The Setup

My adventure began just over two weeks ago. Life was normal, if you could call being unemployed for nearly five months normal. I had no real direction post-university, making it that much harder to find work in a city that is having a serious bout of job unavailability. All the doors seemed to be closing and I knew I had to figure something out soon. Returning to school was looking more and more like the way to go. Get more credentials and maybe the job market will improve by the time I'm done. The problem is, I don’t know what to go back to school for. I am interested in so many things: architecture, graphic design, editing, writing, hell, even accounting doesn’t sound terrible to me. In any case, I was feeling pulled in several directions because I had no direction. I left my job at the library in December because I knew it was time to move on. I knew if I stayed, it would be nearly impossible to leave. I enjoyed my job, I loved the people I worked with, but I knew I wanted more for my life and would not motivate myself to find a better job unless I left myself with no other choice. Other than that, my future was wide open. 

Somewhere between there and here, I stopped listening to myself. I stopped listening to that voice that had been pointing the way before. So I started to try to listen, at the very least to narrow down my options in regards to further education. I spent an afternoon with my Bible and a pot of tea at Murchie’s and ruled out graphic design. Anything that might kill my creativity due to deadlines and business is just not an option at this point. 

That still left things way too open. Enter Donald Miller and some serious thought and a bit of prayer. My mom will probably now have a love/hate relationship with her favourite author because he helped inspire my rather spontaneous adventure. I started reading A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller about maybe a week before all of this fell into place. It’s all about stories. How to write a good one, and how life is similar to stories in that we can live good stories or bad stories. When you look at your life, is it an interesting story? The point at which I’ve most recently left off is about how characters (us) have to do something to live an interesting story. They have to overcome something. Fear keeps us from living good stories. Risk comes with fear. I have been lacking risks in my life lately. My life has become a terribly uninteresting story. I am setting out to change that.