This blog post is for a wonderful, brilliant and courageous woman setting sail into a future she is unsure of. So many of us have decided to make real changes (big ones) in 2012, I think it's a good lesson for us all.
Moving into uncharted territory is terrifying, even on a good day. You wake up and set sail and the weather is brilliant and the horizon is clear but when it comes down to it you can't ignore that your entire being is rattled with the fact that you really don't know what's around the bend. It's ok. That's just how it is when you have to pioneer, even when you're only pioneering your own life. So don't beat yourself up if you're not always feeling absolutely positive about what's going on and if it's all going to work. In order for us to have absolute knowledge of outcome we have to take the paths most traveled and if we wanted to do that we wouldn't be....us. Being unsure is part of the deal here. That's normal.
What causes people to defeat themselves is to give into the fear. Fear can drive you to worry a bit, then it can drive you to lose sleep, then it can drive you to become insecure to the point of lashing out at others, then it can drive you to simply quit. You can look at the uncharted path before you and say, "You know what......never mind." Turn the boat around and take another path - that's always your right. But to move forward, to pray, to ask for divine assistance and the faith of those depending on you, to push yourself out of your comfort zone and into something you can't deny yourself...well...that opens a door of magic within that changes you forever. And if you ask me about my own adventures, even if I fail it's worth it just to open that door. I raise my glass to those who are scared and moving forward anyway. Cheers.
Look at the move Tim and I are making. I wish I could tell you I'm not scared to death cuz I know deep down I am and I know it's probably gonna get worse long before it gets better. We know what we want, but we don't really know exactly how it's going to be. It's uncharted territory. There are people on the wings cheering us on and there are people who will never understand why we're leaving. It definitely isn't the first time people look at Tim and/or myself and think we're crazy, rash, naive, foolish, etc. But, I just can't bring myself to care if those people get it or not. What I really care about is creating a life for myself that reflects who I am on the inside and I don't feel like this city offers my heart all that it desires to grow and expand. We have a pretty good plan going and we've been taking steps towards the move for a year now - emotionally I've been taking steps even longer than that. What keeps me going is impenetrable faith. I've set my sails up a hundred times so I know that I may not always end up where I think I'm going to, but I will always end up somewhere better than I was when I started the journey.
We steer our ship, angels hold our compass, God is the water beneath us and the wind in our sails. How could any of us POSSIBLY go wrong?
I have one other angle that you may find helpful. Over the holidays I was in NM for about a week when I started projecting on my move and feeling lonely for the people in my life who really GET me. There's a seriously small population of people like that in NM and I don't know a single soul in our final destination of Colorado. Though I believe I'll love the new friends I make and plan on keeping all my old friends, this particular evening I was doing a lot of self-doubting and feeling uncharacteristically sorry for myself. I was on my nightly walk from the main house to the small guest house I'll be moving into in about 11 weeks. It was, as usual out there, a dark and chilly night and I looked up as I always do to marvel at the gagillion stars visible from Middle of Nowhere, Northern NM. I could actually see the Milky Way plastered above us in a huge bright strip. And I thought to myself, "Well, shit. In a hundred years I'll be dead and none of this will matter." That is a true story on all accounts.
Thank you, Mrs. Marshall, for helping me put my own journey in perspective. I'm thankful you're on the waters with me.
