Cellular Confidence vs. Cellular Competence

Boxing Day. It’s indeed a peaceful day for me. No rushing around; no anticipation of anything, just a beautiful, quiet day unfolding. Music fills the house with a variety of renderings of the Christmas classics. Who would have thought that Jingle Bells could have such a variety of offerings? Solo artists, duets and groups; old stuff and new stuff; all of it an invitation to hum along as my day eases from one hour to the next.

I smell turkey cooking. This is the first time that I’ve made our Christmas dinner on Boxing Day. The boys still talk about what they call our ‘Christmas Cheese’ event as I introduced them to fondue on Christmas Eve. I learn fast – and won’t be doing that again anytime soon!

So, I sit by my beautiful 8 foot tall palladium windows, a dusting of snow still sitting at the foot of the cedars in the back yard; listening to an instrumental version of White Christmas, one eye on the clock and listening for the kitchen timer that will tell me that it’s time for the next step in the process of a wonderful family meal.

And in the midst of it all, the thoughts of cellular confidence vs. cellular competence keep nagging at me to write.

We often associate the notion of competence with a combination of knowledge and experience. It may be that cellular competence is what we call wisdom – and wisdom is a process of experience, with experience being the domain of the body. Cellular expression, in flow. Nonetheless, it continues to have the flavor of the past, with competence in some way connected to having X, Y or Z’d and thus knowing that one can X, Y or Z again, with a likely positive outcome.

Cellular confidence is different. There is no knowledge. Nor is there experience. Its essence is not of the past but of what might come to be. Its underlying presupposition is that which might become. Cellular confidence is a state of being that welcomes and embraces the unknown. It is an expression that recognizes that an emerging future unfolds – it is not planned, anticipated or even created. It just arrives, and we get to meet it as it appears. It is in those moments that we each become our own greatest surprise, to ourselves.

Cellular confidence – a willingness to invite and allow. A willingness to let go and trust that no matter how bizarre it may seem in the moment (usually when compared to history or expectations), its presence is pure genius and exactly what is required to accelerate my own evolution. Seems to me that I would have to trust the harmless nature of what would flow at least as deeply as I trust my own harmless nature. Perhaps that is the greatest challenge of all.

Who must we know ourselves to be in order to let go and, in doing so, create the Space for what might become? How do we accelerate access to (willingness) and capacity for (ability) cellular confidence? And what might our world become in the moment of our having succeeded?

Breathing is good….