Light Bulb Moments

What is life for, if not, for a series of light bulb moments; new awarenesses; little peeks into what we’re fully capable of; an opportunity to see ourselves as more significant than we were the day before; to feel more significant; to contribute in a way that feels powerful?

As a coach, I work for light bulb moments. I’m addicted to that moment when someone recognizes something that could only be described as Divine within themselves. Something that is life-changing, sometimes just for them, but also, often, for other people too.

I think ADHD is another way of saying that someone has a relentless curiosity about life. So much so that they find themselves distracted by everything, including themselves. There’s so much to take in and so much to process… everything, everywhere, all at once. Conversations become an adventure where you can start at ‘A’, wander over to ‘K’ and like it so much that ‘A’ no longer becomes the subject at hand. That’s an agile mind. A flexible mind. . . supple. Fertile. Growing and unashamed. To think this way, it’s glorious and full of little hidden treasures and discoveries that you wouldn’t have found if you stayed on the beaten path of the conversation you initially set out to have. To converse like this is expansive. It’s okay. It’s undefined and unabashed, and somehow, perfectly on purpose in its aimlessness.

Thomas Edison was said to have ADHD.

He’s described as a restless entrepreneurial spirit who had a constant curiosity and a tendency toward hyperfocus. Now I know there are no two brains alike, but sources would tell me that Thomas Edison would qualify as an atypical thinker. Beaten path? No, thank you! And thank goodness because his wandering mind stumbled upon so many new discoveries for the rest of us to enjoy.

It is a powerful thing, thinking differently. If only more minds would wander on purpose. If you can learn to be still, you too, can learn to wander. You can learn to be a discoverer in your own mind.

Edison may have been known for the quote,

“Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration”

but I don’t think people give credit to how inspiration actually occurs. The light bulb was an idea born of dedicated mind wandering. What if you could manufacture inspiration or at least prompt it to create the conditions for its success? I think you can. I know you can. Brain science tells us so. You can create the conditions for your mind to wander. And those conditions are completely counterintuitive to what white supremacy, and hyperproductive work culture would have us believe. The key to inspiration, to finding more light bulbs, is doing less.

I came across this face-to-face when I first encountered Tricia Hershey’s Nap Ministry some time ago, I think in 2020. She was putting out brilliant messaging on Instagram about the power of resisting work as dogma. And not only was this a novel idea, but it was actually inspired by Black theology, and an associated history of oppression that has fooled marginalized communities into believing that if they work hard, they can earn liberation, when in truth, we are all deserving of liberation and all deserving of rest. Liberation is not to be earned. It is to be taken. To be received. And by resisting this overwork culture we actually reclaim something beautiful, innate and sacred about ourselves. Rest is resistance. It’s also the title of Tricia’s manifesto. And it is beautiful in its shameless wandering into story, and history, and present, and future.

In a culture that tells us laziness is sin and productivity is king, not doing is a revolutionary act. It’s a purely anti-racist act as well, because it refuses the notion that our worth is based on our work and our output.

Rest says ‘I am not a machine. I am human.’

And humanity is more valuable than any product one could conjure. And that feels like a sigh of relief, if I’m honest.

Like the feeling when you have a vacation coming up so you bust through a crazy to do list and then it’s done. And then there is nothing left to do. Nothing to do is an exhale.

I have shared Tricia’s work with so many people over the years extolling the value of rest, starting to explore the power of somatics for myself, and suddenly understanding the connection between my yoga and meditation practice and how I’m able to show up in spaces that are verbally violent, aggressive or, at the very least, uncomfortable.

Knowing how to be still when others are agitated; that is revolutionary. Choosing not to get whipped into a furor. There’s something powerful in giving yourself space to digest, to be with, to allow your nervous system to calm down. To be still in spite of an external system telling you to get busy, get to work, move.

No.

Rest isn’t always taking a nap, although that’s what people will tell you. No, this light bulb is more nuanced than that. More personal. More intentional. More intimate. Take a nap, a bubble bath, a spa day. Those strokes are too broad for a specific wanderer.

We are all very specific wanderers.

I remember coming out of the COVID lockdown. The world was on fire with what seemed to be the worst cold we had never seen. And so many had awakened to racism for the first time (hint: your light bulb is rarely the same as someone else’s. See? Your wandering is specific). The world dubbed this collective lightbulb a ‘reckoning’. During this time, I happened upon one of my first “DEI” projects. I was contracted to coach about 40 executives in an anti-racism sponsorship program. All of them were tasked to work with an inclusive leadership coach who identified as Black. Each of them also committed to supporting a rising talent within their organization, that had for numerous reasons, been heretofore, overlooked. Yes, I said heretofore.

One of the things that I found in working with one of the CEOs on my roster during that project was that people had not properly transitioned their rest time from the pre-pandemic days. And please understand we all had baked in rest time. But we took it for granted, like so many other of life’s small pleasures. In a world where we were forced to leave our homes to go to work we found empty spaces. In between getting fully dressed and arriving at your office desk to sit down at your computer, there was at least 30 minutes to sometimes up to 2 hours where you were in transit, in motion, where we existed in between. And people were able to put in a podcast or read a book or space out on their drive down an infamous metropolitan freeway loop/belt/parkway. And that space allowed them to shut off their thinking. We wandered on the regular. We found ourselves and inserted daily rest into our routine empty spaces.

Commuting used to be the 8-hour shower that every entrepreneur craves.

I read an article in Fast Company magazine about this concept, that every entrepreneur needs an 8-hour shower because the shower is a place where our bodies are relaxed, where we feel vulnerable, exposed and our minds are allowed to wander and it’s usually there that all the best ideas come from. So what would it look like if just one day out of your work week was just dedicated to that empty space, that incubator for inspiration? Yeah it could look like a literal shower but it could also look like a long commute. It could look like reading something inspirational. It could look like a quiet walk similar to the ones I used to take on the way to the subway each day as a busy New Yorker. Those empty spaces when we’re not doing anything are when some of the most genius things happen.

Later, when I decided that I needed to decolonize my own relationship to work through the power of rest, I hired the rest Coach, Octavia Raheem from Georgia. She was/is everything that I saw/see I could/can be. She is a writer and she speaks real words that are always poetry disguised as prose. Even the way she marketed herself is just so authentic and unassuming. And one of the first things that Octavia offered me when I met her was the question. “When you rest, what awakens? What part of you is asleep?”

Light bulb moment:

To be truly living a life, one must choose to turn off the autopilot. You must unplug from the conditioning that tells you to ‘go go go’. You must seek out the spaces in the in-between. You must allow yourself to wander. The in-betweens, the sighs, the pauses.

We don’t pause long enough to question, “What is it all for?”

“What life am I creating?”

“What new thing in me shall I awaken next?”

Tireless overproductivity is masking, hiding, keeping us from our most creative selves. Because of course, all of the light bulbs exist in that space of remembering what’s under all of that stuff that we’ve been doing. Between here and there, there is something. Who is it that we want to be when here and there is gone? When it all falls away? What remains in the space between? What in us will awaken?

Thomas Edison was a genius with over a thousand patents for his inventions. And he very likely was undiagnosed ADHD, which just means he was relentlessly curious. And without a diagnosis, there was no stigma about that. Then it makes sense that in between his periods of hyperfocus, there was also quite a bit of idle mind wandering that allowed him to stumble upon the greatest ideas, and that allowed him to find what he was awake to. I would assert that many of us can find our sleepy bits in the wandering place as well. And it’s in that process of restless mind wandering that we uncover the biggest ahas and have our greatest light bulb moments.

I live.