We are all on a hero’s journey, and we are the narrators of that story.
There are so many different versions I could tell, but I’ll begin here. In high school I felt like an alien. People didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t make sense to me.
What did make sense was the feeling I had when I was riding on the back of a motorcycle, behind my friend Lee: the wind in my hair, the sun on my face, the world flowing by in a stream of images.
Or that feeling I had when I stayed up all night creating, writing, painting.
Or when I sat under the roots of a giant tree in a nearby forest writing poetry, listening to Led Zeppelin’s Tangerine on my Walkman.
In short, when I wasn’t thinking but was, rather, BEING.
As I went forward, I experimented with many ways of living. All of these were driven by a desire to live from a place of deep self trust, which mostly evaded me for many years. But every experiment brought me closer. Different forms of meditation and self development tools like rational emotive therapy played a big role for me during this time.
I went to college, then University (for Journalism). Then I dropped out after my third year to backpack around Australia for a year. When I returned, I won a top award for writing, and got an internship as a researcher/journalist in South Africa.
I eventually landed a job as senior editor at Financial Post Business magazine, where I stayed for two years before quitting to do a solo overland trip from Thailand to Nepal for seven months.
These are all pictures of me from some of my experiments.
The first is at my book launch, when I self published my travel memoir (from that 7 month trip in SE Asia).
The second was a week-long whitewater kayaking camp on the Madawaska River (where I soon realized this probably wasn’t the sport for me, since I spent way too much time upside down).
The third is when I was facilitating 2-day business communication workshops at major companies across Canada.
The fourth is me on a yak in Tibet.
The fifth is near Kolkata, India, after I co-founded a children’s charity.
This marked the beginning of a new phase, from just BEING to GIVING.
I ran the children’s education charity for five years. It was called Jai Dee (Good Heart) Children’s Fund. My old blog is still live, here. We built schools and toilets in Laos and India. I also co-founded an indie music festival to raise money for the charity. Here’s an old teaser video for both the charity and the music festival (featuring a much younger me!) here. Both were successful. The charity helped over 400 children. The music festival was featured on TV.
It was an amazing experience that taught me a lot about both BEING and GIVING. But the biggest lesson it taught me is that, while it feels good to do good, it should never be used to feel “good enough”.
In the end I had to shut it down. Why? Because even though the projects were working, I was a wreck: stressed, exhausted, and still feeling like something was missing (incidentally, the very same problems I had when I was an editor at a national business magazine, then as a college teacher, then as a corporate facilitator). There was also divorce in there.
The problem wasn’t the projects. The problem was that I was using them to try to “be something”. I was doing what I thought I should do or needed to do–what I “thought” others needed from me, rather than going deeply inside myself to see what I wanted and needed.
Another one of these experiments included hobby farming on a 2-acre property on Georgian Bay. It was a dream come true–living in a century old Victorian on my own land near the water. That was, until I had it. Life is funny that way.
But it’s perfect too. Haven’t you noticed that you have to get clear on what you don’t want, before you can get clear on what you do?
And that means you have to actually try out the things you “think” you want before you can get to that place of clarity. Just sitting around strategizing doesn’t move you forward.
So none of it is a waste. It’s all part of your hero’s journey. Everything you’ve done is all part of the foundation for what you’ll be able to do next.