It's hard to keep track of all my thoughts. I carry around a notebook
for the purpose of recording them, but even then, most of my thoughts
and ideas end up lost in the nebulousness (that's a word!) of the
universe. It's a sad reality.
I really enjoy talking to people--I like hearing stories. As of late I've been talking to a few older, more established people to get a glimpse into their life histories.
Pam, a woman I met in Thailand a couple years ago, was in town earlier this week. I met her "for coffee" on the morning of my birthday and I listened as she ever-so-gently shared her young-adult years and gave me some advice that I really appreciate:
Follow your heart.
Simple advice--advice you and I have heard a million times over. Advice that I semi-jokingly offer people when they ask me for input. You know, just do what your heart tells you.
But Pam--a woman with an impressive passport and even more impressive resume, a graduate of Georgetown University, a doctorate student at Duke, a mother of twins, a speaker of 6 languages, an accomplished world traveler--told me that in all of her life experience, she may have regretted following her head sometimes, but she never regretted following her heart.
She said nothing about being strategic or creating a plan; she gave no networking or interviewing tips. No phone numbers or emails of important people I should connect with.
She told me to honor what was inside of me, to follow my heart. And she wasn't just repeating a tired platitude. Her eyes welled up and her hand fluttered to her neck. She had put stock in this conviction, I could tell; she had tried and tested it--and it had held true. She believed it wholeheartedly, and she made me believe it, too.
I walked out of that coffee shop and I thought, "I will. I will follow my heart."
My heart tells me to stay here. It tells me that it needs time to catch up with my head. It tells me to give myself space and to explore my options and to sit and think for awhile. It tells me to be still and to be patient. It tells me to catch up on the books I've been meaning to read, the letters I've been meaning to write, the phone calls I've been meaning to make. It tells me to stop for a second and take a breath.
Today at work I sat outside and chatted with another woman in my office--Eleanor. She spent her twenties galavanting around war zones in Africa. She worked for Doctors Without Borders, USAID, Human Rights Watch. She's got a pretty impressive history, just like Pam.
But with a wry smile on her face she told me, "I could have never planned any of that. I just let it happen. I rode the ebb and flow, and things just worked out."
After we talked she sent me an article exploring the problem with the way we've been taught to make decisions--from the Harvard Business Review, ironically enough. It was so good--almost poetic. I was pulling out quotes left and right, but I think the best summation of it can be found in these lines:
"We are many selves. And while these selves are defined partly by our histories, they are defined just as powerfully by our present circumstances and our hopes and fears for the future.
We like to think that we can leap directly from a desire for change to a single decision that will complete our
reinvention – the conventional wisdom would say you shouldn’t fool yourself with small, superficial adjustments. But trying to tackle the big changes too quickly can be counterproductive...trying to make one big move once and for all can prevent real change.
We redefine [our identities], in practice, by crafting experiments, shifting connections, and making sense
of the changes we are going through."
A nice cherry of validation, wouldn't you say? I can wait. I can make small moves. I can stay here and see.
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