Hold Your Head Up High

The thirteenth-century Sufi writer Ibn Ata Allah al-Iskandari taught that God is present in both expansion and contraction. Sometimes life opens: opportunities appear, you fall in love, you feel understood. Then, just as suddenly, doors close, the phone stops ringing, and you feel unknown.

But these seasons of contraction are no less divine than the expansive ones. In fact, al-Iskandari warns that too much expansion can make us forgetful and dependent on pleasant feelings. In essence, he teaches: don’t judge God’s nearness by how you feel. Judge it by whether your heart is being drawn toward the divine.

In other words: hold your head up high. Find dignity in the moments when your world gets smaller. Maybe it’s time to deepen a few close friendships. Maybe it’s time to spend a week alone in a cabin and finally write the novel or make the album that quiet voice inside you has been calling for.

Recently someone said to me, “You have good ideas, Paul, but you could use help scaling them.” He may be right. But connection isn’t scalable. What makes my coaching work isn’t reaching many people. It’s slowing down enough to give my full attention to the only professional relationship that matters: the one in front of me. That’s the wellspring from which transformation, satisfied clients, and referrals flow.

When I was younger, I always thought I'd be famous one day. I think I believed in the naive equation: talent plus hard work equals recognition. What I left out was divine will, which often carries us away from the heights we imagined toward where our gifts are actually needed.

In the end, happiness comes from dancing with life through both expansion and contraction, not siding with one over the other. Expansion will come, but in the meantime, trust contraction to teach you not only humility, but compassion, creativity, and freedom. Trust the narrow places.

As always, if you'd like to be held through your own process, contact me and we’ll set up a free coaching call.