Cocooning and the Art of Strategic Withdrawal [Part 1]
"If you don’t come away for a while, you will come apart after a while.” —Dallas Willard
Hey Everyone, this Find Your Forward newsletter might be more of a Finding your Inward. It's an attempt at finding language for my own struggle with the summer slowdown. It can be hard to trust that there are times when unplugging from the drive to get ahead can be the most productive thing one can do. Disappearing, retreating, withdrawing, logging off—these are all needed. I’ll share a few ideas on why and how. Hope it helps. Thanks for reading!
Every summer, it seems to happen.
When schedules dissolve, the days grow long, and work life gets quiet, is right about the time I begin to get a bit low. I feel a pull to go dark, to withdraw, to get slow.
Not sure if this reflects your summer experience, though it seems that for a few of us the slowness of summer can be hard to accept. Summer is a slow time for many entrepreneurs and businesses, where new leads dry up and new business cools off. And fair enough, who wants to work in summer?
I’m learning not to panic with these yearly summer slowdowns, yet I often can’t tell if I’m a bit depressed or if this is a natural rhythm to co-operate with.
I think it’s the second. But it’s hard.
Anybody else feel out of season in all the summer sunshine?
If not, feel free to skip this post! (I don’t want to be a buzzkill with my natural scandinavian penchant for sweater weather and grey skies.)
But, if you too are someone who can feel out of sorts in the summer, I’d love to know what’s helping you these days. Is there anything you’ve found to help reframe the summer slowdown? Send me some words!
The Power of Reframing
One of the things I’ve learned in working with creative leaders is the ongoing necessity of the reframe. Because these are people who tend to live from their imagination, they have an extra large capacity to perceive the world in fresh, innovative ways. However, this seeing superpower can work both for and against them, which makes the skill of reframing absolutely critical.
Being able to flip the perspective, shift the viewpoint, find a new angle, widen the lens, notice the details just outside the current cropping—all of this is the work of reframing.
Reframing is the ability to see the same thing, different.
And when it’s applied to our thinking, it’s what allows us to begin to separate truth from perception.
Reframing starts by first becoming aware of how we see what we see. And then, like a good photographer, finding new angles and distances to gain a fresh perspective from.
Have you had this experience? You’re with a friend in a beautiful location and you both take out your phone to snap a few pics. Later you compare photos or maybe you see what they end up posting, and you wonder: how did they get that picture? I was there and I didn’t see any of that!
This happens all the time when I’m with my friend Reid who has more than a little photography game. We can be in the same moment, same location, looking at the same things, and yet we end up with wildly different photographic outcomes.
Once we were travelling in Portugal and we got up early to go to the little town of Sagres. After driving through the town, we came out to the point at Farol do Cabo de São Vicente. It’s the far-southwestern edge of Portugal. Sheer cliffs, wild wind, frothy sea. We got out of the car to see the cliffs and could hardly take it all in. There we were, at the edge of the world, suspended in fog and soft sunlight, and our only assignment was to stay drenched in awe. It was a moment we still talk about.
Later, I was able to see some of Reid’s photos from that morning. And well, let’s look at one contrasting example here.
A Lance photo:
A Reid photo:
See what I mean? While I mostly stayed stationary, Reid crouched, climbed, and explored. I stayed in one perspective; Reid shifted perspectives, over and over.
Our different photographic outcomes were the result of different ways of seeing and framing the moment.
I share all of this as a way into the theme of this post: the art of strategic withdrawal, which we’ll uncover in a moment.
This is Part One and today’s post contains a metaphor, a reading (a mini essay from David Whyte), and a reframe for the summer slowdown.
There’s a dual layer here, as I’ve been needing to reframe my own urge to withdraw. And, at the same time, it’s within the act of withdrawal, where we can find the space to reframe.
There’s a line in David Whyte’s poem Sweet Darkness—"When your eyes are tired the world is tired also.” Tired eyes lead to a tired outlook. Best to withdraw, disconnect, pull back, and go into the dark to learn to see again.