The Messy Middle
We talk about a lot of things in the Ripple Room. This month it was the messy middle — that in-between place where you haven’t arrived anywhere yet and the previous place is already gone.
There were four of us.
An hour.
No agenda beyond the theme.
And like most conversations in the Ripple Room, the theme was just a doorway.
We came at it from every direction. As a life stage. As a creative block. As the accumulated weight of how you got to where you are, not just where you are. As something to move through, something to stay inside, something that might, if you let it, turn out to be a portal to something that doesn’t exist yet.
Somewhere in the middle of it, I found myself saying: “maybe the messy middle isn’t something to overcome. Maybe it’s just something to inhabit without judgment.”
That’s the kind of thing I can say in this room. Not because it’s a clever thought, but because the room makes it safe to not know. To sit in the question. To say I don’t know where this is going and have that be enough.
Safety is an interesting word to use about a creative space. But I keep coming back to it.
What becomes possible when you feel genuinely safe to not have the answer? When there’s no performance required, no expertise to demonstrate, no version of yourself to maintain? Like writing nine essays in a month that I didn’t plan to write. Like cutting something large and layered into small pieces and sending them out into the world as postcards. Like showing up to a conversation with nothing prepared and discovering that’s exactly right.
None of that happens without the safety first.
The Ripple Room doesn’t try to fix the messy middle. It doesn’t resolve anything. We don’t leave with answers … we leave with better questions.
A little more whole than before.
Next month, we’re gathering around Repetition.
What happens when we return to the same gesture again and again? Small marks. Simple strokes. The thing you keep coming back to without quite knowing why.
Repetition lowers the stakes. It softens perfectionism. It brings us back to ourselves.
The next Ripple Room is on Thursday, April 2nd at 10am Pacific. It’s open to anyone, offered on a sliding scale with a suggested minimum of $10.
I don’t record these. They’re live only, so we can be fully present together.
If you’ve been looking for a room like this, this might be it.
માનસી
