SAY YES
If you are anything like me ( and God help you if you are) you spend a good portion of your time trying to solve the puzzle of existence. I'm not speaking of the meaning of life because duh, so easy...I mean how to get along day to day, to live meaningfully, to steer yourself back on track when fate has placed you in a bumper car death match.
If you are of a certain generation you will recall the board game LIFE where you got a little car to drive around the board and placed pink and blue plastic pins inside to indicate spouses and children. Pretty telling that people were represented by pinheads in that game. It was a miserable representation of existence that had fate handing out good and bad fortune and winning the game was an approximation of a suburban wet dream: marriage, job, children, house. In that game you had no control and following the status quo meant victory. But in reality we do have control and far too much of it. It is up to us every day how to react to the situations around us and that ultimately determines our final outcome. Misfortune happens but it is our choices that truly matter. And so to the subject of this particular post- saying yes.
Another lifetime ago when I was stranded for a brief time in a far away land called Oklahoma, I embarked on a new career as a realtor. It was out of necessity and failure was not an option. I had a child to support and still needed a flexible schedule to accommodate him. I had a husband with a checkered employment past who had been fired from every job he had ever had and the move to his home state was precipitated by his latest failure. I had dabbled in sales before but this time was different. I threw myself into this new enterprise with such energy and conviction that for that magical interval of five years I achieved every goal I set myself and beyond. I became imbued with good fortune; luck followed me everywhere like some vagrant fairy godmother desperate to dole out prizes. I went from someone who had never won a game of chance in her life to one who won anything she entered. I took advantage of every opportunity that was offered. I showed up and great stuff happened. At the beginning of my career as a realtor, I was invited to a free seminar hosted by a mortgage company. Of course, I went. There was a raffle and guess who won? The prize was the greatest gift I could have been given. It was an expensive set of CDs with lectures from the most successful realtors around the country. I got inside tips and tricks from people at the top of the field; information it had taken years for them to figure out or develop. I would listen in my car over and over again and I tried just about every tip I learned. One of the tips that resonated then and still does was by a realtor and coach who told a story of being invited to a wedding by someone he didn't know that well and deciding not to go. Several years passed and the realtor ended up in a business enterprise with that person. They became very close friends and the realtor regretted terribly that he hadn't bothered to attend that wedding when he hadn't known his friend that well, that he had missed sharing that special day. That realtor/coach made it his motto to say yes- to just go when opportunity beckoned. I'm not talking about over promising or doing things you really don't want to do. I'm speaking of breaking inertia, taking a chance, embracing experience. You don't know who you may run into at that function, what prize may be raffled off. It could be just the thing to bump you back on track. But you won't know unless you go.
