The translation of transition.

This past week, I met Jen, co-founder of wandersnap.co, a brilliant site that connects travellers with pro or semi-pro photographers in their vacation spots. Their slogan is #fcktheselfie, and are helping to capture vacation moments from the lens of a qualified, high-quality professional. 

I was lucky enough to cross paths with Jen briefly during a photography session provided by Hubud, a beautiful co-working space in the heart of Ubud, Bali. It’s an incredibly special place, Hubud, that attracts so many inspiring entrepreneurs, and like-minded people who are more than travellers or adventure seekers - they are life-designers, rebels, and game-changers, and I am super thankful for the time I spent there. 

So as mentioned, I met Jen briefly in this photo walk along - I told her that I was looking to create a new business, but that I had no idea what it was going to be. That I was learning about all different kinds of online businesses, and was trying bits + pieces of a bunch of them, but had no idea where anything would stick. 

Without skipping a beat, she had the best analogy prepped and ready to go, and while I will most certainly butcher it, it went something along the lines of this:  

Sometimes during a time of change/transition, we can see the big picture in terms of  what we want to get out of something. In my case that meant: location freedom, financial abundance, creative work, exciting new challenges, and maybe a thing or two about love (but that’s a whole other  post). She went on to say that  all of our experiences, everything we learn, anything that sets us a new challenge, or sparks creativity is a dot on the page. Then just like the paintings and colouring pages we worked on as kids, each dot connects to paint the big picture. That when looking back on it, the picture and each of their corresponding dots are so clear as to what they create, even though during the process it seems like we’re drawing the entire animal kingdom until we find our elephant, owl, or whatever the f*ck your spirit animal is. 

There is so much pressure today, to be and have everything right away. The space in between the wanting and the having can feel like a lack. Stay there long enough and you can develop a full-fledged scarcity mindset, where nothing is enough, you consistently miss the beauty of the present moment, and inevitably end up living for something that may never come, or if it does come, it won’t be what you thought it was. You’ll realize that you missed the point. Say the cliché with me: 

Life is about the journey, not the destination. 

My cousin, along with my dog and I were out for a walk one stormy winter night in our Ottawa borough. With black parkas, hoods up to block the blowing snow, we were stopped at an intersection waiting to cross 4 lanes of traffic. We see the walk signal, put our heads down and start to cross the street. Just as we were half way across the road I heard my cousin let out a scream, and before I could even blink to see what happened to her a massive pick-up truck passed right in front of my face, nipping my nose as it blasted past us at full speed. We stood in the middle of the street in complete shock and stared at each other. The driver had been turning left and didn’t notice us crossing the street. We were a literal inch away from being crushed by this truck… just out for our weekly stroll and catch-up session. 

All to say, our futures are not guaranteed, we are promised nothing. Life is short, and now is here - enjoy it. Be IN it. Breathe it in, love it all: the good + bad, nothing is forever, learn from it all. Each moment, experience, encounter is a dot on the shape-shifting bigger picture that inevitably makes up the pieces of your life. 

So go out, and make a dot, and have Faith. Trust in something bigger than yourself - believe that the reason you decide to do anything or try something new in the first place, was to lead you to somewhere more beautiful than you were imagining in the first place. 

There are times that are hard. There are times where my brain is racing in a thousand different directions. When the expectations I place on myself creep in and I feel behind, lost, or like giving up. (Dear God, so many freaking times.) But let’s remember that nothing is wasted because we are just colouring in one dot at a time, connecting us along the way to seeing the full picture. So I thought I wanted to learn photography and went to learn more about it, met Jen, got this gem of advice, wrote this article. 

Our job is not to figure out the how, only the why. 

Did I know it would look like this? Absolutely not. Though looking back, I see how everything I have learned has lead here. Do I know what The Get Good will become in the future? Definitely no. But I’m excited to keep plotting dots and making lines: learning & growing with each bridge. And ultimately I think that is the most beautiful thing of all - when we can set out in a direction with no clear picture, but a feeling. If we can feel the life we want: smell it, taste it, touch it - then it can appear in the way it was always organically meant to be - without labels and expectations that were prefabricated in our minds of what success, or happiness, or fulfillment looked like, and give to us instead how it should feel. 

So build. First your inner trust. Build your relationship with yourself like you would a new lover. With kindness, excitement, forgiveness, gratitude, lust, and that so-so good feverish love. Future You deserves it. Build the skills that interest you, without expectation. Elizabeth Gilbert talks about her writing as being her creative outlet, but that she never placed the expectation upon it to support her finncially, because it didn’t deserve that. Support yourself, and make that hustle the investment into the future you that you are building unknowingly. 

Because one day, you will wake up with the dots  connected, the picture clear. It will be more beautiful than anything you could have ever imagined, and you will know with 100% certainty that you didn't know anything with 100% certainty, except wanting to feel exactly the way you do, and that there is nothing to change from the past, present, or future. 

So here’s to colouring dots.

All the love to all of you, 

MK