Sunday, really? Okay, I can blog on Sunday. Anyone remember what I did on Friday?
Just kidding, I remember! I hung out with myself and my pets, engaging in distracting, shallow activity and leaving most of my brain free for long, deep ruminations on a great multitude of things. Exactly what I’ve been doing a whole lot of all month, which is how I remember. It’s been quite fantastic, actually, I’m starting to feel relaxed, empowered and playful in a way that I haven’t for quite a while.
In addition to ongoing creative thinking about how I want to engage with my precious Treasures, I’m also enjoying giving other areas of my life the thorough shake out and freshen up. One particularly fun area to contemplate is my desire to make a significant and widespread intervention in the discourse on some topic that I care about. I don’t know if that’s the best way to describe what I want, but finding the language is part of the process. I want to have a Big Idea that becomes generally known to everyone to whom it is relevant. I want to invent a way of thinking about something.
It would be an understatement to say that such an accomplishment has always been a desire of mine. It’s more like it’s always been an expectation, a sense of destiny. I, like a startling percentage of my friends, have a fairly functional messianic complex. To this day I don’t know what is an “average” amount of feeling like one was born to do something extraordinary.
I remember being on vacation visiting family in the south when I was little, about six to eight. We went to church with my aunt, a laying on of hands, dancing in the aisles, slain by the spirit type of church, something very different from the solemn services to which I was accustomed. The preacher, who in my memory both looks and sounds a lot like John Edwards, looked out, from far away from me, on a crowd of hundreds, and explained that he had Messages from God to deliver to some in attendance. And I thought, “Oh, great, he’s going to talk to me.”
Sure enough, he came down from the podium, addressed a few people farther up in the crowd than me, then made eye contact from thirty yards away and made a beeline my direction. He told me what a special little girl I was, and how God wanted me to know that my life would be something amazing. He talked to my mom for a while, also, about how wonderful and challenging it must be to be entrusted with me. And the whole time I was pretty much thinking, “I know, I know!”
The point of this story is not to suggest that God told a preacher I was awesome, and that’s evidence that I am. Even at the time I understood the impact of being a first time attendee in the company of a new, reasonably well-off, community member. And turning cold reads into divine messages isn’t even particularly tricky. The point is simply how ridiculously easy the things he was saying were for me to believe at the time. There’s nothing anyone could have suggested that I would accomplish that I wouldn’t have thought possible. But I always thought The Thing would be obvious, eventually.
Flash forward a few decades, and I’ll admit that I both have a truly extraordinary life and that the bigness of my accomplishments (a combination of impact, fame and money, sort of) is happening slower than I would have guessed. And I’m starting to realize that there isn’t going to be one obvious thing that I’m “supposed” to do with my life.
It isn’t that I don’t have ideas. Wonderful, creative, potentially important, unique ideas. It’s amazing how many ideas there are out there, sometimes it would be so easy to think that someone already thought of everything. I often feel like I think of too many things, however, it’s overwhelming, and none of them get developed. So now I’m chewing over the notion of picking one, without worrying that it’s the best one I’ll ever have, and trying to turn it into whatever it can become.
So that’s fun. I can’t even figure out how to pick! Should I decide what I care about, then figure out the best idea I have related to the thing? Or do I figure out what my best idea is, and then imagine the most important impact? Is this engagement going to be business, in any part, or something I keep very separate from money? So many great questions to ponder, as any answers come in, I’ll let you know!
Sweets!
Kasha