People see what I’m doing here — teaching what I know, modeling what it’s like to have a conscious, intentional, non-preachy relationship with yourself — and the coolest thing happens.

It inspires them to go out and do it too.

People start blogs. They open practices. They start teaching what they know. It’s the most beautiful thing in the entire world.

And even when they go deep into the scary where the walls and the monsters are, they remember that it can work.

They remember that my baby blog here pays rent for three people. Real rent, not unheated-hole-in-East-Berlin rent. And that’s without even taking on any advertising or sponsorship.

So if I can get over my own deep, painful “you’re not allowed to receive and you’re not allowed to be visible” stucknesses, and that can inspire other people to get over theirs?

I like it.

It takes me out of that panicky trying to see the whole picture *and* all the details at once mode.

It takes me from oh god this kitchen is a disaster to “my one thing for now is just going to be putting the mixing bowl away.”

It pulls me out of crap crap crap I really need a three-month sabbatical to work on my book and deposits me back into “what if I just spent a few minutes with my gentleman friend after dinner talking about where I am with this?”

Fear #1: My fear of being a slacker.

Otherwise known as my fear of spending five years in a row doing nothing but staring at the wall and picking lint out of my belly button. Otherwise known as my fear of repeating the better part of my twenties.

Me: Whoah. Interesting. Okay, you’re totally allowed to be afraid of this if that’s what you’re feeling.
Fear: Uh-huh. I know.
Me: Um, can I just remind you though that we weren’t actually slacking off? We were just, you know, paralyzed by some seriously crippling perfectionism that kept us from even thinking about trying anything. Well, that and exhausted from working until 7 a.m. at the bar.
Fear: Whatever. Maybe. What’s important is that I need to keep that from ever happening again.
Me: Man, you are always trying to protect me. And I manage to forget that every single time.

Here’s my question:

I think there are just some things that are not in one’s nature, and there’s no reason to force yourself.

But how can you tell if you are being true to yourself, or just giving in to what feels safe?

Here is a concrete example from my life: I’m an introverted person. That doesn’t mean I don’t like people, or don’t enjoy being with them, or even meeting new people, but it takes a *lot* out of me.

So what was happening was that I was getting way, way better at saying no, but at the same time way, way more people were asking.

So if all those people asked for something and I was brave enough to say no to almost all of them, it still sucked.

I’d say no to nine out of ten impossible requests but that one last request might take forty-five minutes or more. If that happened every day … you see my point.

Moving on.

So Mona and Jess and a bunch of people whose names aren’t coming to mind at the moment have asked me to “report back” on the whole email sabbatical thing.

And — if you’re not in the loop — my duck and I decided to take a break from email for all of 2009 as one of my many experiments in how to run a successful business while still maintaining some semblance of sanity.

As my father likes to say:

“Take that mental health day before it takes you.”

Of course, it didn’t feel so much like a mental health day as an “I really, really, really don’t want to get a cold” day, but these tend to be more closely related than we’d like.

And granted, any advice from my father is a tad suspect …

Obviously when a super-biggified “expert” screws up, it’s way more entertaining than when other people do. And god knows we all need someone else to slip on a banana peel once in a while or we’d never feel good about anything.

There are two ways we get support. Or anything, for that matter.

We have internal resources (thoughts, emotions, strengths, energy, ideas, epiphanies, concepts, reassurances, trust) …

… and we also have external resources (people we know, experts, authorities, information, even a higher power — if you believe in one — could be considered an external resource).

Working on your relationship to TIME sounds kind of a lot of …. work. Which, I have to say, is not really all that appealing.

But it’s not like you and time need to go to couples counseling together. It’s not like you need to start spicing things up …. like opening the door to time while wearing only plastic wrap.

There’s a giant semi-annoying cliche in the world of people who talk about time-management and productivity stuff: we need to make better use of our time.

The experts and biggifiers love to tell us about how we all have the same twenty four hours in the day which means, apparently, that some of us (them) make better use of these hours than the rest of us (us).