluck. Those voices are loud because the world makes them loud. The sixth sense is quieter than all of them, on purpose, because it is the only one that is actually yours.

staring out at the Irish Sea this past spring on a walking trip

So it gets clever. If you will not listen, it starts tugging.

It is the friend in your ear who keeps bringing up the same subject, gently, every time you talk, until you finally say why do you keep mentioning that and she says because you keep mentioning it.

The thing about the tug is that I ignored mine for decades. I was good at ignoring it. I was good at a great many things, which is part of how the ignoring works — competence is an excellent place to hide. And the inside voice never got angry. It never gave up either. It just kept its hand on my sleeve, patient as anything, while I went and was highly productive, competent and even happy in my career of 30 years.

And then one day I stopped, turned, and looked at it, and said fine. Show me. And it did.

a quick watercolor of the irish sea from that trip

Here is what I want to tell you, and it is not a method, because I do not have one, and by the way, you would not trust me if I did. It is just this: the tugging is simply information. It is not a nuisance. It is not a judgement or midlife indulgence. It is not something to get to later, once the more reasonable things are handled, because the more reasonable things are never finished being handled — that is what makes them reasonable.

The tugging is the most honest thing in your life. It is yours, and likely, left alone, it is not going away.

You do not have to obey it today. You do not have to quit anything or announce anything or buy anything. You only have to stop pretending you cannot feel it.

And once you do not only acknowledge that you are feeling it, listening to it, communicating with and about it everyday, the feeling is transcendent. It’s your truest you.

That’s it. Now you know.

But then again, you have known for a while.

I can’t wait until you stop to listen.

xo

— MJ