TGIF

Posting the poem I wrote when I was 18 was a little like the open mic experience where people read from their adolescent diaries--embarrassing! Reading it again I was struck by how many of those things I claimed over the last umpteen years. I think the only thing I missed was the black cat. God knows there's been plenty of purple wine! So what's surprised me so far in this un-ordinary life? Here's an excerpt from an old journal:

One sunny October afternoon I took a walk along the bike path not far from my home in Plano, Texas. People were involved in typical activities—jogging, biking, and pushing babies in strollers. My own mood was in sharp contrast to the smiling faces I encountered. It was a very low point in my marriage when nothing either of us did was right. I can remember thinking to myself that my life would probably stretch on exactly like it was until I grew old and died. The thought of an endless sameness depressed me to the point of tears. The workweek was one dull, predictable task after another. There never seemed to be time to relax, let alone time to get ahead of the chores involved in running a family. Weekends were spent trying to get a head start on the next week—grocery shopping, doing laundry, and cooking meals to freeze. Because our marriage had lost its life, we often spent our leisure time on Saturday night with too many people, drinking too much, engaging in too many superficial conversations. The mood of the evening always appeared relaxed, but it often left me empty. There was plenty of laughter, but it had a forced, strident quality to it for me. The chatter certainly made a jolting contrast to the silence that followed after the guests left.

Fast-forward ten years and a divorce. I live in Texas, but in the interim I’ve lived in Washington State near Puget Sound with an old family friend who became a second father to me. I renewed an old high school love and helped his teen-age children through some difficult times. I moved back to my hometown and remodeled and lived in my grandmother’s house. I spent six months with my mother in Arizona strengthening our friendship. I bought a pick-up truck and learned to enjoy my own company as I traveled from one end of the beautiful state of North Carolina to another. I signed my first mortgage as an independent homeowner in Delaware and designed a new kitchen for my 80 year-old home. Eventually I moved back to Texas and saw it through fresh eyes. On my journey I continued my work assisting individuals and organizations in changing and prospering, but the form of that work often looked radically different. I served as a therapist, the director of a day treatment facility for abused children, the director of a department for chronically mentally ill adults, the administrator of a boy’s ranch for substance-abusing pre-release felons, a consultant to a state department of behavioral healthcare services, an international training and development specialist, and a performance management coach. I made meaningful connections with so many people. Hardly, the unending sameness that once depressed me! On that October day ten years before I couldn’t have even imagined the variety of life experiences that were soon to occur.

Certainly from the vantage point of an observer, my life changed considerably over the course of ten years. But I knew that the radical change was internal. I stopped seeing life as something that happened to me and took responsibility for the quality of my adventures. I don’t recommend anything as traumatic as a divorce for a catalyst, but unfortunately sometimes it takes a catastrophic event to motivate us to make fundamental change. Much more than my life circumstances and place of residence or job title changed. I moved myself out of the unsatisfying rut I occupied into a life that was filled with exciting possibilities. I stopped looking at the world from the wrong end of the telescope. I purposefully made changes in my jobs, residences, and relationships to proceed in the direction I wanted to go, but I also remained open to the surprise of unforeseen options. I opened my eyes to possibility and capitalized on opportunity. My new life still contained routine tasks like laundry and cleaning, but they became background noise and not the primary focus of my days. I looked instead to each day with an eagerness to discover what new thing I could learn or experience. I went from a small cadre of friends and acquaintances that had become stale with familiarity to an ever-expanding group of diverse individuals who opened even more new doors. I was pleasantly surprised each Christmas holiday at the burgeoning size of my Christmas card list, which was for me a visible sign of my growing circle of friends.

I’m older now and not eager for big adjustments like the geographic and career changes I once made, but I am still very open to adventure. Adventure doesn’t have to be a cross-country trek or a mountain climb. Adventure can be the result of small choices we make every day. Simple things like trying a new recipe or listening to music you’ve never heard before or reaching out to a new neighbor can make big differences in the quality of your life. I “never say never.” My life journey has been an upward spiral—a path that looped around and back to touch old friends and places in new ways. Now when I look ahead to my future I almost laugh at the fear of a boring life that I had that day in October as I walked on the bike path. 

I need to remind myself now of the closing lines in that entry:

Know that life will surprise you. Be excited by whatever possibilities lie ahead. Your only limits are those of your imagination.