Jan 18 - Line for the day

'It's a thrill to fulfil your own childhood dreams, but as you get older, you may find that enabling the dreams of others is even more fun.'
- Pg 117, Chapter 'Training a Jedi', The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch with Jeffrey Zaslow

Wow...what a line. Something that completely resonates with where I am in life. This is where all my personal growth activities, my chosen career path, and my very being seems to be leading me. Interestingly, when I first read the line, I stopped at the first comma...and then after a slight pause of wondering whether to get on with the blog (its past midnight) or just read through, something made me read it to the end. And wow, it completely changed the way I read the line!

Story of my life I think. I reach a place where I hit a pause. In that pause, when I take the opportunity to refrain from immediate action and actually take a moment of nothingness, the ensuing future - usually never the way I envisaged it - turns out to be so much more richer and fulfilling that anything I could have dreamed up! I remember a point where I thought my life was so much in control, along the lines I had planned it..everything falling into place. And then everything fell out of place, and churned, and kept churning, and still keeps churning. And it continues to create dissonance in me, who likes everything planned and in its place. And yet, the experiences that I've had, have taught me so much more, about life and even more about myself.

I used to think two steps ahead of where I was. While writing, I would know how the sentence would end and the next one start. I still do that...hey its me :) But at the same time, I also recognise that sometimes I don't have the words. And its okay to not have words. Like when I started this One Line A Day exercise, I told myself no backspaces, no deletions...just type what comes to mind. And yet at the end of the last paragraph, I tried out at least 4 different sentences to follow that last sentence...before deleting all of them.

Maybe thats the grace. The grace you give yourself not to be perfect, but to be in the moment. And when I am out of the trap of being perfect, I can be with myself, or be with the person in front of me... completely and wholly. Not as a solution provider, but as a listener. Not to fix things, but to support, to listen, to give them space to let it all out. Because most of the time, we are not looking for solutions. We are just looking for someone who cares.