Years later she and my dad dropped me off at college and while I couldn't believe they were actually going to leave me there and I cried all the way through my first dinner in the dining hall, they knew I was ready and once again would find my way and be all right. (My mom cried the whole way home Dad later confessed when he heard my dining hall story.)
When my dad walked me down the aisle, I remember feeling shaky and nervous inside, but he knew that together, my new husband and I were ready and would have to navigate our own way through the ins and outs of marriage. He couldn't do it for me; he could only take me so far and then he had to let go.
When the nurse in the labor and delivery wing didn't even try to stop us and watched as my husband and I took our three-day-old son out of the safety of the hospital and into the precariousness of world, she knew that even though we probably weren't ready, we would figure it out as we went through our days with no sleep and a lot of dirty laundry to do. She knew she couldn't come with us, and I'm sure she was happy about that. (I wasn't. I would have paid her good money to come live with us for a while.)
And now our 15 Habits of Great Writers challenge has come to an end, and it's as if Jeff has taken all of us by our collective writers' and artists' hands and walked us to the edge of the cliff and told us, "You know what you need to do. Now go do it. And you need to jump off this cliff to make it happen."
Gulp.
Thanks, but I'd rather sit on the edge where it feels safe.
On the other hand, if I never jump, I'll never know what it's like to fly on my own.
Jeff did for us what all great leaders and teachers do. They show us the way, but make us do the work.
For it is, after all, our work. It's our art, our writing, our creating, our story of who we were meant to be.
No one can do it for us, but we can do it for ourselves. In fact, we must.
So let's jump on three, shall we?
1, 2, 3.......................................................................
Leave a comment and tell me what that jump looks like for you. Will you be doing something now that you weren't doing before the challenge?
For me, I'll be writing daily.
You?
OH you ... I haven't started the end of the process yet. For some reason my mind is a blur and yes we are done... finished and what shall we do now? WRITE. Daily or at least a few times a week, encourage, comment, put ourselves out there and do something. That is better than doing nothing right?
ReplyDeleteYou better believe it! Write, write and write some more. After all, you are a writer, just like I am.
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