June 10, 2024
Dear leader,
You are telling me, and I am feeling for myself, how hard it is in the business world right now. Hard to find work, even though you are so exquisitely skilled and effective. Hard to keep work with clients canceling halfway done when they realize their budget won't hold out. And it's not just you. It's everyone you talk to. All struggling. The owner of a very thriving coaching consultancy, well, until recently, told me, “We've already written off 2024 as a total loss.”
I spent more time than was comfortable in a tunnel yesterday. My husband and I took a walk through the Blue Ridge Tunnel and back again. It's an old train tunnel, the first through the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. Approaching the tunnel, the educational placards told a story of struggle to even make the tunnel in the first place. The man who advocated for it, Claudius Crozet, was run out of public office because the canal boat industry of the day wanted canals to be the main mode of goods transport in the U.S., not trains.
A few years later, when the average person had caught train fever, Virginia Public Works asked Crozet to be the engineer of the tunnel. The people were clamoring for it. He still faced an uphill battle, and there were many delays. Then, the same people who fought him tooth and nail petitioned to have him removed as engineer because the tunnel wasn't being built fast enough for their liking. Struggle. Almost every story that's worth telling is full of it.
So here we are, all learned up about the tunnel, and taking our first steps in. This tunnel is 4,273 feet long, about 1,300 meters, and my phone tells me about 3,500 steps from beginning to end.
It's pitch black in there. No lights, except the lights at the ends, literally the light at the end of the tunnel.
We had an old school flashlight, the kind that gives a circle of brown light that bounces around as you walk. And we had our cell phone flashlights if all else failed.
Moving into the dark, I was immediately comforted. Things were simple, natural. And it felt like being in the embrace of a mountain mother, literally so, with about 700 feet of mountain directly overhead. I'm sure I could have conjured up fear at being that far under so much rock and mountain, but it was oddly comforting for the first few minutes.
Then I started to feel nauseated, the brown circle of flashlight bouncing around right in front of me. The daylight at the end of the tunnel, a bright arced doorway so small in the distance, and also bouncing with every step I took. Nothing was steady, not right in front of me, and not even my goal in the distance.
By some instinct, I started to put my visual focus on the deep black dark just ahead of the flashlight. There. There. That was okay. That worked.
The emptiness and steadiness of the dark terrain just out of reach was calming, even though the footing inside that dark terrain was completely unknowable and possibly ankle-twisting dangerous. At least it wasn't bouncing around.
Coming back to our shared conundrum of hard business times, maybe there's a lesson from the train tunnel to apply. Turbulence right in front of us, a future vision bouncing up and down, neither are steady. Focusing on either may make you sick to your stomach. What deep, black, dark terrain is actually ahead that we can sink into and find steadiness, even a certain kind of relaxation?
I'm thinking about this for me. Maybe you'll think about it alongside me.
Love,
Lyssa
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