Embrace the wiggle

The other day I found myself having lunch with a well-known musician and book editor. They were talking about the nature of their work and how they decided what to do and not to do. 

I listened for a while before I finally spoke.

“I feel like I haven’t made any decisions in at least a couple of years,” I tell them.

The book editor looks surprised. “What do you mean you haven’t made a decision?” he asks.

“I mean I can’t think of a fork in the road decision where I had to decide whether to go left or right. Somehow it’s always been clear which way to go. There isn’t a choice.”

It hadn’t always been this way. That’s what made it worth mentioning.

The musician, who has been listening quietly, begins to share their story. As they describe the shape of their creative path, one phrase catches my ear:

“It’s about embracing the wiggle,” I hear them say.

When they finish, I return to the wonderful phrase of “the wiggle.” What a great way to put it. When you come at things loose enough, there’s never a T-intersection of go right or left. You just wiggle along in your direction, carving your path.

“Exactly,” the musician says. He heard the phrase from the philosopher Alan Watts, who saw the universe not as a machine, but as something alive and wriggling. Embrace the wiggle, he taught, and you'll find yourself moving in harmony with the world.

At our best moments it’s not just that we’re on the right path. It’s that we let the wiggle take us there.