Last week, my friend Christina blogged about the birth of her new niece. This part of her post really made me have a little “aha moment” I needed:
Speaking of life… my niece was born. She’s one of those seriously beautiful babies that you can’t stop looking at. Dark hair, dark eyes, perfect skin. So sweet.
Anyway, today when I stopped in the hospital to see her, my brother (the baby is his daughter), says to the baby, in a joking way, “sorry we brought you into this world. now you’ll have to grow up and go to school and get a job and all those things.”
“No,” I said. “Look at how beautiful she is. All she has to do is grow up and move to Hollywood. She’s going to be a movie star.”
Or she could live on the beach, or Paris, or outer space. She can be a rock star, a secret agent, or the president. So many possibilities lay before her, on this first day of her entire life. It’s amazing, really.
And then later I realized, this is the first day of the rest of my life, too.
I've been in a bit of transition this year. In February I quit my corporate marketing job and have been doing social media for clients. I work from home, have a much more flexible schedule, and have to manage myself and hope that I get paid. I'm risk-averse, and this is frightening, but it has also allowed my body to get a lot of much-needed rest, and to lower my anxiety levels quite a bit. For the first time since I bit the self-employed bullet, I've had a client opening and it means that I'm a little unnerved. This type of unease typically throws me into chaos (as mentioned a couple of weeks ago) and it's really not pleasant. I say all sorts of negative things to myself and magnify every slip-up while diminishing every success.
After reading Christina's post, I realized that we each make choices and have the power to be and do so many things! We might not have as many options as the sweet baby girl does as some of our path has already been dictated by our past decisions, but there is a huge amount of potential we all have inside ourselves to do crazy, wonderful things. Even now, things I thought I wanted 10, even 5 years ago, are different.
Things don't always go the way we planned, but perhaps they're not meant to. Let's dream a little bigger and make it the first day of the rest of our lives.
Along these lines, I started a list of things that I have told myself I couldn't do because “people” don't think I can, or wouldn't expect it. I'm going to share a few of these items in my next newsletter, which will come in the next day or so. I hope it opens up a dialogue for opening our eyes a little wider to possibilities.
