For the past few years, I’ve been spring-coiling.

That’s how I think of it, anyway: a focused process of assessing, experimenting, consolidating, retracting, refurbishing, replacing, upgrading, upskilling, scanning my personal, interpersonal, and professional horizons, and generally questioning every aspect of who I am, what I’m doing, and where I’d like to be as a next-step version of myself.

This stage, this state isn’t unfamiliar territory; I’ve gone through this process more times than I can count.

And this framing of this process is comforting to me as it implies I’m meant to expand and contract in this way. It’s not weird or worrisome that I’m suddenly moving in a different direction for a spell, orienting around different things and repurposing my momentum inward rather than outward—it’s my natural state. That’s what springs do.

I’ve come to associate this compressive process with positive things, as it gives me permission to explore otherwise unwieldy and far-out-seeming possibilities in a context primed for exactly that modality of imagining.

It’s a liminal space, though, with all the pros and cons of liminality.

I’ve got the internal go-ahead to try and dream and sample, but as a trade-off enjoy fewer anchors and fewer solid-feeling, confidence-inducing, time-tested structural elements holding up the ceiling, the walls, the floor of my life.

I tend to enjoy these moments despite that sense of rudderless interstitially, because they’ve historically resulted in satisfying periods of growth, fulfillment, and expansive (and more solid-feeling) exploration.

That’s the spring uncoiling: all that invested kinetic energy exploding outward, a self-creation myth authored in the preceding weeks or months or years finally made manifest.

Each new coiling process, unfortunately, is burdened with the worry that this one will be my last.

This time I won’t find what I want to find and I’ll be stuck in a swirl of maybes and possibilities (and inadequate action) forever. I won’t be capable of re-hoisting my sail after growing accustomed to drifting with the current.

I suspect that unsurety is part of the process, though; one of the psychological ingredients that makes the larger recipe work, and which keeps me from overextending or overcompressing, from losing my capacity to ebb and flow, productively pulse, and inflate and deflate at a healthy (for me) cadence.

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