Are You Leaving It All out on the Field?

Lesson from a digital freak accident, a professional soccer player, and a woman struck by lightning. Oh, and Buddha makes an appearance, too.

Hi friend,

Uff! What you are reading right now is not the email I had planned to send you today.

You see, I just got The Call.

An elderly family friend who recently had been in bad health just passed away, a few months earlier than expected. There will be a funeral in a few days. Of course, we don’t have any details yet, and there’s a lot of uncertainty in the air.

I feel a lot of different things: Sadness (because the person is gone). Happiness (because the person is no longer suffering). Compassion (for those left behind, and for all of us because being human is really hard sometimes). And and and.

Here’s what’s wild: I got The Call while finishing up the post I had been meaning to send you today about how regular planning just doesn’t work anymore. Go figure!

In that post, I quoted my favorite super-villain’s 4 rules of planning:

“Make the plan,
execute the plan,
expect the plan to go off the rails,
throw away the plan.”

—Leonard Snart, “The Flash”

Apparently, the universe has a strange sense of humor. You see:

• I made the plan to offer my first ever new moon call this Sunday,

• I started to execute it by writing about it in my email to you, and

• I’m currently in the “plan going off the rails” period (which is essentially how the entire 2020s have felt so far, right?).

Anyway, if I can still make the Sunday call happen and if it would feel auspicious to do so, you might receive another email from me, with an invitation to join me.

Either way, I hope you can enjoy the new moon energy this Sunday.

For now, I have an article for you that feels very fitting to me right now:

Why you should share your gifts as soon as possible

A few years ago, I learned some important life lessons from a digital “freak accident.”

While transferring a photo of a Buddha statue so I could use it for my new self-compassion meditation (go figure!), I accidentally deleted most of my computer files.

I still don’t really know how this happened but I assume the combination of a full workday and “quarantine brain” contributed to it. (That, or the Buddha wanted to teach me a lesson about non-attachment.)

Using a file recovery program didn’t help. And while I had a backup of my computer files, that backup was almost five months old.

So, I lost almost all the work I had been doing over nearly five months. 

Here’s what that experience taught me:

Share your talents and gifts because you can’t lose what you’ve given away

While trying to assess the damage I had inflicted on myself within seconds, I went through some unpleasant emotions.

If you have ever lost a collection of things, you know that part of the discomfort is around not exactly knowing what you’re even missing in the first place.

But as I mentally went through the most important files I could think of, I started to relax. My husband, on the other hand, didn’t: “What about your book? Is THAT gone?!?”

I waved his concern aside: “No, no. That’s published.”

Hubby: “Your articles?!?”

Me (starting to feel a little bit better): “Published.”

The same is true for my recent videos, audios, and fiction stories. They’re all published.

“Published.”

That single word immediately alleviated most of my concerns. And it helped me grok an important lesson:

You can’t lose what you have given away to others.

Share your talents and gifts because it's the safest way to back up your work

This incident helped me realize that I had been on the right track for a while. You see, a few months prior, I had started to practice “the art of finishing things.”

I had made it a point to complete and publish half-written articles or stories.

To get things out into the world instead of keeping them on my hard drive.

To live by Steve Jobs' adage that "Real artists ship."

And because of that practice, I only lost a couple of unimportant files.

Actually, the only files I lost were the ones I had created only for myself. For instance, a long document with interesting quotes, facts, or tidbits of information for myself. That was gone.

But everything else wasn’t.

This made me realize that there’s an almost fail-safe way to back up your work: share it!

When it comes to your creations, think like a whistleblower who has crucial information: spread them wide and far.

The safest way to “backup” your creative output is to distribute it to other people.

This reminds me of another lesson I learned about the importance of giving your gifts while you can:

Share your talents and gifts because once life is over, it's over

Back when I worked long hours in a law firm, I started an exercise routine from home. (Yes, I worked out at home before it was cool!)

The video series I followed was taught by Nicky Holender, who used to be a professional soccer player. And during one of the workouts, he would say something along these lines: “As my coach used to tell me: you can’t take it with you so leave it all out on the field.”

Something about these words coming from a person who used to be a professional athlete inspired me to push harder in my workout than I usually would.

Because it’s true… in a soccer match, you only have 90 minutes or so to make your play, and once it’s over, it’s over.

More importantly, though, I realized that the same also applies to other areas of life. The reality is that we will all leave the playing field that we call physical existence (or “life”) and when we do, we cannot take anything with us except our soul memories — so there’s no reason to hold back.

Now, what’s something that you haven’t yet left out there on the field… but know you should? 

An imagination exercise that made me feel braver

I once played around with a little mental imagination related to the idea of death. Since I got profound insights from it, I’d like to share it with others.

I tried this after listening to a podcast where Elizabeth Krohn shared about her near-death experience. She left her physical body and, from that place, was able to see that she had been struck by lightning.

In case you haven’t read about near-death experiences before, it might be good to know that according to research, these often have positive impacts on people’s lives. Potential after-effects include a higher appreciation for life and a great desire to serve others.

Hearing about this woman’s experience made me wonder if I could gain some of the same insights without, you know, the whole “getting struck by lightning and almost dying”-part of it. And while a near-death experience is obviously not quite the same as a “dry run” in one’s head, I got a ton of value from it.

What I told myself was this:

“Now, imagine that you’re dead and have just left your physical body. Look at your life with those eyes. Walk through your day-to-day experiences as if you’re not in your physical body anymore. What do you care about?”

When I did this, I realized that there are many things that I wouldn’t care about if I were dead:

• I wouldn’t care about anyone criticizing my work.

• I wouldn’t care about my fears (after all, if I’m dead so what do I have to fear? Ghostbusters?).

• I surely wouldn’t let my fears hold me back from sharing any talents and gifts I want to share.

If you would like to apply this to your own life, here’s a question: what are some concerns about giving your gifts and sharing your talents that you could let go of right now, without needing to be struck by lightning?

The following quote by Natalie Babbit perfectly summarizes the point I’m trying to make in this article:

“Don’t be afraid of death; be afraid of an unlived life. You don’t have to live forever, you just have to live.”

You and me, we don’t have forever, at least not as our current personality. And that’s actually a good thing because it forces us to make our lives count.

It’s time to “backup” your work by sharing it with others.

It’s time to share your talents and gifts.

It’s time to leave it all out on the field.

If you want help with that, I invite you to check out my services and how I might be able to help you:

Warmly,
Louise

P.S.: Here’s the link again for the open call on Friday.

Relevant video:

This is something I created a few years ago, back when I still went by “Bere” and had life circumstances that made it easy to record videos in the middle of the night: