.jpg)
Autumn is the season of pruning. We put our gardens to “bed,” and the trees naturally pull back and drop their leaves. This can be a scary time of year if you want to hold on, but it’s a breathtakingly beautiful time of year if you allow yourself to exhale.
If you’ve ever been to my website you may have noticed that it’s delightfully homemade (to say the least). In its previous incarnation, it definitely looked like I designed it myself, and I did honestly like that it wasn’t too flashy, or sterile.
The “organic” nature of my website wasn’t really an issue for me until a new patient tried three times to access my new patient forms page and found the text cut off. I eventually realized she was using her phone to do so, as my previous site was an absolute overlapping mess on mobile devices.
I was really, very much dreading the idea of migrating 8 years of text and intention into an entirely new format, but my previous site was basically past fixable. Letting go and starting over was the only way to address the existing issues.
I am neither technical nor overly artistic so I was planning to look into hiring a website designer. But that was a process in and of itself, and I was conscious of not wanting to end up with something so complicated tech-wise that I couldn’t maintain it myself.
After holding this in the back of my mind for months I eventually logged into my website builder site and began to play around with a template aptly named “minimal.” It was the opposite of my old site but the clean design and sans-serif font (meaning no little do-das hanging off the font to distract the eye) felt like a fresh breeze.
After a few hours of flow state I had the beginnings of a new site and after a few days of focused work, I now present to you my brand new website. Take a look if you like and let me know what is (and/or isn’t) working for you!
The thought of the redesign was scary. But the actual process was surprisingly rewarding and actually even fun at times, minus the few technical glitches which I had to google.
And though I used much of the text from my previous site, it was refreshing to let go of a lot of the wordiness and pare down to fewer overall pages and less text.
Sometimes the thought of starting something new is overwhelming, even paralyzing. But when we let go and just play with the idea, sometimes we can find that playful curious state that manifests as relative ease..
If you’ve got a big project on your plate, what is a tiny step that you could take towards realizing whatever’s next? It helps to let go of your expectations completely and just see what’s in front of you.
When I first logged in to my website builder (which does NOT allow you to just swap one template for another), I honestly didn’t think that I’d be able to redesign my site by myself, much less enjoy the process and be grateful for the result.
But by allowing myself to approach the project with curiosity and a willingness to try the process out, I ended up paring down and refining my website to something that even better manifests my vision for my practice.
This autumn may you release your fears of the future and may you release something which no longer serves you. Get curious. What can you playfully approach without expectations and take a look at in your work or in your life?
Drop me a line and let me know what you’re playing around with letting go of this fall.