Things Evolve

Allow things to evolve.  As many of you know (and thank you for your support during this process), my niece and I recently finished writing a book. It is a book about kindness. It did not start out to be a book about kindness. It evolved into a book about kindness. Projects are not unlike people. To evolve and grow, there must be space, time, pressure, time away, and the right amount of attention and  nurturing to have the right outcome. Like most projects, this was (and is) a journey.

Our original plan changed into other plans. The book had a few incarnations along the way. The original format and structure are unlike what it turned out to be. It seems as if we  needed to go through all of the stages we did to get to where we ended up; but who knows? Personally, I believe we went along the course we did in order to end up where we are even though, at times, we wondered if we were going in the right direction. Perhaps at the times we asked that question we were and perhaps we were not. Detaching from what we felt was essential to our vision was often hard, but in the end, necessary.

Listening to the advice of others was also often difficult, because when you are attached to an idea, you can feel certain that they just didn’t “get it” when in fact, their fresh perspective allowed them to “get it” more than we did because we were too much in the middle. So there are many lessons to be learned along the way when working closely on a project that means so much to you. One of those lessons is to step back and allow it to evolve.