Look, I'm a high school teacher. So, I thought it was just any other day in the classroom with students. I didn’t realize I was about to be reminded of one of the most valuable lessons for living an extraordinary life.
Due to COVID, we hadn't had many visitors in the class. Students were still getting settled back into the traditional academic setting, so hearing wisdom from Brenda, an Indigenous leader, actually had my early 1st-period students sitting up and paying attention.
Brenda told her story about not taking the straight, easy path to success. In fact, there is no such thing as an easy path. The theme she echoed repeatedly was that we, young and old alike, need to learn how to fall in love with ourselves. We need to learn how to fall in love with our stories. We NEED. To LOVE. OURSELVES.
As I listened to her tell her story, I understood that her journey, like many of my favorite role models and my own, was full of missteps and “wrong” turns, as well as low points and high points.
I fell in love with life all over again when I remembered that we get to choose to love ourselves. I get to choose to love my story—every messy, beautiful, ugly, snarled, twisty, confusing, glorious, broken, perfect part.
I could never have gotten here without the bumps in my story, and I won’t get to the next step—whatever marvelous place that will be—without my past. I am ridiculously in love with this process of being in love with life.
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