A career-quest analogy from the coffee-table of Bethany & Kate¹
There we were.
Two souls lost and confused, blinking past another round of midterm exams and blinking back tears of frustration. We were lost, again.
But were we?
The basic bone structure of our dreams was still unbelievably intact, still standing after countless flights across oceans and up and down stairs of (someone else’s) progress. We were who we always were. Weren’t we?
What changed, then?
So our bones had grown weaker over time, stronger with some more osteoblasts in other places, due to weight-shifting (and much groaning). We’ve gotten stronger at rebuilding ourselves from practice.
Ah, our approach is what’s changed about us.
Kind of like going vegan and then finding out later those weren’t the right ingredients for us after all. Our tool-box has been exchanged a time or two since two years (or so) ago.
Feeding our dreams (the what) hasn’t changed — but it’s how we feed our souls (the process) that’s shifted. Dramatically, we might add.
The bones of this beast we’re both (blindly?) walking around in are firm: to share, to communicate, to learn more than we know today, tomorrow.
Our muscles — our experiences — have torn and stretched us in all different directions. We have too much muscle memory to move confidently right now.
And yet, every day we make new cells, new solutions.
Every 24 hours we start with a different idea, and let it run its course. If it lasts the night, the idea stays — and multiplies in our memory.
But those old ideas, the ones we couldn’t for the life of us duplicate? They shed like snake skin, forgotten, abandoned, like a ghost town left to blow away in the wind. It’s for someone else, those ideas are now.
Oh, we still bruise, and badly. Our egos sometimes inflate to the size of cumulonimbus clouds — our heads aloft in the skies of comfort and comfortable complacency. It takes the other one of us to remind that there’s the rest of the body to attend to.
And those bruises, they sting.
We know we won’t make those same mistakes again, even when the black-and-blue blends into beige. Those mis-steps will always remind us of what we stand to lose. Those painful scars paint us a different shade of progress.
We are women of vision.
It is our eyes that are the window to our souls.
They are the kaleidoscope-like tools that have kept constant in our lives of constant changing. Our consumption of the world through this lens of learning affects our (re)production of it.
The ideas we generate reflect the people, the memories, and the moments we have seen — like panes of stained-glass windows. We absorb their energy and have framed our entire lives around this way of seeing. It is how we share our stories.
This shapes and ultimately is our perspective. Our primary pattern of consumption is sight.
And even if we can’t see the end of this journey, we know we soon will.
Because our body is strong and able; our movements are flexible and agile; our cycle is constantly filtering and finding new ideas; our bruises remind and remake us; and our eyes shine a light on the way FORWARD.
There’s no looking back, here.
¹Kate, aka the lovely Katlin M. Hiller, previously introduced here and here
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Bethany N. Bella 