TRANSCRIPT: Notes From Dunfanaghy 5: We Make Work (And Money) Like Animals
Hi, it’s Megan. Welcome to, I think this is the fifth Notes from Dunfanaghy voice memo, where, in case this is the first one you’ve listened to, I am starting to think about the Dunfanaghy retreat that’s happening at the end of September, and I am sending myself voice memos as I just think through the material and the things that I want to talk about and the things that I want to cover. And I’m sending these voice memos to you as well.
So I think it’s going to be a short one today. I’ve had a busy day today. I haven’t been wandering around pondering all day. But something that I have thought about a couple of times, which is something I’ve thought about before, although I don’t know that I’ve specifically talked about it at the retreat before, but I think I’m definitely going to weave it in this year, is the fact that we are animals.
So that might seem like a very obvious thing, but I think we forget it all of the time. One of the reasons that I love to be in Dunfanaghy and to be in the landscape — like whenever I go there, there’s a particular cliff that I like to go and stand at and just stare out. There’s just, like, endless sea if you look north. I stare out at the sea and I can almost feel like a physical realigning of myself, like I am kind of reset to my natural state. And part of that is this slowing down and this remembering that I am a body as well as a mind.
And, you know, so I talk about the difference between the traditional business paradigm that most of us have been raised in. Like, you could also think of it as the productivity paradigm, the hustle paradigm, all of that stuff. It is how we do business, but it’s not just how we do business, it’s how most of us have been taught to do life.
And so, you know, I’ve spent the past 10 years trying to move away from that and to move into the art paradigm, where we are taking an artistic approach to our work, but also our lives. And the art paradigm is really all about surrendering to the reality of nature. And part of that is the fact that we’re animals, we’re not machines.
And so the way that we do our work, our creative process, all of that, does not look like how a machine would do it. It doesn’t look like how we’ve been taught to be productive in the traditional business paradigm, or how we’ve been taught — like in the early days of my business education, it was all about, you know, build this like very rigid, predictable, repeatable machine, essentially — like, that’s what your business should be. And I could never do that. I could do it for a short period of time, and then I felt like it was just sucking my soul and my energy. It just felt so unnatural for me.
And I was so relieved to discover we don’t have to do it like that, because actually we’re animals. And so, of course, the way that we make our work is the way an animal would make their work. We have these natural rhythms, we have these natural cycles. It’s not evergreen. It’s not the same every time. It doesn’t have to be.
And so not only is it okay to build our work around our natural rhythms as a human being, it actually, I think, helps us create the richest form of our work. Like, if we can acknowledge and surrender into this fact of — we make our real work at the pace of our body. We don’t have to try and speed it up. We don’t have to try and make it a kind of push-button thing. It can be an organic thing, because that’s what it is. If it’s not an organic thing, it’s probably no longer our real work.
And so, not only that — not only do we make our work like an animal, at the pace of our body — we also make money like an animal, at the pace of our body. If we are taking an artistic approach to things, if we are living, if we are planting ourselves firmly in the art paradigm, making money is just another part of the creative process. It’s this thing that is kind of overblown in the traditional business paradigm. There’s too much focus put on it, too much attention put on it, and it’s all about trying to find certainty in a world where certainty just doesn’t exist.
And so there’s all of this focus on money, and the making of money, and how do we make it faster and more, and all of that, in the traditional business paradigm. But in the art paradigm, we’re taking an artistic approach to our work, we’re doing the work that only we can do — making money, part of the process, is just there in the mix along with all of the other aspects of your creative process. It’s not overblown, it’s not completely negated. It just sits there, it’s the same size as everything else, and it’s part of the mix.
And again, it doesn’t have to be, you know, this like machine-like thing. The way it plays out in my work is it’s cyclical, there are rhythms to it, there are seasons, there are fallow periods. And all of that is okay, it all works out in the end. Like, there are times of harvest and there are times of planting seeds, and there are times of rest, and there are times of, you know, like, very busy periods. And that feels very good to me, it feels very natural to me. And that’s okay, like, that’s an okay thing.
And it’s different every time. I don’t have to, like, find a business model and then do the same thing over and over and over again, because I would absolutely hate that. It means my work gets to shift and change, the things that I make money from get to shift and change. It’s organic, it all fits together.
And so I think that is one of the joys of Dunfanaghy. It’s one of the joys of doing a retreat in Dunfanaghy — we can kind of plug our bodies back into those natural rhythms and that natural wisdom, and that — I don’t know, I just think it’s the most obvious thing in the world whenever you’re tuned into it, and it feels so right.
And also it’s so easy for us to forget it, because we’re constantly being bombarded with messages that are telling us essentially to be more like a machine, and to make our work more predictable, and to make our money-making processes more predictable. And they’re predictable in some ways, on a kind of longer time span, but they’re organic processes. And that is just the nature of them, and that is okay, and that is what is so magical and joyous about them.
So yeah, we’re animals. That’s okay. Allow yourself to be an animal. That’s my message for today. Thanks for listening.