I’m starting a new chapter in my life (when are we not?) and I don’t necessarily know where it is going but this A-type personality is trying something different for several reasons. One, I have had times in my life where I thought I had everything planned perfectly and then the $@it hit the fan and I learned that despite my best efforts, I am not in charge. When you listen to stories about successful or admirable people, they often didn’t set out to be as big as they became – they simply followed a passion and made moves that felt right at each turn. The visual that comes to my mind is a monkey swinging from vine to vine – she doesn’t stand safely on a tree, trying to figure out everywhere that she’s going to grab in order to reach her final destination. She leaps and trusts that the perfect vine will be there just as she releases the last and if it’s not, it’s fine to take detours or even keep swinging until she can reevaluate.
What started as an anonymous fitness account has turned into resurfacing onto Facebook, joining a multi-level network business, getting certified to teach group fitness, writing an extensive course to help people change their lifestyle and their lives and then? It’s as if the last five years of being a full-time nursing and pregnant mom of three has finally caught up with me and now my passions are exploding – that’s what’s really going on. With all of these new ventures, my insecurities are screaming, as always happens when you begin to do things that are bigger than you knew yourself to be. One of my fears is that people will get annoyed with me, think that I’m acting as if I’ve got it all figured out.
Which brings me to my freshman year of college, when I had the best Japanese teacher that I’ve ever had. Mind you, I had many Japanese teachers while living in Japan but in Washington, my Japanese teacher was an Italian man whose last name was Tomasi. Professor Tomasi was a great teacher because at some point he had been in the exact same place as each of us, he too had to learn all the rules and exceptions to one of the hardest languages in the world. Tomasi didn’t grow up speaking Japanese so he never took for granted how the language works. If I were to ask a native English speaker why we usually say the word “because” as, “becaaaause” you would probably say, “I don’t know, we just do.” (Which actually happened to me when I was teaching English to a Japanese student.)
I have spent over 10 years reprogramming my brain and now I want to share some tools that have worked for me. Meeting my husband shook me in such a way that made me realize that my former strategies weren’t working for me, and that they weren’t even in alignment with who I really am. Although I have led an extremely privileged life, I had to learn this language myself – I wasn’t programmed to look at the bright side, gratitude wasn’t a daily practice. I have been a seeker for as long as I can remember and I’m writing myself these letters so that I can reread them whenever I go down old paths – maybe in 10 days, maybe in 10 minutes but probably both.