What I Know for Sure: Number Seven

Which leads me to Number Seven.. jump in, take risks. Don’t wait for it to feel right or “safe”. Life doesn’t guarantee, it will rip promises out of your hands if you don’t leap when a gift is offered. Take the adventure, change jobs, keep trying everything until you find something that just feels like “you”.. and then never let it go. Stay with it, develop it, swim through the thick of it until it either becomes part of you, something you feel inspired to share or something you eventually need to let go of after it has served its purpose. My children taught me this one.. Excerpt from my previous post:  What I Know for Sure.

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My beautiful counsellor Kerry will say of a person

“I see her, I see him”

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And so, on this quiet morning while all the world sleeps, I’ve decided to look back through the last few years of my life to see if I can “see her”.

I currently have 54,197 photos on my iPhone that neatly organize my past by year, month and day. One click and I can find myself, the truths and threads of a life being woven over time. I can see that some qualities, virtues and values were carried forward while others fell away.

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In 2015 I hired a photographer for new business photos. One of the best in the city, I wanted him to capture an image that reflected both myself and my growing real estate practice. This was taken just before I started out on my own, that terrifying journey of trying to find my authentic self and so I feel this photo is fitting to mark the beginning of my “hero’s journey”:

“a hero who goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis, and comes home changed or transformed. (Wikepedia)”

Here is Barbara, circa 2015, in a designer dress with hair and makeup done by the photographer’s staff, standing in a luxury home I had just listed in Scarboro. The soft focus is fitting because “who I was” was so blurred and indistinct. I remember her, but I don’t recognize her.

Shortly after this photo was taken, I read this poem and it became my “call to adventure”.

Sweet Darkness

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone,
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your home
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

David Whyte

And so my hero’s journey began shortly after that photo was taken. The fact that these choices also caused pain and suffering for others has never, ever left my own heart. But it was impossible to ignore the insistent voice inside me that kept whispering “what about my life, doesn’t my life matter?”

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I began looking through all 54,197 photos to find those that resonate as the emerging me, photos where I could “see her”. This gallery of photos has the highlights, the times when I felt most authentic, joyful, connected, most of all courageous, as I began stepping outside of my little world. The family and friendships that have carried me during this time, that held me, hold me, I will  always keep in my heart.

And now.. I see her…

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What will be next?

Well, this particular photo has been added over and over again to my vision boards.. maybe this will be my next adventure?

And I’ll leave you with another of my favorite poems by Mary Oliver.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mary Oliver

Love,

Barbara