Photo by Dylan McLeod on Unsplash
You may have noted that this is reaching your inbox later than our usual date together at lunchtime EST on Tuesdays. It has been quite a week. In the midst of the transitions I mentioned last week, there has been an urgent family medical matter. I have talked so much about the need to trust your life path. In the past week my trust has been really rocked as I face urgent family matters with an uncertain outcome. The fear and the worry can obscure what was once a clear path before me.
I struggled with the question of how to continue to put one foot in front of the other on my life path as I approach an extremely important piece in my path’s puzzle: 2.5 weeks (God willing) with a famous pattern maker and socially conscious apparel manufacture learning how to make my dream uniform and establishing the blouse design for the coming year of client testing for the women’s made to measure blouse.
As you might imagine, in addition to my full time gig and a big conference we have this week, preparation for pattern camp is no joke. Some days over the past week I’ve felt like it was all impossible. How can this all be happening at the same moment? How do I sustain it all? I have a few answers to these questions that I have been able to assemble in the midst of the storm. First off, my wise friend Ryan Carey said: take it with you. Take all the emotion and your love and concern for your family member with you to camp. Just remember to bring your computer so you can write. He gets at a larger point that I have thought about all week–serious concerns about life and death deepen our presence and expand our hearts. In spite of how exhausted these events make us, they have the capacity to make us more powerful, more present with our coworkers, lovers, family members and random strangers we encounter. That presence IS our power.
I felt that trust lingering under the surface, and yet still I questioned- Have I derailed? Am I going to make it through this without spinning off my path into the stratosphere? And today I got an answer in the form of a motivational speaker at our conference: Jamie Valvano [listen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lBkGjNLS58&t=298s to the shortened version] – one of the most inspirational people I’ve ever had the privilege to listen to and herself a cancer survivor. As I listened to her speak about establishing a vision for living an extraordinary life, not only surviving cancer, but coming out of it filled with life, fists swinging to get people motivated to do astonishing things with their lives. While listening to her I realize that far from spinning wildly off my path, it is with the family emergencies and the incredible number of challenges in the past week that I find myself squarely on my path. It is all exactly where we are supposed to be. We are supposed to love, we are supposed to cry, we are supposed to have big dreams, our heart is supposed to be full. This is all of it. Always. The tough, the heartbreaking, the beautiful and breathtaking.
We are taking our big full hearts and letting that drum beat large and triumphantly as we take sure, clear steps to building the world of our dreams.
Go, fight, win.
Please note: There will be no Weekly Letter until Tuesday, August 13th.