Girl About O-Town

Today is a really big day for this girlaboutOtown.   It marks a new beginning.

Last Friday, I celebrated with friends and colleagues, and left my cubicle job behind.  “Do what you love and the rest will follow” goes the theory, and I’ve decided to test it. 

 Images of my surprise cubicle makeover thanks to MH’s IPhone.  Thanks!

From now on, I will be working hard to turn my experience, my training and a ton of passion into a successful small business.  Over the coming weeks, I look forward to revealing my plans in more detail, but for today, I thought I would simply share some inspiration.

A long time ago, when I graduated from university, Canadian poet Dennis Lee gave the convocation speech.   It was a beautiful June day, and an amusing set of remarks, but at the time, I was full of ambition and short on life experience.  I didn’t fully appreciate the significance of his message, and I remember thinking it a bit strange that after four years of studying hard in my subject area, I was being sent off in the world with advice to follow my intuition.

Since then however, I have found myself returning to the words of this wonderfully wise poet over and over again.  The tattered pages of typeface, torn at the edges, have proven to contain some of my life’s most valuable lessons, and I have kept them folded up and tucked away in my journal as constant reminder to slow down and connect with my inner self.   

Each time I read Dennis Lee’s speech, I am more deeply affected and more completely convinced of his simple but profound premise.

“I’m haunted by the sense that my words today are meant for a single person.  I don’t know who you are, but I’m going to put formalities aside and speak to you directly.

The one thing I know about you is this.  You are harbouring a hunch you need to honour.  A live possibility that has your name on it.  I can’t say what it is, and even more to the point, neither can you.

It doesn’t present itself as a clear cut choice, like  “Should I go into law?…Should I live in Vancouver?”  Those are important questions, and you’ll decide them when you decide them, but this is something deeper and less defined.  An itch, and inkling, a dim sense that something is beckoning you, and you don’t know what it is.  It leaves you feeling that other decisions you are wrestling with don’t matter as much as this.  Only, what is it?

It is the thing you can’t imagine living without having explored.  It’s the you at the centre, but it’s scary – because when will you ever sit down and pay proper attention to this deeper rendezvous?  Could you wake up one day, too late, and say to yourself, “I never really went for it”?

The answer is you could, which is scariest of all.

But if you can’t put your finger on this possibility, what can we even say about it?  Well, the first thing is this.  You must take the summons seriously.  It matters, and more than that:  you have the resources to respond. 

Let me ask?  How do we determine the path our life will follow?

A lot of things arrive by accident.  The parents we’re born to; a car crash; and unexpected job offer.  And, we also move ahead by deliberate planning, but there is another way of steering our lives as well.  That way is intuition.

Intuition is a hard power to talk about, because it operates outside our conscious control; indeed outside our awareness.  But, it’s just as down to earth a faculty as hearing, or using language.  It’s the part of you that feels this tug at the core.  I think of it as a kind of homing apparatus.  It mooches and hovers and scans, the way an insect’s antennae do, groping about until it locks onto something which it already senses, but which we haven’t recognized yet…

…What you are looking for is a little ping of rightness.  When it comes, you’ll know its time to proceed.  And don’t fret if some people never do understand what’s propelling you.

Will that lead you to the deep place where you have felt yourself called?  It will.  Not today.  Not tomorrow.  But, if you continue to sharpen your intuitive faculty, the journey itself will become a way of inhabiting that calling.  Until you settle into it though, you’ll be like a bird trying to fly on one wing.”

                                       -Excerpts from Dennis Lee, Trent University, 1995.

Today, I feel like I might finally be flying with two wings.