*Originally posted here at Simply Leap with Lauree Ostrofsky, as part of her Like You Mean It series. Thanks, Lauree!

Without a pre-flight checklist, a jump team, and a plan, what’s a Type-A, compulsive list-maker to do?

In less than 8 weeks, I will become a wife to my wonderful partner. About 10 weeks after that, we together will become parents to our first baby.

While these are the grandest leaps that either one of us has ever made, neither of us saw them coming four months ago.

Instead, we looked around us one day in early May and discovered that we had already leapt without recognizing it, and evolution already had us in its arms.

It would be a false revision of history to say that it was an elegant or peaceful realization. To be sure, there was panic, fear, disorientation, denial.

There was resistance because while we wanted to be parents someday, this was not how it was supposed to happen. It didn’t look at all like my daydreams of marriage, partnership, and ecstatically welcoming the news of a just-created life.

Instead, this leap into becoming a wife and mother at first felt like falling, without control, without bearing, without a grasp on anything solid or sure.

While I had taken leaps of faith before, I had to learn to leap all over again.

The first step toward transforming a surprise launch into a conscious leap was realizing that any change, no matter the level of transformation involved, is never a slip and fall into a deep abyss.

Instead, it’s a hop down at a time, day by day, moment by moment. Planning a wedding, evolving my work life, creating a home for a baby, nurturing my body through pregnancy, bonding with our unborn child, and preparing for the journey of childbirth – they’re all one small jump per day, tiny actions that are completely doable.

Then there’s rest.

After each tiny hop that composes our grand leap, there is the constant knowledge and faith that we are being held in a divine hammock larger than our lives and our ability to control them.

When we can rest in a hammock of grace, knowing that we’re being cared for; that life is evolving in precisely the ways that we need it to – even the furthest leap becomes tangible.

When I stopped trying to convince myself that each next step was safe and began to trust instead that it was, a recognizable way forward appeared.

Finally, just like an overburdened plane casting off heavy cargo to stay airborne, I realized that I’d been holding on to far too much baggage to land well.

I needed to leave behind old stories, old neuroses and habits, incomplete pasts and irrelevant fears, and time was short. It’s amazing to see how quickly we can burn through old clutter when there’s true necessity.

When leaping entails adopting a new identity – and how many leaps don’t? – there’s an inevitable process of grieving what’s been left behind.

The childless, pre-pregnancy me is gone forever. But with the grace of knowing change is one jump at a time, in the context of implicit safety and amid the continued work of burning off what no longer serves – it appears not as a death to be mourned, but as an expansion, a surprise leap that happened at precisely the right time.

Originally posted at the lovely Leah Piken Kolidas‘ Creative Every Day, June 14, 2011*

When we’re in the throes of metamorphosis – when change has taken over our body and whole selves — there’s a very real temptation to disconnect from the inevitable mess and chaos.

After all, birth is messy. It’s a very human experience: humbling, disorienting, sometimes sensory overload. (We’re not speaking exclusively of childbirth here; all creative births lie at the center of a similar labyrinth.)

But as tempting as it is to try to escape the intensity of metamorphosis, it’s much better to dive deep into it. When you meet the change and agree to walk with it for a while, you also open yourself to the wisdom waiting for you and deeper self-knowledge.

So how can you be your own best birth partner? How can you be present and fully conscious for the birth of your next “baby”?

Embrace curiosity and not-knowing.

*  Who are you being in this moment? (This is far more important than outcomes or decisions.)

*  What does this moment ask of you?

*  If you were courageous and you did know what to do, what would your posture look like? What’s the next think you would do?

*  How are you bringing your love to this moment?

*  What do you know for sure, in your bones?

*  What’s one small thing you can do right now?

Find your body. Come back to your breath. It’s a practice: you’ll come back to it over and over. Be easy, steady, and have compassion for yourself all the way through.

Worry effectively. Identify the worries that follow you. Name them, dialog with them. Are there ways to avoid the things you’re worried about? If not, how would you like to handle your most undesirable scenario? Who can you reach out to for help?

Find a rhythm and ritual that work for you, and stick with it until it doesn’t work anymore. Your rhythm is yours alone. Find the routines and rituals that nourish and sustain you through times of change, and promise yourself to do all you can to stick with it. Then, when your rhythm no longer serves, let it go.

You might have to do things you didn’t want to have to do. The wider the variety of possible scenarios in which you can envision yourself giving birth, the easier you’ll find agility and flexibility needed to change in the moment.

The intensity that it takes to get your creation out may be more than you anticipated. Plan for more, not less. When you’re giving birth to anything new and powerful, you’ll necessarily emerge a changed person. Understand ahead of time that your own rebirth can feel like a small death – of an identity, a perspective, old stories and no-longer relevant dreams or wants. If you anticipate the possibility of mourning along with the joy of a birth, you’ll be more prepared for the grace of newness.

This month will be cross-post central. I’m writing for DC Fit Week’s blog and am so thrilled to share my posts at home too. Here’s the skinny on DC Fit week, co-coordinated by the lovely and talented Lauree Ostrofsky of Simply Leap:

Get ready for a FREE week of fitness – March 21-25 – mentally, physically & financially! No cost to attend or sponsor, lots of workshops, classes, speakers, a fashion show, happy hours and more.

Committing and Recommitting to Self-care as a Business Sustaining Practice

Self-care is a practice of developing sensitivity and responsiveness to yourself and your own needs.

Your self-care is the sum of habits, boundaries, and attitudes that nourish and sustain your personal wellbeing. As a practice, we come back to it over and over, without expectation of mastery. It’s not something that you’ve ever achieved – in self-care, process trumps outcome.

You can bet that a practice of self-care is the only path to building a sustainable, nourishing business. Here’s why:

You are the only person who can care for your business the way it needs to be cared for in order to grow and flourish.

When it comes to the heart and soul of your business, only you can do the really important pieces: the creative work, directly serving clients, envisioning where your business will go next.

And you can only do the really important stuff well when you are well cared-for.

You are your business’s most valuable asset, and it’s your responsibility to nourish and sustain that asset.

Start by honoring the parts of your work that make you glow.

Respect your time by building efficient systems.

The bottom line

You will never work hard enough to “earn” your self-care. The rotating to-do lists probably won’t go away. So start where you are.

Take just 5 minutes to meet a thirst. Specifically name what feels clunky, oppressive, fuzzy. Then put some breathing room around the idealized version of whatever you are. Practice kindness towards yourself, because as much as you need your business to succeed, your business needs you.

It’s one of my most fundamental self-care rules: boundaries are effing critical.

Our boundaries – between self and others, between public and private, work and not-work – can be porous, fluid, dynamic.

We can continue to be curious and always-learning in the context of our boundaries. We can be open, receptive, willing, daring, courageous and still have a healthy respect for boundaries.

A commitment to healthy boundaries leads to structures rooted in self-love that help us take good care of ourselves on a day-to-day basis.

It doesn’t sound like I need a lot of convincing about boundaries. And yet.

Apparently I’ve still got a lot to learn.

The German Alps kicked my ass this week, and all because I forgot all about my boundaries. (Ahh, yes. Humility.)

A tiny bit of background: I learned to ski years ago in Pennsylvania. And this week for the first time I took a ski trip to the German Alps at Garmisch and Zugspitze.

You won’t be surprised to hear that in terms of skiing, Pennsylvania has nothing on the Alps. Savvy ski bunnies in Pennsylvania are put to shame in the Alps.  Trust me.

Even so, the first day found me confident, self-assured, easy-breezy and carefree. I wasn’t thinking about boring boundaries, I was going for fearless. We were in the Alps, for God’s sake. When in the Alps, do as the Alpinists. Everyone here pounds a few beers, hops nonchalantly into their boots, and whoosh – they’re gone. No fear. It was working out great.

It was the last run of the day and my brother wanted to go all the way down the mountain. Most of this run was doable, he said, but parts of it were “hard as shit.”

“Whatever,” says I. “I’m scared and tired, but let’s just go.”

“Hard as shit” indeed.  It took everything I had not to bawl when I looked down the hill.  Left, right, breathe, left, right, breathing, fighting panic, fighting to stay in control.

My brother and partner described what happened 10 minutes later as “epic.” I lost it completely. They heard me scream, turned to see me tumble, and apparently I kept on screaming as I fell.

It was the beginning of the end of dignity. For one thing, Alpinists never scream.

When I skidded to a stop, a young boy stood looking at me, lying spreadeagle on the snow.

“I’m ok,” I said, and he whooshed off.

When I finally got to my feet, my legs were shaking. This was all my brother’s fault. We should never have gone all the way down the mountain. It’s the end of our first day. This was the stupidest idea. My coordination is shot. We’re exhausted. It’s getting dark and it’s icy. This is way too steep for someone who hasn’t been skiing in at least five years. What the hell was he thinking?

And I wasn’t just pissed at my brother; the chorus of inner critics had their cue. “You asshole, what were you thinking? You’re not ready for this! Everyone else here has been on moguls since before they were weaned.”

All notions of competence were out the window. I was no longer safe.

That night I lay in bed hugely fearful of the next day, when I had to get back in the saddle and go again. Here I was, an ocean away on a fabulously romantic adventure, and I was scared shitless. And disappointed with myself, because up until the end, I was feeling so damn good. That’s not how you’re supposed to spend a vacation in the Alps. What a waste!

And my partner picked up on it, too. He said, “You’re acting like you do when you’ve been hurt.” I wasn’t hurt; I was scared. But as far as he was concerned, the outcome was no different.

Of course skiing, like anything else, is at least partly a mental game. The next day, still scared, I panicked more than was necessary. Even back on the “easier” runs, I was wobbly and unsure and so focused on just making it down alive that the love for what I was doing was diminished.

Can you see where this is going?

I didn’t really need to kick my own ass.

Had I taken the cue that “hard as shit” might not be appropriate for the end of my first day of Alpine skiing, this story might have ended differently.

I would have joined my lovely sister-in-law for one last run down the easier slope, a gorgeous ride down the ski lift to the bottom, and a hot mug of spiced wine.

I would have ended that day confident, proud, and eager to start again the next day. And I’m convinced that I would have done better, felt better, and had the wherewithal to be fully present had I not disregarded my own boundaries.

And I did it because I thought I should. I thought that’s what I needed to do to take full advantage of being there.

How often do we do this? And in how many different ways?

If we’re in a conscious practice of gentle pushing past our comfort zone, it can be occasionally tempting to throw it all to hell and hurtle oneself way beyond what we know in our heart is an actual boundary.

And when that leaves us crumpled, fearful and full of new self-doubt, it is not a practice borne of self-love.

There’s a difference, I think, between this and the healthy fear that we can acknowledge and move through. Healthy fear can be an opportunity to move a bit beyond where we are; to push through into something bigger and better. But carelessly disregarding boundaries does not accomplish these aims. To the contrary, it wears us out, makes us less than we could otherwise become.

Respecting my own boundaries means that I have the willingness and confidence to come back again; to push the comfort zone out a bit more; to have even more to give tomorrow. It means that in the long run I’m more effective, because I’m working with where I am right now.

So, what do you think? Where could you show a bit more love for healthy boundaries?

I had a really wonderful conversation with Michelle Ward, the When I Grow Up Coach, about what it means to feel compelled to do more than one thing.  I hope you’ll hop on over and eavesdrop on the call.

In the meantime, here’s a tapas-style rundown of what to do if squeezing all of your work and energy into just one box makes you want to scream.

Figure it out: What is the big picture of your professional life?

The things we do aren’t random. Taken together, the things that occupy your mind and your time say something really important about what you’re all about.

So what’s the central question that binds your work together? It could be a pursuit of order. Or healing, Or beauty. My big picture is about justice and self-determination. (All of my jobs have been, in one way or another, about offering compassionate, smart companionship to women in a way that puts them in the driver’s seat of their lives and wellbeing.)

Standard self-care rules apply.

Even Renaissance souls need a bit of lovin’.  If you’re working more than one gig,  boundaries are your friend now more than ever.  If you don’t know where they are, find them. Feel for them: what feels better, what feels worse? When does it feel good to power through and get work done, and when does your fallible human body need you to stop and recharge?

Then build your structure with respect to those boundaries. Let your days be a reflection of the work and play that sustains you. Take breaks. Take vacations. Keep your computer off on Sundays.

And remember your humility. You’re one person – a talented, savvy, hardworking person, yes, but one unfortunately lacking superhuman abilities.  It’s really OK to need regular sleep, good food, a quiet space for 10 minutes of meditation each day, and regular pee breaks. It’s really OK to delegate tasks that leave you in tears of frustration. It’s really OK to dedicate a portion of your income to activities that nourish and sustain your creativity. Come to think of it, it’s more than OK. It’s super important.

A word about logistics

If you’re called to more than one line of work: whether you’re an attorney/painter, writer/accountant, craftsperson/dancer, or VA/doula, there are a few practical pieces that make a Renaissance life easier.

• It would be awesome if at least one of your jobs or projects offered you flexible times.

It would be even awesomer if one of them offered some firm deadlines. Two sets of rigid deadlines and daily schedules can be impossible to integrate. Two loosey-goosey schedules can be tricky to navigate if you’re not really Type A about time management. Try to build a structure with few deadlines and some flexibility.

• Don’t make it a secret.

Unless there’s some compelling reason not to reveal your slash-hood, put it out there. Allow people to see the real you; to see the big picture of what you’re all about. And realistically, if there’s ever a conflict between the two worlds and you have to peacefully extricate yourself from being two places at once (see above on humility if, like me, you lack superhuman abilities), no one will be surprised.

• Experiment with keeping your time management systems for all of your gigs in one place.

Keep separate calendars in Google or iCal, but be sure to connect them so you don’t accidentally overbook one job with another. And remember, color-coding is always your friend! If your client appointments from Gig A are blue in your calendar, set up a blue label for email correspondence with them too. Find a way to make life easy.

So many of us here are leading double lives: between work and family, between a handful of jobs, between the demands of an internet-based business and everything else.

I too am leading a double life. I’m a birth doula.

I work with the Hudson Perinatal Consortium as a community doula. The program is funded by the state of New Jersey in part because doulas and continuous labor support have been shown time and again to improve birth outcomes (i.e., shorter labors with fewer complications and interventions and healthier babies) while cutting health care costs. Many women also find that doula support improves birth satisfaction and helps create empowering, positive memories of the labor and birth experience.

What’s a doula?

According to DONA, one of several national doula certifying organizations:

The word “doula” comes from the ancient Greek meaning “a woman who serves” and is now used to refer to a trained and experienced professional who provides continuous physical, emotional and informational support to the mother before, during and just after birth; or who provides emotional and practical support during the postpartum period.

A Doula:

• Recognizes birth as a key experience the mother will remember all her life
• Understands the physiology of birth and the emotional needs of a woman in labor
• Assists the woman in preparing for and carrying out her plans for birth
• Stays with the woman throughout the labor
• Provides emotional support, physical comfort measures and an objective viewpoint, as well as helping the woman get the information she needs to make informed decision
• Facilitates communication between the laboring woman, her partner and her clinical care providers
• Perceives her role as nurturing and protecting the woman’s memory of the birth experience
• Allows the woman’s partner to participate at his/her comfort level

After working in maternity care and childbirth advocacy for years, I now want to see the direct impact of my work improving another woman’s life.  And I’m very specific about the “woman’s life” piece.  Many childbirth advocates come to their work specifically aiming to improve infant care. I come to this work primarily driven to support women’s work, women’s reproductive choices, and ultimately women’s empowerment.

So too with my approach to virtual assistance.

The question I get all the time

“What’s the connection?”

It’s a fair question. Interestingly, none of the women business owners I work with as a VA have kids. (I suppose I should say that none have kids yet. My VA clients’ future childbearing plans aren’t part of my Get-to-Know-You call).  Together we think and talk about mailing lists, billing schedules, new webpages and ways to automate administrative tasks.

When I’m with my doula clients, we talk about comfort measures to get through the next surge and breathing the baby down. We talk about breastfeeding, oxytocin levels to promote mother-baby attachment, and Mother-friendly and Baby-friendly hospitals in the area.

Both types of conversations are about nurturing something you love into fruition, and strategizing like hell to make the process transformative and empowering. Both conversations require a commitment to stress reduction and taking good care of oneself.

And look, neither a doula nor a VA is the star of the show.  We do the behind-the-scenes work: we clean up databases, run errands, focus on what will make our client look and feel good.  We are the support structures that make the process more enjoyable, more fulfilling. Less stressful.  Healthier. And sure, life isn’t perfect; I’m not perfect; childbirth isn’t perfect. But it can be better.

Moms and business owners both experience shifts in their identity when life stretches to accommodate this big new piece. It can be stressful, frustrating, frightening, and overwhelming.

Doulas and VAs both offer resources, helpful pieces of information, support systems, advice and I’ve-been-there-before guidance and companionship. Personally, I thrive on opportunities to share what I’ve got in useful ways.

And, bonus, being a doula makes me a better VA. It helps me listen, empathize, communicate, lead compassionately and be present even when the shit hits the fan. It teaches me about the value of offering a calming presence and the importance of making sure my needs are met before I can offer support to others.

Likewise, being a VA makes me a better doula. It teaches me to problem-solve in creative ways, to use technology, online resources and online networking to get my clients what they need. It teaches me that my doula business is a business and therefore requires proper caretaking to grow and thrive.

What we do & who we are

Some folks are surprised when they hear that I’ve never experienced childbirth myself.  Right now I’m wrestling with my own ambivalences about parenting, even as I whole-heartedly support women in the process of becoming a parent themselves.

But is that so surprising? My VA clients are coaches, attorneys, and teachers. I don’t need to be a coach, attorney, or teacher in order to effectively help them with their work.  Similarly, when a client is having intense, painful surges, what matters is whether a doula can support her through them until her baby is in her arms, not whether she has a personal memory of what that experience is like.

So, ok, we’re all leading double lives. And maybe in the end, the mixing and mingling of those lives and roles ultimately makes us more whole people.

Acknowledging and appreciating these parallels transformed the way I think about my big picture. It makes me feel more confident, more in touch with myself.

(By the way, I have Lauree Ostrofsky to thank for gentle nudges and insightful questions that led me to this inquiry. Go find Lauree. She’s amazing.)

What double lives are you leading?

…while Great Works
of the traditional sort
are marvels of time and space,
life offers
far more opportunities
for the sharing of peanuts.

-excerpted from Colleen Wainwright’s poem “Dying to be born,” published in What is Dying to be Born?, Lianne Raymond

I love using self-care time to focus on long-term visioning.

(I call this “biz-care” when the visioning = daydreaming about how I want to nourish and grow my business.)

Occasionally that long-term visioning takes the form of clipping and collaging.

I love the process, but inevitably I don’t know what to do with old pieces. After all, a collage represents your hopes, dreams, and who you want to become. It’s hard to throw that away, even if they’re ages old and don’t warrant prime real estate space anymore.

Enter: hanging file collages.

The small layout makes it great for a quick afternoon collaging break. Plus, they’re super easy to hang on a cork board (two pushpins under the white nubbins), easy to swap out when you need a lift or a theme change, super easy to fold and file when they’re retired.

Easy peasy.

Just a quick note that this month I’m hanging out with the gals on Spring to take part in a month-long conversation about self-care.

I think quite a bit about self-care and how to support others’ self-care, and I’m coming to a deep-seated belief that no one masters it; we simply work towards a fuller consciousness and responsiveness to ourselves and our needs.

Check out my first guest video post on the 4 juicy bits of self care, and the second piece, a bit of self-care tough love.

A popular sentiment among some online circles these days is that the pursuit of balance is blasé.

I wrote about this a while ago. At that point, delicacy seemed the best way to go.

Yeah, sure, I thought, an interesting idea.

But would you know, it’s taken off?

I’m so done with the balance bashing.

In fact, I’m about to drop the F bomb. Repeatedly.

Recently I’ve  been reading laments over the human body’s failure thus far to evolve beyond needing sleep. (Seriously!) Without that pesky time waster, the thinking goes, we could be doing so much more work.

Because who needs a sense of self outside of wage earning activities? Who needs a social life? That’s for losers who obviously aren’t as dedicated or passionate about their work as The Rest of Us.

Apparently the desire for time away from work, interests in other pursuits and due time and attention to bodily needs is not compatible with success in business.

Nope, the thinking goes, seeking balance is lame, and moot, and irreconcilable with the pursuit of work that you love; work that burns in the pit of your passionate belly.

Fuck balance, or so the sentiment goes.

<Ahem> No, seriously, AHEM!

No one ever said that starting or running a business would be easy.

It’s a lot of work. A hell of a lot of work, in fact.

Some folks are totally capable of condensing that work into a focused, frenzied bubble that excludes everything else. Especially if there’s an opportunity afterwards to completely, totally unplug and fully recharge, leaving it all behind and escaping completely. Work hard, play hard, right?

But for me and my clients, a binary life is not an option.

Look, there’s a central question here that has everything to do with the dividing line, a boundary, between where your work stops and where you begin. That line exists when you close your laptop and decide to stop taking calls at a certain time everyday.  It exists when you decide that maintaining your friendships and physical wellbeing is important enough to coexist along with personal investments in business.

That boundary – porous and permeable though it may be – is necessary. That boundary is made up of self-care, and deciding that self-care is important is a vote for balance. No matter how much we love what we do.

So if checking out completely for however long it takes to recuperate from alienation from self and nourishment isn’t an option for many of us, then clearly erasing that boundary between self and work is NOT A GOOD IDEA.

Why?

Because it’s not fucking sustainable.

And because no matter how much you love your clients, the product you’re developing, or the service you’re about to launch, when you sacrifice everything that keeps you whole in order to give it life, eventually you will burn the hell out. You will resent it.

And does that mean that you just didn’t love your work enough?

Hell, no.

Does that mean that you just weren’t willing to give what it takes (or what some folks believe it takes) to succeed?

Hell, no.

Isn’t this the same logic that motivated so many of us to opt out of the traditional workforce in the first place to pursue something more… us? Something that reflected who we are?

Most of the fabulous, creative entrepreneurs I know decided to follow their hearts with their work in respectful homage of a sense of self.

And now that’s the work to which we offer ourselves up in sacrifice on the alter of productivity?

For fuck’s sake.

I’m convinced that work and not-work exist, as most things do, along a spectrum. At one end is work that you don’t give a shit about, a black hole of time and energy that isn’t meaningful in the long run, and you do it because you have to in order to survive.

That’s one extreme.

At the other extreme (which comes perilously close to full circle) time, energy, social life, and sense of self outside of income-generating activities collectively take a back seat to… work. Sound familiar?

I’d wager balance is even more important if we love what we do, because only then do we sustainably have anything to give to it; only then do we have the resources to embody that work and purpose. And when we love what we do, having those things to offer matters profoundly.

You cannot source and source and source your energy and creativity without stopping to refill the nutritious soil from which new ideas poke their tender little sprout heads.

It is not possible. The world is full of limited and finite resources, and we creative entrepreneurs are not exempt from this truth.  Oil, water, Social Security, youth, endangered species, ancient hardwood forests, coal, ozone, and YOU, homeslice.

When they’re gone, they’re gone. No matter how much of ourselves we invest in our business or how closely our business is tailored to our unique gifts and passions, we are not unconditionally, effortlessly renewable.

Once upon a time…

…a huge red golf umbrella lived a quiet life for many years in the corner of a mailing supplies closet of a small office.

No one thought about it; no one used it. No one remembered where it came from, or whose it was, or why a mystery bank, whose logo was screenprinted on the top, had given it to someone in that office. It lived nestled between shipping tubes, a broken 13″ TV with a VHS tape inextricably lodged inside, and a Christmas wreath that had been similarly exiled into the deep nether-corners of the closet.

That umbrella represented, to me, useless crappy clutter.

I was tasked with clearing out the closet and keeping only what was essential. A big dumb red umbrella, embarrassingly large for carrying down the sidewalks in Manhattan, was not essential.

(This isn’t ONLY about looks. In Manhattan, you share sidewalks with, um, people. Walking is a primary means of getting around in the city because cars are simultaneously a luxury and inconvenience, so when the weather is ugly there’s no brief dash from the office to the car. Nope, there’s just walking through the rain. And when it rains not only is the sidewalk’s width contested territory; with so many umbrellas, vertical space is now also at a premium. New codes of etiquette govern the squeezing by, lifting over, and appropriate closings of umbrellas around you to accommodate others and their umbrellas. You get the picture.)

The big dumb umbrella clearly wouldn’t do for any commute home; hello, it was big, and dumb, and would probably poke peoples’ eyes out and I’d probably get yelled at by other angry citydwellers for being so damn inconsiderate.

I didn’t want anything to do with it. Plus it was dusty. And ick. Just ick.

Ok.

Today was kind of a crap day. Not terrible, just crappy.

I’d been cooped up for way too many hours. Alone. I’d eaten only a bagel and some potatoes all day. And the weather reports said cold, so I dutifully put on a sweater this morning, but it wasn’t cold, it was just humid and rainy and gross. And my commute involves walking a mile and a half each way with a train ride in the middle. (Yes, uphill both ways whilst fighting saber-toothed tigers with only your bare hands. Commuting to New Jersey is that bad.) Plus, I had to carry home something awkwardly bulky. None of this was at all appealing. I was grouchy.

Right before I left the office, I saw the big, stupid, clumsy, dumb red bank umbrella leaning against a desk.

And, I have to tell you, a little voice in my head said, “Oh. That makes sense.”

It was late enough in the evening that many commuters were already gone, and the sidewalks and trains weren’t going to be as crowded. And the stupid bigness meant that it would shelter me, the big bulky thing I was carrying, and my purse that sticks out from behind my left arm.

Oh. Something I loathed for its apparent uselessness suddenly transformed into exactly the thing that I needed exactly when I needed it.

Isn’t that interesting, I thought as I plodded my way back to New Jersey.

Relevance, please?

How many other times has this happened? How many times have I completely failed to understand the value of something until I was in a moment that required precisely that thing?

And ok, forget things. How easy is it to take for granted:

• Unique skills or inclinations toward a craft.
• Someone’s piece of advice that got lodged in the back of your mind and annoyed the hell out of you until one day it slid into focus.
• The sum of your experiences, totally foggy and uninterpretable until one day you are the exact recipe personified to solve a particular problem.

Picture Harry Potter’s Room of Requirement – but already with form, waiting for the structure and the need to appear.

And with that perspective, the only response that feels appropriate is humble gratitude.

So, what do you think? Have you ever taken something for granted that ended up serving you in a surprising way?