The Joy Wire
Finding the joy that connects everything.
Pssst. As always, my posts are far too long for e-mail format, so if you want to read the whole thing, click ‘read more’ at the bottom!
Dear Kula Diaries,
Today I’m going to tell you two different stories about hearing the same song… almost 5 years apart… on two different bikes.
As I’ve shared earlier, I left my job as a railroad police officer in July of 2017 to pursue my dream of a career, ‘in the outdoor industry’. In the months leading up to that moment, I was in the midst of a massive personal transformation following a near death experience. I found myself doing things that I would have laughed at a year prior: meditation, a gratitude practice, finding the feeling of abundance, giving without expectations, and visualizing the things I wanted to create in my life. In the very early stages of this transformation… I started a blog that I haven’t mentioned yet. I called it… The Joy Wire.
The premise of The Joy Wire was simple. I started by picking one person to interview for the Joy Wire… and then they had to recommend the second person that I interviewed… and then so on. My goal was to create a ‘wire’ of goodness by following the links that connect all of us together.
I had no clue where to start, so I purchased a domain name, started a Squarespace website, and I hired a designer on Fiverr to create a logo for me based on the idea I had for the design. The idea was, honestly, really cool.. I loved sharing inspirational stories about people, and I loved watching how they connected.
The only problem? I had left my job… and I was ‘doing stuff’ — but nothing had really become anything yet. I had a lot of irons in the fire… but nothing was entirely taking off. It’s a tricky place to be, because that’s usually the place where the white flag gets flown… it’s so easy to slip into fear at that point, because we are forced to confront some of the things that are the most painful for us to look at: our fear of poverty, a fear of ‘instability’, a fear of failure, a fear of looking dumb, a fear of feeling shame. All of these fears started to rear their ugly heads at me — and sometimes all of them at the same time.
Contrary to popular belief, I did not leave my job and instantly leap into a field of pee cloths, diamonds and sugar crystals and unicorns. Nope — I left my job, and while things were beginning to move in the right direction — I still had a lot of fear about what I had done and where I was going. I had two backpacking classes planned to teach a few months after I left my job, but I felt a little bit lost about what to do next. In my most doubtful moments, I’d whisper, “You’re going to figure it out. Trust yourself. You are doing your best.”
When you jump out into the unknown… and particularly when you’ve been simultaneously diving into a sea of personal development … you can feel a little bit duped at first. I was reading a lot of stuff about things like gratitude and abundance and appreciation and giving… so why, when I left my job, did my first $300,000 paycheck not just instantly show up at my doorstep? Why did the golden opportunities not instantly present themselves? Why did only 2 people sign up for my second backpacking class? Was I completely deluding myself into an illusion of success that was false? Had I made the stupidest mistake of my life? At the lowest point, I hid myself in the closet in our guest bedroom and sobbed one night while my husband was at work. My husband, who never once doubted my ability to succeed. I fought with agonizing guilt about leaving my job to, ‘go have fun’ - while he was working 12-14 hour nightshifts at the railroad just to make ends meet.
When I left my job, I knew based on the framework of lack that I had operated under for most of my life, that I would be tempted to cut myself off from any and all forms of enjoyment, recreation or ‘extra’ expenses that I didn’t really need. Everything that I had read about the word abundance was that abundance had more to do with finding a feeling than anything to do with money at all. And so, I tried my best to ignore my nagging and persistent fear… and one day, on a complete whim, I signed up to attend a spin class at Soul Cycle in Bellevue. Believe me, when you’ve quit your job and are spending your days semi-pretending to be doing something … it would have been easy for me to convince myself that I should absolutely not have spent $28 purchasing a 45 minute spin class… but something in my heart told me that I needed to go.
This is the part of the story that gets a little ridiculous. You see, I had heard of Soul Cycle before, but I had never been to a class … so I didn’t know that being one of the riders in the ‘front row’ of the class was a thing. Well, apparently it is. If you’ve never been to Soul Cycle, just imagine this: You walk into a crisp, clean and brightly lit building that feels like you just walked into a Lululemon fashion show. After placing your items in a locker, you are whisked into the studio to get fitted on your bike. The studio is dark and packed full of bikes. Riders are snapping their feet into their bikes and pedaling faster than you’ve probably ever pedaled in your life… as a warm up. Now, I had actually competed as a road cyclist before, so I thought to myself — a spin class? Ummmm… hello. Of course I can handle this. In actuality? As it turns out, I could not handle it. I decided, because I didn’t know it was a thing, that I should sit on a bicycle in the front row of the class so that I could see the instructor better. The instructor, an amazing human named Earl, entered the room like a celebrity and mounted his bicycle and started pedaling at a rate so quickly that his feet turned into some sort of a hypersonic blur. That’s when I knew I was in trouble.
The lights were turned out. The music was turned up. We started to pedal. And not only did we start to pedal — but we started to, essentially, dance on the bike, including a move that was supposed to be a ‘full body roll’, however, my attempt at it looked more like a caterpillar flopping onto the handlebars of a bicycle. As the cadence crept up and up during the class, I struggled to stay with the rhythm. Looking around me, I quickly realized that all of the more advanced cyclists were very clearly in the front row - with the exception of me. Frantically, I pedaled and practically threw myself into the bike, hoping that the people behind me weren’t too distracted by my off-beat bopping.
By the end of the class, I was a mess of sweat and tears and gasps for breath. The room was hot and sweaty, and the music thumped loudly in my chest. I found a rhythm and closed my eyes as the last song, Sweet Disposition by The Temper Trap, started to play. Earl dismounted his bike and walked over to where I was located in the front row - presumably to check and make sure that I was still actually alive. A few small candles illuminated the instructor’s pedestal, and he lifted them up and one by one, students in the class took turn blowing out the candles.
I don’t really know exactly what happened in that moment, except that I experienced a cathartic release of every iota of pent up doubt and agony and guilt and fear and shame that I had been feeling over the past two months. I had been so afraid to look at all of those things and to admit that they were a part of who I was. Suddenly I knew — that part of me wasn’t bad… it just needed to be loved. It needed to know that it was OK to have those feelings, and that they were there because of all of the people who had tried to protect me for my entire life. I knew it was also OK to let those feelings go. I pedaled my heart out on that bike in class that day… and tears streamed down my face and mixed with sweat. My eyes stung, and I tried to wipe the tears away, but I also realized that if I let go of the handlebars, I’d probably launch myself into the mirror at the front of the room. And so, I was content to cry on that bike. Pedaling absolutely nowhere that day, I was suddenly overwhelmed by one thought: I can do this. In a $28 spin class, I suddenly knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that I could do whatever thing it was that I was going to do. I knew I’d figure it out.
When I left the class that day, I felt like I was walking on air. Every single feeling that I had read about, but didn’t fully understand, came rushing in — love, gratitude, kindness, generosity, abundance… they were all there, in perfect clarity. On my walk back to the car, I found a piece of paper and a pen and I wrote a handwritten note on it and slipped it under the windshield of a random car in the parking lot:
About a month later, I came back and interviewed Earl for The Joy Wire. He told me his story and I shared with him my first experience in his class. I continued to ride with him for the next few months, and things continued to rapidly progress for me. To this day, I cannot separate the song ‘Sweet Disposition’ from that unexpected moment in the spin class. Every single time I hear it, I am immediately brought back to that memory - it is a touchstone of a moment in my life when I felt connected and open to all of the infinite possibilities that existed.
Over the next few years, as I’ve already shared, my journey progressed in many ways. While I did experience a moment of clarity on the bike that day — I would be dishonest if I told you that I moved forward with perfect clarity and that everything clicked into place from that point forward. Au contraire my friends — in fact, there were a lot of very messy, very clouded moments over the next few years. I would need to come back to that knowing over and over again and remind myself, through the rockiest of trails, that anything was possible. That even the rocks were a part of the path — not a reason to turn around. Today, over five years later, and with proof that I was able to create something from an idea, I still have to remind myself.
In the midst of creation, you lose track of where you are at times, and you often forget where you were, because you are too busy noticing where you are or where you are going. A dream feels like something in the future — a moment that hasn’t arrived yet, but a time when we anticipate that, ‘things will be better’. But, as most of us discover, when we push off that feeling to an imaginary place, we find that we grow increasingly unsatisfied with where we are… always looking and seeking for the next thing that will make us happy or successful. We often forget to look at where we are right now, and acknowledge and recognize how far we’ve come.
Last year, on May 31st, my husband Aaron walked out of his job at BNSF Railway for the last time. After working 12-14 hour shifts for nearly 16 years… he was done. When I first decided to leave my job, and when I first wrote my ‘statement of fact’ on a piece of paper and hung it on my fridge with the instructions READ THIS EVERYDAY typed in big letters across the top of the page, the number one thing that I wanted to do was get to a place where I could allow my husband to leave his job. I was watching as the stress of working long hours in the middle of the night was taking a toll on him physically and emotionally — and our separation and disconnection from each other had reduced our marriage to a skeleton of a relationship. When he left his job, we were suddenly blessed with something that we hadn’t previously had - time together.
For most of our relationship, we had hiked and climbed together — but hiking and climbing were the hobbies that I had brought into our relationship. We have spent more nights in a tent than I could possibly count - we’ve hiked and climbed thousands of miles together and summitted all 5 Washington Volcanoes. But last year, when Aaron left his job, we knew that we needed to find a different way to connect - something new that we could discover together.
At first, we didn’t know what that ‘thing’ could be, but we didn’t rush the process. It took Aaron a few months to decompress from the pretty high levels of stress that he had lived with for more than a decade and a half. I put zero pressure on him to do anything at all. I wanted him to figure out what he wanted to be and do — because he had never had the opportunity in his life to do that. Similarly to me, he had always jumped around from job to job on auto-pilot… never really asking himself what he wanted. Within the first few months, he launched a stained glass business called Lake House Glass, which was pretty successful almost immediately (he had more work than he could handle!), but I knew that in the early stages of leaving your job and jumping into the unknown — it can sometimes be a frightening place. Losing your ‘identity’ and confronting fears about stability can be somewhat oppressive.
As we slowly got into a new routine together, we started doing a practice that we called an, ‘abundance walk’. Every single morning… I wake up ridiculously early around 4am, so that I can have a few hours of blissful silence to walk and dance by myself. Then, I wake Aaron up around 6:45 so that we can do a meditation and a walk together. On our walks, we started speaking out loud all of the things that we wanted to create together and we spent time every single morning feeling the feelings of the life and relationship we wanted to share: adventure, joy, peace, abundance, love, exploration, fun, and happiness. On one of these walks, we were talking about an idea for an adventure that involved camping in the desert in Utah (one of our favorite places) and hauling some dual sport motorcycles so that we could explore the endless dirt backroads. Suddenly it hit us… why don’t we have motorcycles? Coincidentally enough, we both were experienced motorcyclists who hadn’t ridden in years. We didn’t even know why the idea of getting motorcycles had never come up in our decade together.
When your husband leaves his (very well paying) job to start a stained glass business that makes approximately $400 per month, rushing out and purchasing motorcycles is probably not what most people would advise… but I thought back to that $28 spin class that I almost prevented myself from going to. I knew that I had to trust the feeling of excitement and joy that came with the idea of the motorcycles. I had no idea why — but I knew we needed to do it. And so, as with most things I do, I got completely carried away and Aaron and I ended up buying not 2… but four motorcycles. Completely and utterly ridiculous and unnecessary by some accounts — but let me also tell you that when you have seen your relationship reduced to nothingness… when you have felt the pain of almost losing the most important thing in your life… when you know that you have a chance to get that back, the ‘shoulds’ of life no longer matter. And so, we did it. We threw caution to the wind. My husband quit his job, and we bought 4 motorcycles with no shred of an idea if it was actually going to be doable or not — and we just trusted it would work out.
As it turns out, trusting the feeling of abundance is something I’ve become very good at - even when ‘logic’ or excel spreadsheets and fear would tell you otherwise. Doing things that seem absolutely and completely illogical at the time — but deep down, knowing that something I can’t predict yet is in the process of creation… is not an easy feeling to trust. But, with four motorcycles sitting in our garage, I decided I was going to have to trust it. Worst case scenario? We laugh about it and sell them. But something started to change on our rides together - we reconnected through intercom conversations and started using any excuse possible to go on a ‘milk run’. We never even needed milk — we just wanted to ride and to spend time together.
After riding our motorcycles in the cold all winter long, I noticed the absence of a product in the motorcycle and hiking world — a neck gaiter that could accommodate people with long hair (if you have long hair and you’ve ever used a neck gaiter, you know exactly what I’m talking about). Over the past year, I’ve been secretly designing a product called the ‘Rapunzel Gaiter’ and simultaneously creating a brand new company with Aaron called Milk Run Moto. I’ve also submitted my first patent application with the help of John and Indhira - the lawyers I trust with my IP matters. Absolutely none of this would have happened if we hadn’t thrown caution to the wind and decided to trust our hearts.
And so, now you will understand why I cried last weekend when I heard the song Sweet Disposition begin to play on my motorcycle helmet intercom. I use earplugs when I ride, and I find that softly listening to music in the background helps with the muffled disorientation that earplugs can sometimes cause. Last weekend, Aaron and I fulfilled a dream of ours that we had once spoken about on our morning abundance walks - completing the Cascade Loop. The Cascade Loop is a scenic ride around the North Cascades in Washington… from Highway 20 down to Leavenworth… and back home.
I can’t even remember where we were on the ride, but I am pretty sure that it was on highway 153 between Twisp and Chelan. Apple orchards surrounded us and huge rolling hills stretched in every single direction. The air was cool and crisp with a sweet smell of fruit. The sun was the brightest I’ve seen and the sky was a piercing crystalline blue. As I rode on the motorcycle, wind whipping my hair, I looked up and saw Aaron riding ahead of me. I looked down and saw the handlebars of my own bike and watched the pavement whizzing by at 60 mph (my husband says I should be more honest and write ‘87 miles per hour’). I mouthed the lyrics of the song silently as they played, “A moment, a love, a dream, aloud …A kiss, a cry, our rights, our wrongs …won't stop 'til it's over.” I thought about everything that has happened in the last five years — Kula Cloth, The Musical Mountaineers, moving to a house in the mountains… retiring Aaron from his job. In that moment… on a very different type of bike… it hit me. I had done it. ‘It’ wasn’t something in the future — it was right now… all of it. And it always had been.
Un-wipeable helmet tears streamed down my face as I thought back to the moment that I cannot detach from this song: the moment on that silly spin bike in December 2017. I wanted to reach back to that person and say, “You can do this. You are going to do this. It’s going to be better than even you can imagine. And also really really hard. But you can do it.” And you know what? Maybe I did reach back. Maybe it wasn’t the song that day that gave me the knowing that I needed… maybe it was my future self — the woman riding on a motorcycle through the desert with a husband that she was very much in love with. Maybe The Joy Wire is real… and maybe it doesn’t just connect all of us… maybe it connects us to who we truly are… maybe it connects us to everything that is possible.
On the last day of our trip, Aaron and I spent one night at the Sleeping Lady Lodge in Leavenworth, Washington. Exploring the property, we discovered a small trail that led to a knoll that overlooked Icicle Creek. The wind was whipping through the valley as we sat there before sunset, and I decided to tell Aaron the story about the song. I don’t know why I had never told him — maybe it just didn’t seem significant enough for me to share. Afterall, who is going to believe me that hearing a song during a spin class could have been such an important moment? When you write it out… it sounds a little silly. And yet, I found myself recounting the story to Aaron… telling him how I had wept during the class… wept for the things that I wanted to create and for the fear that I had that I wasn’t good enough or strong enough to do it. I had wept because I believed so badly that I could make a difference in the world… and I wept because I was afraid that I was would fail. I had hidden most of this from Aaron at the time — not because he would have judged me or doubted me, but because I was afraid to show anything other than absolute, unshakable belief in myself. But the truth was — I didn’t have it right away.
As the sun started to set, I told Aaron about hearing the song again that day in my motorcycle helmet… and how I looked ahead and saw him riding on his motorcycle. “You looked so happy”, I said. I told him that in that moment I experienced both the doubt and fear of the girl pedaling the spin bike who could have so easily said ‘no’… never knowing what she would have missed out on … and also the joy of a wife, riding a motorcycle with her husband and smelling the sweetness of apples, breeze and sunshine. We sat together on that knoll until the sun went down, and Aaron listened to me as I cried (he’s used to that - ha!). We did it, I said. And he knew that I wasn’t talking about the motorcycles … or the stuff… or even our businesses. Those things are wonderful, but they are not the things I most value in life. At the end of the day… when the sun goes down and the trail is dark… it is the love you feel inside that will show you the way back home.
Dearest friends, it is my deepest desire that you can also feel the love, abundance, adventure and joy that connects all of us. There is indeed a joy wire that is very real… and the energy that each of us creates is what ripples out into the rest of the world. It is up to us to determine what that energy will be. It is not always easy. It is not always good. But it is always worth it. This experience of life is confusing, chaotic, difficult and beautiful. We are each doing our best on this planet to muddle our way through the noise and to return back to what we know is true: the love that connects all things.
This past week, in The Dance Experiment, I shared a ‘Sweet Disposition Sandwich’ playlist. If you want to listen to it or dance to it, I’m sharing it below. I hope that it will remind you that your journey matters very much. You are loved, friends. Thank you for being here.
Love,
Anastasia
P.S. If you have a question, comment, or want to share an idea or a topic, please use this Google Form to submit it anonymously. If you’d like a specific response, make sure to include your e-mail address. Thank you for all of your kind words - I read all of them!
P.S.S. This is my 16th Sunday post — which means I’ve been writing the Kula Diaries for 4 months now. Thank you all so much for being here, it means so much to me.
Awww 💕 This makes me so happy FOR you both AND hopeful for my future ! Thank you for being so vulnerable. Your vulnerability has been the greatest gift to me in ways you may never know. Thank you 🌹
Love this! I think your experience with this song was a powerful act of being completely present in that moment and joy was the result. 💞