I want to unlearn everything.
When a writer comes to a blank sheet of paper or a blank screen, when a painter faces an empty canvas, when a potter sees only a mound of clay, there is often a hesitation. Perhaps fear of not knowing what this could become. There is no direction, no place to begin.
There is only a void. We fill it with what we know: our experiences, what we’ve been taught, what we’ve been told we should fill it with.
That blank canvas is your life.
I would like a blank canvas. I would like to unlearn everything I know so it doesn't interfere with creating something that has never existed before. Something born from my intuition or my imagination, without constraints around what it should be, how it could serve, or even why it matters.
The freedom of not knowing is a gift. It is the place where a new possibility might arise, for my art, for my life, for my work.
So instead of trying to learn new things, I am trying to unlearn what I have known and what I’ve been told. To stop listening to the messages about how things should be, what success means, the frameworks for thinking. I am devolving my mind so I can evolve my consciousness, my imagination, my curiosity.
My mind says this makes no sense. I see flashing red lights. Danger, danger, danger!
Yet when I sit in quiet contemplation, or when I am present to a flower blossoming, or leaves falling from the trees, or the ocean when it is completely still, I hear a very small voice. It asks me to live without limitations.
I suppose that is why I named my retreat Becoming Limitless. The only way to be limitless is to remove the limits of all I know and all I have done. To start again with a blank sheet of paper, an empty canvas, a mound of clay.
This assumes my wisdom comes from within, even as knowledge comes from without. We are flooded with information. We know more than we have ever known, and still, it is not enough to solve our most complex problems.
Costa Vicentina, Portugal
This is the time to go inward. To recognize that behind all the frameworks, ideas, and solutions we’ve been told work, lies an innate wisdom that comes from somewhere beyond the mind. This is what we need today.
Artists feel it first. Creatives are sensing it in their lives and in their work. A shift is happening in the collective. I feel it strongly. It’s disorienting. It’s uncomfortable. It’s painful and scary. Like an oncoming tsunami, it’s the ocean pulling back, the strange quiet before the wave, and then the rising.
Can you unlearn what you know? Can you question what you’ve been told, the way things are supposed to be? Can you sit in the quiet spaces without needing to produce anything, long enough to hear your own wisdom and live from there?
Your mind will interfere. It will tell you how dangerous this is.
I know. I hear it in myself. And yet I am driven to unknow. To be comfortable in a void, a space where creativity can happen, where I can imagine possibilities that don’t yet exist.
For now, I will practice pulling back and in, until something I imagine, like the waters of the tsunami, rises again.
