Hi Soul Minimalist!
When you have a big day circled on the calendar - a graduation, wedding, baby due date, deadline, closing date - it can be hard to imagine life after that date.
We just have to make it to the end and then we can think about what’s next.
And then, the day after the day comes. Sometimes there’s relief, other times exhaustion. Almost always, at least for me, there’s some level of decision fatigue.
It’s been one week and one day since How to Walk into a Room left my hands and arrived in yours. The week after launch marks the end of the pre-order and first week stage of the process and we move into thinking more long term about the book. In other words, it’s now the day after the day (or the week after the week, in this case.)
So where do you start when you’re at the end?
This week on the podcast I had a lovely conversation with Grace P. Cho. Professionally she is an Acquisitions Editor for my beloved former publisher, Revell Books, and personally she is a dear friend of mine. While I’ve not had the privilege of working with Grace as an editor, I did get to witness her discernment process as she took on this new role.
You can listen to our entire conversation here on The Next Right Thing podcast, but today I wanted to highlight not only one of my favorite parts, but one that is helping me (right now today!) to find some relief from my own decision fatigue.
As I’m sure you know by now, I wrote the book using “rooms” as a metaphor for our various commitments, jobs, relationships, and life stages. It could also refer to a literal space like a classroom, a sanctuary, or a home.
When we leave one room but aren’t sure what the next room might be, we’ll find ourselves in a liminal space that sometimes feels like no place at all. I’ve named this “the hallway” and it can be a lot of things: a wilderness, a respite, a waiting room, a bridge, or a big, deep breath.
We may stay in certain hallways for decades. Sometimes the hallway is the best we can do. Sometimes the hallway becomes a room all its own. And we gather with the misfits and the I-don’t-know-yets, and all those who are leaving rooms but don’t yet know where to go.
The beauty of writing using pictures and metaphor is that the reader can expand on that metaphor to make sense of their own experience. I’ll give you the grounding image and you build on it in whatever way makes sense for you.
After Grace shared about her decision to leave a particular room, I asked her this question: