The moments that move us to next choose us. This I know to be true.
2018 was filled with moments like this for me. Moments big and small. Moments that ran the gamut from feeling bone-weary and depleted to remembering the feeling of new romance and the angst of rejection, navigating a health crisis, getting single-mommed on the job, finding my center, and launching a company.
In physics, activation energy is the minimum energy required to spark a reaction. It’s most common source is heat.
2018 brought the heat.
Launching a company takes equal parts balls, faith, and blind ignorance. All of these are necessary for overwhelming resistance to fear, to change, and to failure. For pumping you full of just enough endorphins that going for it feels like hope and not roulette so you pull the trigger. For getting you just high enough that any concerns that the real world throws your way look like the sad concerns of a gilded cage you no longer want the keys to. For inspiring you just enough to start creating and keeping you committed when creativity and inspiration can’t be found.
To name something is to bring it to life, to give it identity, to begin construction. To name something is to give it power, to declare intent, to communicate purpose and mission and vision. To name something defines the essence of a thing by moving it from the conceptual to the concrete making it the first critical step in creation because it enables action.
We tossed about a lot of names for our company but none of them seemed to fit and that first critical step started to feel out of reach.
One wine-inspired spin through tarot readers on YouTube late at night delivered a moment that gave us our name — Banduri.
Even though my mother is an Irish immigrant and I knew about Druid priests, I had never heard of the Banduri — Druid high priestesses who trained for 19 years and were intellectual, political, religious, and military leaders with expertise in diplomacy, law, trade, healing, magic, and military strategy and tactics. Greeks and Romans alike wrote about the Banduri, so unaccustomed as they were to these women who came to their senate galleys as ambassadors of state to negotiate peace and trade deals. Women who were sovereign rulers governing lands the Romans coveted. Women who met them on the battlefield. Women who challenged conventions and drove change. The most famous Banduri was Boudicca — a Celtic Queen who led the revolt against the Romans in England and whose name in Gaelic means “victory”.
If naming is the first critical step in creating your identity, the second is designing your logo. A logo tells the world who you are. It is a symbol that inspires, that communicates your values and your commitment to your customer. Legend has it that before going into battle, Boudicca would invoke the Celtic goddess of victory, Andraste, then release a hare enveloped in divine fire. Andraste would direct the burning hare to the place on the battlefield that would ensure victory. Following this hare, Boudicca would kill a hundred thousand Romans, burn London to the ground, and reclaim most of England, before she herself died in the last battle — the only battle for which she did not use the hare.
After finding our name, we explored a lot of symbols for use as an icon. Symbols that represented unity, intersection, divine inspiration, and a little magic. But none of them worked. None of them felt authentic. None of them felt aligned to our name.
A friend of ours was so inspired by the story of Boudicca’s burning rabbit that he suggested we use that as our logo but getting the symbol right was a struggle. All I could see in my head was some version of Peter Cottontail, hardly lacking in gravity, and certainly not inspiring confidence. With so many things to do, I decided to give up on the logo, rationalizing that many companies used only their name as their logo and I had more important things to get done. Weeks went by. Weeks filled with challenges not of our making, of waiting, of frustration.
One Saturday morning, filled with some serious doubt that had me questioning myself and wondering if I had made the right decision, I sat down at my desk, fired up my computer, and checked the headlines. There, on the front page of USA Today, was an embedded video of lava flowing from Kilauea into the ocean. The still image under the play button was of the lava, still burning despite being in the ocean, in the form of a hare. Within hours, we had our logo. Not long after, we had our first big customer.
In the months and years that have passed since that Saturday morning we, like many small businesses, have had no shortage of challenges — some intentionally levied at us, others, like the pandemic, wholly inconceivable.
If 2018 brought the heat, 2020 has spared few the burn.
I’ve thought a lot as we closed in on the end of 2020 about the power of moments — those we mourn, those we fear, those we are inspired by, those that shape us, those we regret, and those we cherish. Personal experience has taught me that resistance to change is a doom loop whose destructive power is orders of magnitude greater than the loss we must accept to get to next.
Heading into 2021, the only thing we should resist is a return to normal. Normal is what got us here. Normal requires that we hold onto strategies, conventions, and perceptions that are broken, that have proven to inflict harm at scale, and that are wholly uninspired. It is normal, when faced with change, to feel overwhelmed by the unknown. It is human to feel fear, to want to give up or give in and to feel powerless when overwhelmed.
Action is the enemy of powerlessness. To move to next, you must name things into existence. You must learn to co-create with the forces around you — the people, the obstacles, the things known and unknown. You must be open to the moments, big and small, that will activate the muse, the hope, the purpose and mission. That will light the way and provide clarity in moments of darkness and doubt. In physics, the First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy is neither created nor destroyed. It is a constant.
Change has enormous energy and, therefore, enormous power.
In life, the difference between being the fire and being burned comes down to perspective. To learning how to harness energy and not be consumed by it.
