It’s Time for a Change
Make no small plans, for they have no power to stir the blood.
—Daniel Burnham
I’ve always been a big dreamer. I imagine myself in five or ten or fifty years and all the places I’ve been, friends I’ve had, accomplishments and accolades to my name. There is, however, an expansive chasm between my dreaming and my doing. Do I want to visit all the countries in the world? Um, ya! Have I been to thirty…ok, yes I have, which is more than most get to in their lifetime and I’m still in my (ahem, early) thirties. Have I thought every year for about the past twelve years of owning some property in the country and running a U-pick business with full-time staff to pick what customers leave behind and make pies and jams to sell? Lately, I think about this almost every day, but the reality is that I haven’t even so much as looked for available property to get my dream started.
Since marrying a military man, my life has had a level of uncertainty – when will he be deployed, when will we be posted, when is the next time he is going to get hurt? Thankfully, the most serious injury he has sustained while at work has been losing a fingernail or two, and once he needed a few stitches. But we know people who have died during “routine” exercises. The uncertainty I feel has been a stumbling block for me to get up and do something. I had a small clinic once, in the last town we lived in, and right as I was consistently successful, we had to move. When we got here, I was gun-ho to open another one. Well, plans fell through, costs were too high, excuses were made, and I have worked out of someone else’s clinic for more than five years.
I’m starting to feel the usual unrest I do when I stay in the same circumstance for too long. Part of my motivation to go back to school is to drive me to find more. There is so much more I want to do, and some of that includes finding what it feels like to try, to fail, to start again, to eventually succeed or give it up.
Now that I’m in school again, I get to reflect on what I have learned. And this week is simple – gotta focus on number one.
Ok, there’s more to it than that. but I realized I need to dust off my old dreams, maybe come up with something new, put some actual ambition into some of my plans and see where it takes me. Jeff Sandefer stimulated my thinking with this: “You may feel paralyzed by the thought of a larger-than-life goal, overwhelmed by the need to be so grand. If so, try starting with a smaller step. Begin by focusing on your most precious talent, your rarest gift, that task you do better than anyone else. Sometimes you have to ask others to help you identify it, because it’s often something that comes so naturally to you that you don’t even realize it’s something you’re good at.”
What am I good at? What would I be willing to do for free, if you know, I didn’t have to eat or live somewhere better than a box in the park? Well, I’m very skilled at behind-the-scenes work for theatre and film – primarily scenic art. I like people well enough that I am accomodating and caring. I have been told that my massage skills are excellent – and, when it’s your repeat clients telling you, it’s usually because they are happy with the treatment they have received. I garden quasi-successfully every year and have helped my friends and family with their gardens and harvests.
But what is my rarest gift? There are better gardeners, better theatre technicians, better massage therapists out there than me.
This stopped me in my tracks. I couldn’t pick a unique skill that has monetary value.
What I can excel at, is patience.
I remind Dave regularly that I have the patience of a saint, and he’s so lucky to have me because no one else would put up with him. Am I more patient than everyone else? Absolutely not. I get frustrated when I give (professional) advice and it isn’t followed. I roll my eyes a little when clients – usually older ladies – have to tell me the details of their troubles over the phone…this is what coming to the clinic is for. But overall, I am patient.
That’s why it doesn’t scare me to hear things like: “You get to choose, but you cannot control the uncontrollable. And that means you will sometimes fail. The sooner you embrace failure as a friend, the better. Blessed is the entrepreneur who learns to fail early, cheaply, and often. Cursed is the traveler too fearful of failure to choose the more difficult path.” If there is to be any success in my ventures, I have to patiently work for it, time after time, and as I work I wait for the effort to be worth the reward.
“Entrepreneurial heroes forge themselves one hard decision at a time, never giving up, always moving forward. You start by making difficult decisions.”
I’m starting to feel that eagerness and readiness that I felt when I graduated from school – both as a newly trained theatre technician, and as a massage therapist. I want that change. Even though people say they don’t like change, I crave it. (“No one ever really wants change. We fear change. We want safety and stability and comfort. That’s why big leaps help focus our attention outside, toward the horizon, away from our own daily fears and petty insecurities and sloth.”)
It is time for action, and time for change. I’m excited about the next step of my education that will propel me toward it.