When I was younger, I thought I had plenty of time to take action on my big dreams. So whenever I considered taking a trip, enrolling in a training, or learning a new craft or language, I would think, “I’ll do that next year,” “Now’s not the time,” or “I’ve got too much going on. I was on the left side of the bell curve measuring a lifespan. I felt practically immortal back then. Time, I thought, was on my side.
Now I’m 57 going on 58 years old and I’m on the other side of that bell curve. My expiration date may not be in sight, but I can sense its presence, and when I can’t sleep at night, time no longer feels like my friend. A couple of years ago, my dear friend’s beautiful sister passed away from complications of ovarian cancer. A junior high school friend died just last week. Less than a year ago, a Martha Beck colleague succumbed to brain cancer. Each of them were my peers. Aging feels like Russian Roulette – which number will the spinning wheel stop on, and will that number be mine?
Poet Mary Oliver, who passed away a few weeks ago at 83, wrote one of my favorite lines in one of my favorite poems, her urgent and lyrical The Summer Day: “Tell me what it is that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” It’s an urgent and even thrilling reminder of how fragile and brief life really is. What if, I wonder, the fact that I spent so many years heeding my mind’s excuse-making – I’m too busy, now’s not a great time, my kids need me – will turn out to be the biggest regret at the end of it all?
I don’t want to be an old woman lying on my deathbed and thinking, “I wish I’d taken more risks. I wish I’d followed my heart. I wish I’d ventured into the unknown.”
In 2009, I visited Africa with my mentor, Martha Beck. It was an insanely long flight crammed into cheap – I mean coach – class next to a boy with croup. I missed my daughter’s swim meet and a friend’s birthday party. That said, Africa was a dream come true for me, and worth every single discomfort I went through to get there. My younger self would most assuredly have thought, “I’ll do it next year, it’s not the right time, it’s too much.” But this time, I took my desires as seriously as I take my child’s welfare, my spouse’s health, and my friends’ problems. My truth, as it usually does, found its way to the surface. Africa called to me like a hungry baby longing for its mother.
A decade later, Africa is calling me again. And this time, she wants me to bring like-minded women with me. Now, hosting a retreat in South Africa is by far one of the most impractical, irresponsible, and out- of- the- box things I’ve ever done in my life, but I’ve learned over the years to listen to the whispers and yearnings of my soul, and to take bigger and better chances. So I borrowed money from our personal savings to pay the hefty deposit needed for the game reserve, and my coaching partner Kelley Wolf and I may have gone a bit over budget carefully curating the gifts for our guests. Our plane tickets have been bought.
We named our retreat A Return to Your Soul and picked Phinda as our destination without even knowing that the name means a return, how perfect is that? This kind of serendipity is something I call a “God Wink” – a personal experience, often identified as coincidence, that is so astonishing that it’s clear it’s divine intervention. Kelley and I are setting out to create a true adventure, a journey not always available to women. We intend to bring 10 extraordinary women just like us, women who are eager and maybe even in a little bit of a hurry to make meaning of their one wild and precious life. Women who have the desire to transform their life by stepping outside of their comfort zone and into the most magical place on this planet – the place where we came from, the place where returning to your true nature is as easy as connecting to what’s whispering to you.
If this is calling to you, reach out. If it’s not, I promise you something else. It may not be as big as South Africa, but whatever it is, resist the temptation to postpone it, to put yourself where we as women have been taught to be – last on the list, on the back burner, behind everyone and everything else.
Your desires matter. The heart wants what the heart wants. Wanting is a good enough reason to leave a relationship, to quit a job, to have children, to do amazing things. Author Cheryl Strayed invites us to “find yourself in what’s grander than you because when the truth is spoken, your world will never be the same again.”
You can stand at the door of your life with all the reasons why moving forward is impractical, unrealistic, or ridiculous. Or you can make room for what’s grander than yourself. Be the agent of your life, go on wild adventures, take those magnificent journeys. Come for the unexpected, and when you do, the unexpected – I promise – will reveal itself, beautifully and perfectly to you.
