You Can Get Anything You Want...

If you listen to NPR, you've probably heard of a program called, "All Things Considered." This is a fabulous program, and I almost always end up in tears before it's all said and done.

"All Things Considered" has been producing a program called "This I Believe." Different people - from your ordinary, everyday Joe, to mega-celebrities - send in essays about things they believe. They range from hilariously funny ("I believe in my cows..") to heart-breakingly touching ("I believe that all people are sacred..").

Nothing, however, prepared me for the essay I listened to yesterday.

The last few weeks have been hard ones for me. I could edit that sentence, and I could say that the last year has been immensely difficult. I'm not a sheltered person by any means - I grew up very fast, and I definitely wasn't babied through the process.

Lately, though, facing difficulties with things like my closest friendships, my marriage, my son, other family members - it seems like I'm facing the hardest challenges of my life these days.

In 1967, Arlo Guthrie sang a song about a woman called Alice. The song was a hysterically funny story about some trash, and some pictures, blind Justice, and the draft, and a restaurant that Alice owned. If you know the song I'm talking about, you'll click on this link and listen for a few minutes, because you probably have just as much history with it as I do. If you don't know the song, I urge you to listen all the way through. It's an experience.

"Well it all started about 40 Thanksgivings ago..."

So the point of this very long post, is that Alice, the lady the song was written about, wrote an essay for "This I Believe."

I know! Who'da thunk?

Her essay can be viewed here, so I'll just tell you why it touched me so much.

Her essay begins with, "I believe that just because you have only six plates and three glasses is no reason why you can't invite 12 people to dinner."

She goes on to say that you can drink out of jelly jars (which is ALL we drink out of at my house, much to Michele's chagrin, because when they break or Zion stashes them in his sock drawer, we don't have to worry about matching patterns), or line hubcaps with tin foil to make plates.

As soon as these words came out of Alice's mouth, I knew I was listening to someone who had been spying on me for the last 27 years. How had she managed to get inside my head so seamlessly?

She talked about "improvising," and explained that, "It's exciting; it's an adventure, a challenge, and a chance to be creative. Not being locked into a 'plan' or a prescribed way of doing something leaves room for all kinds of wonderful stuff to happen."

This is where I started to realize that Alice Brock really was talking to me. Alice Brock somehow realized that I needed some encouragement in my life, in my business, in my future - and the woman reached out to me through public radio.

Stay with me here, people, cause there's never been a question about my lack of sanity, right? So this conversation shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.

This paragraph - this one - is the one I needed to hear:

"I didn't study how to own and run a restaurant. I pretty much made it up as I went along. I was swept up with the idea — the fantasy — of having a restaurant, the chance to make something happen. It never occurred to me I couldn't do it; I only felt that way after I opened up, but by then it was too late. And of course making money at it was way down on the list of what mattered, and that allowed me the freedom to focus on creating something really wonderful."

So now go back and read that paragraph, and replace the word "restaurant" with "scrapbooking kit club" and then you'll have a perfect description of my life.

"I had no idea of how anything was 'supposed' to be. I just barreled ahead, discovering all kinds of possibilities and making plenty of mistakes. And those are really great opportunities to learn. When something works, well, that's that. But when it doesn't, I have to think about why, and I have to come up with some other way that will make it work."

And then, the most perfect sentence I've ever heard in my entire life - "Mistakes lead to discovery and that can produce delight." And then, "It was the oddity that brought richness to everyone."

As I'm writing this blog entry, I have tears streaming down my face, because finally - finally - with this last sentence, I feel that for the first time in my life, someone has given me permission to live the only way I've ever been capable of living:

"I believe there is no one way to do things. The way that works for me is the way that works right now. But that might change tomorrow."

Happy Thanksgiving. Try something different. :)