MAKE EACH STONE YOUR OWN
Ever since I first read this quote by Joseph Campbell it has been reverberating in my mind.
I think about in terms of my own life, as one is apt to do. And more importantly, at the moment, I can’t help but quote it to my daughter and her friends who are graduating from college in the next few weeks, and thus embarking on the real part of their life journey.
It’s hard not to start out with a blueprint of exactly how you want or think you want your life to play out. I’m going to do this job and then get this promotion, and then I will marry this kind of person and well, you know how it goes….
From the time we are small the question is hurled our way, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” As if a five or seven years old would have a clue.
I have learned, the hard way, that at forty, I didn’t know what I wanted to be at fifty. From the time we are very young we are always supposed to be working towards something, preferably one thing. I am a big advocate for always working towards something. I am a big fan of being engaged, prepared and ready for that moment when opportunity knocks.
But nobody’s life turns out exactly as planned.
If you look back on your own life, and think about the times you really wanted a job and didn’t get it. You were convinced that that job would be the stone that would allow access to the next stone that would take you across the river to the place you really wanted to be. And then you stop and look back( at least I do) and say, wow, if that had happened the way I thought it should, wanted it to, dreamt it would, I wouldn’t be where I am today. And where I am today, is exactly where I belong; and I wouldn’t change it for the world.
But there is no way I could have seen that then. In fact in those moments when the Tracey plan was not working in lock step with the world’s plan for Tracey I was pretty upset, sometimes pissed off, other times depressed. There have been many moments in my life when I thought, it was all over, it was not going the way I thought it should. Things were not unfolding in the pattern I had envisioned in accordance with the work I had been doing and that made me feel like I was a failure.
There were moments I felt like a total loser. And it was because I didn’t trust and I didn’t allow for the serendipity that ultimately makes life grand and each of our lives totally unique.
A moment here, for people saying, I’m out of a job. I can’t pay the mortgage. I lost my insurance; I’m fifty years old and it was supposed to be all taken care of by now, what am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to look at this as a gift?
In those moments you have to look around you and say, it’s tough, it sucks, but maybe the world wants me to do something else. Sometimes when the things you thought made you happy don’t work out, you actually go out there and find the things that do. Sometimes you create them.
I was going to be an actress, at twenty-seven it looked like that might not pan out for me in the way I wanted. If you’re a blonde quasi ingénue and you haven’t made it by 27, there is a very good chance you aren’t going to. On a bet I ended up writing plays. I was then only going to be a playwright, that was it, No, TV. No Hollywood. And before I knew it I was working in TV, by thirty had my own show on the air.
I got kicked in the butt a few years later and found myself without a job and reinvented myself again as a screenwriter, a place I was more than happy to nest for the rest of my years. And just as I thought I was hitting my stride, Hollywood did not agree and yet again I found myself with the challenge – now what to do.
I wont’ bore you with the details, if you are interested there is a chapter in my book Between a Rock and Hot Place that talks all about this.
My path was being laid out, but not step by logical step; not in any way I could have predicted, and that is what ultimately made it mine.
No path is without it’s dips and stops and starts and forks in the road. It doesn’t matter how successful you might be, there will be challenges, rugs will be pulled out from under you, people and things you thought you could count on will disappoint you.
And that is when you are called on to maybe make a right when you thought you were going left. You might be shoved to jump to a stone that looks a little wobbly, a little unsafe, it’s usually those that test you and allow you to proceed on the path that is really satisfying and satisfying because it is yours.
We can only live our own lives, that is what I try and tell my daughter and her friends who are starting out. We have to allow for ideas and opportunities that might be outside the box or our comfort zone.
I say that to fifty year olds who come to me with the same question, Where do I go next?
We all want security and certainty; it makes us feel safe. But it’s not the way life plays out. Safe is seldom interesting and it’s certainly not unique.
Sometimes you can lay out the stones and step from one to another, but as Campbell says if the path is laid out for you in a way you can see, it’s not yours. Yours you will make stone by stone, over the course of your life. And hopefully you will look back someday and say – I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Suffice to say if anyone had told me that at fifty-five I would be writing a book called Gratitude and Trust- Recovery Is Not Just For Addicts with my childhood idol, Paul Williams, I would have told them , they were nuts. How could that possibly happen? I barely drink and in those days I barely knew him, and I wasn’t even an author. But here I am and I am beyond grateful.
Tracey Jackson is a screenwriter and blogger at traceyjacksononline.com. Her book Gratitude and Trust is now available.