reCREATING myself

My friend D. may have changed my life forever at dinner the other night, just as she is changing the world.

She and I have been friends for a long time. We lost touch there in the middle, when life got in the way. But we’ve never lost each other completely. And I’m so grateful.

I hope she won’t be offended to learn that I think we are very similar, she and I. We’re both courageous, ambitious women who started down one path, only to find that our lives were destined to take another. We both married men who didn’t fit the description we’d drawn for ourselves, and we both thank the gods every day we were smart enough to listen to our hearts. We’re both good to other women despite the fact that other women aren’t always good to us. We both walk fast, butt in, take charge and do it ourselves because we don’t have the patience to wait for the world to change.

D. is a little farther down her path than I am down mine because she didn’t take as many detours as I did and she naturally comes by the one ingredient I struggle to keep in my tank: self-esteem.

A few years ago, after she moved back to her native city and took on a big, big job, she surprised me and a lot of other people by announcing she was pregnant. A few years later, she did it again. It all came as such a shock — this fairly typical behavior — because D. had all but sworn that even though she’d broken her vow never to marry, her vow never to procreate was indestructible.

Lucky for Planet Earth, she was wrong.

After a whole bunch of interim steps I won’t include here, D. decided it was time to search her soul for the professional purpose that fit this path she was on. Today, instead of working a big job, she’s making a big difference for her kids, her community and our planet. Go here and you’ll see: She's literally changing the world every day. And she's just getting started.

Now before you silently congratulate her altruism, know this: D. is not penniless and happy. She's doing-alright and happy. She won't ever be the envy of her former colleagues when it comes to raw numbers. But she hasn't given up shopping at Whole Foods, either.

I tell you D.’s story because, at the end of the day, it’s all about me. I traveled to her part of the world last week, where she drove two-and-a-half hours to meet me for dinner. We hadn’t seen each other in years, but it was just like no time had gone by. We talked about family and old times, and I finally got to hear the story of how she arrived where she is.

The short version is this: She searched her soul, asked her friends and confidants, and made up her mind to follow her heart away from where she was to where she belongs. Sometimes, she discovered, the path you're on, though familiar and comfortable and safe, is also wrong.

By the time we parted, her story had inspired a realization that I, too, have been standing at a crossroads. My path needs a clearer professional purpose if I am to continue on it.

And for the first time without a single bit of fear, I wondered aloud whether it’s time for me leave my familiar, comfortable, safe path and follow my heart.