39/40 - Learning To Sit Still
When I moved to NYC and started my Biz Dev career with Gowalla, I joined TripIt to help keep all of my travel plans and mileage incentives organized. It was a genius new way of keeping everything in one place. It also told you how many trips you'd taken, how many miles you'd traveled, and how many cities and countries you'd visited each year AND in total since joining TripIt.
In March 2020, I was grounded for the first time in over a decade. I had the chance to go back and look at my travel stats for the 10+ years that I'd been on TripIt. I'd AVERAGED 143 days a year on the road. Basically two out of every four work weeks, I was gone somewhere, for ten years.
When all of a sudden I was "stuck" in NYC, I had a whole new journey to go on.
My freshman year in college, I got an email from my Dad expressing his concern about how many things I was doing and that as far as he and my Mom could tell, I wasn't really sleeping. My response?
"I'll sleep when I'm dead."
I am not sure where this maniacal need to always be doing more came from, there isn't really anyone on either side of my family that I might point to as the genesis of that full speed all-the-time energy. But once I got to college and had an open road to test it out on, I was redlining all of the time.
When I was in Dallas after school, I was going for the number one salesperson in the country.
When I was at Marquis Jet, I was one of the youngest sales executives in the country and constantly had to prove myself to my superiors and my clients.
When I decided to move to NYC, it was all I worked on day and night. It took me two tries and that was painful, but it worked and I finally found my fellow red-liners leaning in for all that life had to offer.
After two startups I was a part of and one that I helped cofounder were acquired, I jumped out to start two on my own.
It was a nonstop cycle that at certain points felt like I couldn't jump off that ride even if I wanted to.
Then I tried to once and got pulled back in less than three months later.
It looks like from a timing perspective that the pandemic hitting is what finally gave me the chance to stay in one place. But it was actually two other things that had happened just before lockdown hit.
- I went to Burning Man 2019.
- I started going to therapy in January 2020.
- Maddie moved in with Hudson in February 2020.
- I started working with an Executive Coach in April 2020.
These four forces were the beginning of some of the most important work I've ever done.
After 1o days at my first Burning Man, I looked at a new friend who'd been multiple times and said, "what do I do now?" and she said, "write down all of the things you think you want to do like get rid of your toxic business partner, propose to your girlfriend, punch your brother in the face, whatever it might be, write them down and then don't do anything for 30 days. If after 30 days you still want to rearrange your world, do it."
In my first therapy session, I said something that admittedly I'd said a million times before when telling that part of my story. My therapist said,
"Is that what Andy believes or is that a highlight from AndyEllwood dot com?"
That was when I knew I could trust her and that she'd actually push back on me in a way that no one else had before.
Maddie and Hudson moving in six weeks before lockdown started was fortuitous in so many ways. But most of all, we figured out very quickly how much we liked spending every day and every night together. I figured that most people who live together have 7-9 meals a week together. We started off our relationship living together having 21 meals a week together.
I tried as hard as I could to find things to work hard on and to hustle in the early months of the pandemic. But no one was interested in that and everyone was okay with just knowing that we all didn't know what was coming next and that we needed to focus on each other's health and safety and supporting local businesses.
I went inside and wrote more in my journals than at any other time in my life. I gave myself space to not know and brought my questions to therapy every week. I brought my curiosities to every meal. I brought my new ambitions to my coach and worked through which ones were old tapes and which ones were new ideas worth pursuing. I was grounded and my identity as a world traveler always on the move had been taken away from me. I was left looking at what I had and what I'd had to leave behind. I found joy in what I was still holding on to and found early signs of new life in places that I hadn't looked or hadn't known were there because I'd been moving so quickly.
I finally sat still and slowed down my pace long enough to claim to become a human being instead of only ever being a human doing. I focused on the things and the people that were focused on living in that space and had to say goodbye to three or four really good friends who didn't come along on that journey and went their own ways when the music stopped for us all.
I am more comfortable in my skin today than I ever have been. I'm more okay with saying goodbye to ideas, dreams, and people that don't align with me and what I know to be true in this life. I've never been more certain of the impact and work that I have ahead of myself, but I've never been in less of a rush to get there. things are moving really quickly again, but I'm still finding my place in the stillness to be the place I want to return to after a momentary rush of activity and ambition.
Sitting still is a state of mind more than an activity. It is a journey more than a location. It is a mindset more than a destination. It is something I had to fight to find and something I know I will have to fight to keep. But now that I know what it is and what it feels like, I know I can always come back.
