This journey with the unknown has an adventurous quality that is challenging me to drop in, hang on and open up. Like the poet says, I am becoming “a half a shade braver”. This bravery doesn’t come from more knowledge. It comes from a sense of willingness and a healthy dose of surrender. It colors my attention with inquiry. It gives my intention a spirit of curiosity.

Practicing this kind of bravery is not new to me, and yet is crucial to recover in service to navigating the territory ahead. I have embraced the world with this bravery before. This is a quality that I have known in my life. For some reason, I have decided it is no longer of value. It is time to give myself permission to remember.

It is not important to analyze the details of what specific events or people triggered me to stop being brave. That is not my path to revelation. It is a mechanism designed to deepen my melancholy and keep me bound in self-doubt. My deft mind and strong analytical sense can quickly abstract moments that I can use to “prove the point” to myself. This kind of analysis cuts me off from the fullness of my memory.

Permission with out proof is that first difficult tiny step: permission to be vulnerable, permission to play, permission to share, and permission to screw up from time to time. This is an expression of faith in both myself and my place in the world.

The more I open up to the possibility of this kind of permission, the more I am tested by these fabrications of fear. The thoughts that are triggered are not in service of the exploration of expansive inquiry. They are focused more on suppression, self-criticism and contraction. The testing is a vehicle designed to shut myself off from experience. It comes like a force closing a door ahead. My fear would rather stop and start pondering the details of the molding, trim, door handle, and deadbolt, then to move with curiosity through thresholds ahead into new terrain.

When I am that half a shade brave enough not to be distracted by this chatter and delusion, I drop into a state of curiosity. I can access my memories in their fullness of emotion, experience and detail. With this agency, I can explore the feelings I was having without judging their merit. Half a shade braver I can access details filling out the narrative as guidance not judgment. It gives my stories the heirloom quality and richness that they deserve. They retain a transcendence through which they can be of service.

These heirloom memories, my inheritances from my experience, are powerful reminders to settle and take a step deeper. They are the generative force that tempers the quality of engagement in the deepest conversations with my own unknown and the unknown of relationships and organizations around me. The practice of becoming is as a practice of permitting myself to share, in its fullness, what has been happening for a very long time.