News from Jules | 03.13.2023 | Follow Your Life
As confident and concise as ever, just louder than usual coming from a human instead of the wind, I heard it whispered in my ear: “The door is wide open.” I felt a deep sense of relief, the door had been closed for weeks—maybe months, maybe years, but definitely the five weeks after my car had broken down.
Within two days of returning from my women’s spiritual group annual retreat two weeks ago, I finally got the call from the mechanic that my car was done—Hallelujah!
I immediately looked at the weather app and realized that the only clear travel day between large winter storm fronts in the forecast was the following day. If I didn’t leave Portland, I’d likely be stuck there for another week. I was beyond ready to go, but it still felt sudden to pack everything I might need for two months in 12 hours.
Just like on my road trip west last fall, I had to just go for it.
After I was done purging my storage unit in January, it was time to restart training to climb Mt. Hood, discerning more small towns to explore, and doing odd jobs to make some money beyond writing. On my last road trip, I already scouted White Salmon Wash. (Population: 2,540) and Hood River, Ore. (Population: 8,286) in the Columbia River Gorge. So, when I visited my friends in Bend, Ore. a month ago, I also scouted the nearby towns of Tumalo (Population: 407) and Sisters (Population: 3,075). I’d passed through both countless times en route to Bend (Population: 99,533), but never actually stopped.
While I can do hours of online research, my experience is that I will “just know” in minutes. Besides my intuition, there is nothing like pounding the pavement to talk to the locals and tap into their word wide web.
I felt surprisingly shy so I steered toward places that interested me—a tea shop, a stationery store, the postal center, a bookshop, an art gallery—and stoked conversations until there was a natural opening to ask about nearby housing and jobs. One kind woman was just as curious about me, so asked a bunch of questions and offered to put out feelers for housesitting opportunities.
I caught a cold in Bend so I was too sick to do much the week after I returned. I wasn’t feeling optimistic, but I was grateful so I emailed the kind woman to say thanks for asking around. I wished I could say it all turned around there.
Well, it did. I just didn’t know it yet.
When I finally checked my email, I saw a response…and an opportunity! I immediately called her and listened in amazement as I heard the answer to my prayers: Housesitting for March and April, in a National Forest, near Sisters, Ore., next to seven major Northwest peaks.
My mind said: Take some time to think about it and get back to her.
My gut said: This is it! A house in the woods. Say yes right now.
Was this it? I had no idea what I was getting myself into, but I said yes anyhow.
What I knew was that the energy was flowing in the direction of my intentions. Too many times in the past, I stalled, analyzed, and overprocessed. Thus missing umpteen opportunities and taking years to finally reach what I had known all along.
Like moving to a small town.
In 2017, I joined a monthly book club to read a hot new book based on one of Stanford University’s most popular courses: Designing Your Life. Ironically, I said yes to that invitation without knowing any of the other women or anything about the book. But, I had a hunch to say yes. By the end of that book club, I had five new friends and started a new business, finally following whisperings from the Universe years before.
The authors, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, cleverly reframed the classic “five-year plan” into an “Odyssey Plan” with a cute dashboard and room to draw. I enjoyed sketching out my grand life plans but also remember feeling uncomfortable. How many of my best laid life plans—all of them—had succumbed to some unanticipated variable?
It was still a plan, which meant it was 50 to 90 percent out of touch with reality (that made-up statistic as reliable as the ones forming the foundation of most plans). This was the biggest thing I learned from my graduate degree and then consulting for years in strategic planning: You can’t know until you’re actually doing it.
Odyssey, a long and eventful or adventurous journey or experience, is accurate. Such is life.
I believe this is what Albie Sachs meant when he said: “Don’t follow your dreams. Follow your life. Your dreams follow you.”
Sachs, the South African lawyer, activist, writer, and former judge featured in the very inspiring “Live to Lead” series on Netflix that I highly recommend watching all in one sitting some evening after dinner, elaborates:
Live your life for yourself. Don’t even bother yourself on Albie who’s speaking to you about how to live your life. Model yourself on yourself. Whatever that means for your life. So explore and allow it to reach out and take chances and risks, not always go for the well-traveled road.
How does one do this?
According to Sachs, it’s simple. Listen to our conscience, that inner feeling or voice acting as a guide on what feels right or wrong.
We think too much and intuit too little. Okay, I’ll speak for myself. I am relearning to trust my “ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.”
So right then and there on the phone, I said an emphatic yes. Just like I said heck yes to skiing. Yes to leaving Portland with only 12-hours notice. And yes to chatting up another art gallery owner after arriving in Sisters that landed me a part-time job which I start tomorrow.
The door is wide open.
May you live your life for yourself this week.
Love,
Jules