Be Mindful of Unopened Doors.

It’s 11:35 p.m., and I had no intention of writing this. But as it usually goes in my life, what I intend and what actually happens are two different things. Or are they?

A couple of months ago, some very good friends invited me out to go to dinner and salsa dancing. Although they, husband and wife, have three kids, they try to make it a point to have a night out sans kids every once in a while. I don’t go salsa dancing very often now. I did it a lot for years in my early to late 20’s. But that night, a guy asked, “Would you like to dance?”

I said, “Ok.” As he led me and turned me, I beamed inside which emanated through my ear to ear smile and gyrating hips. He was a great dancer, and he glided me across the floor in a way that I hadn’t been in a long time. At the end of the night, I turned to my friends and said, “That guy is a really good dancer, and I just want to get his information so that I can dance with him again.”

My friend replied, “You should.”

So I did.

The next Friday we agreed to meet again to dance. By the end of the night I was a sweaty mess and my feet were killing me. He kindly linked his arm with mine and helped me hobble like an old man to my car. It was not attractive.

When I got home, I looked at one of my feet and saw a large blister on the ball. I knew I had to buy proper dance shoes. So I bought a pair of black open toed dance shoes with a three-inch heel. I knew I needed support on the balls of my feet, so I bought some adhesive Dr. Scholl’s pads. I was ready to kill the dance floor.

The next time I went dancing with him, my feet were still killing me by the end of the night, and I didn’t understand why. Until I changed into my flats at the table and realized that neither shoe had the pads in them. I found one laying on the floor near the table, but the other one was lost. So I went to the dance floor to look for it. It was late on a Tuesday night, so there weren’t too many people on the floor. No luck.  I checked the bathroom, and it wasn’t there either. I was annoyed thinking that I was going to have to buy another pair as they were only sold in pairs. When I got home I saw it laying on the carpet in front of my bed. “The little bastard never even made it out of the house!” I explained to my mother and brother over lunch. They lost it hearing this.

My brother said, “Didn’t you feel that is was missing when you were walking out of the house?”

“No because I’m not supposed to walk on the street with these shoes, so I just brought them with me to change into.” I didn’t notice it at the club either until the end of the night.

He said, “The next time you feel it come out, you should tell him to dip you and then come back up with it in between your teeth.”

I was cracking up. My mother was laughing so hard. So hard that her face was frozen and the laughter was silent.

I digress, but that was worth sharing. Back to the story. I began salsa dancing every week with him or with friends and really got into it again. I was further motivated because I wanted to lose weight as well.

While I wasn’t dancing, I was still looking for a job and trying to make the most of my time off. I saw Taproot Foundation as I browsing. I had forgotten I had done some pro bono work for them a few years ago, so I started to look at their site to see what projects were available. I saw a project requiring a Marketing Planner for an organization that provided education and healthcare to individuals in need. I had to write a paragraph as to why I was a good fit for the project. It was easy for me. I had wanted to be involved in bettering people’s lives in some way. My father had grown up poor and worked hard to put himself through school and become a neurosurgeon. He had instilled in me the importance of education throughout my life. So this opportunity was a perfect fit. At least from my standpoint.

Shortly thereafter, the client had scheduled an interview with me. I reiterated why I was interested and happened to mention that I had recently launched a website and started a blog. One of the co-founders checked out my site while we were on the phone. He read “Determine Your Purpose”. He said, “You should check out a book called Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. We are actually reading it right now to help us with this organization.”

“Thanks for the recommendation. I will check it out.”

The call went really well, and the client wanted to move forward.

Less than twenty minutes after the call, my friend texted me. “Hi. I am reading this book and thought you might like it too. I found it in the library.” Then she sent a picture of a book. My eyes widened and my mouth fell open. The picture was of the book Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. I couldn’t believe it. Of all of the books in the world, she sent me that one. I ordered it immediately off of Amazon.

I began to read the book, and I liked it. One of the exercises required me to track what I did during a day and to rate my level of engagement and energy. I was supposed to do this for three weeks, but I knew most of my days were spent doing the same things, so I just did it for a day. Then I was instructed to mind map one activity where I was really engaged, one where I was really energized, and one in which I was in a state of flow. A mind map has a word in the middle. Then you connect other words you think of from that center word and then think of other words from the first tier of words and connect them until you have multiple tiers of words. I chose writing as my engaged activity, salsa dancing as my energizing activity, and listening to music as my flow activity. I did my best to mind map each one of them as quickly as possible. Then I was instructed to take three disparate words from the outer ring of one of my mind maps and try to come up with a possible job description and a sketch of it. I did this exercise for each map. On one of the maps, I chose writing, practice, and new clothes and came up with a writer on salsa practice and salsa style. I drew a stick figure girl with a short flowy dance skirt. I thought, How can this be a job? This is silly.

I read on. The authors said, “You might be thinking, “This is terrific! There are some really cool ideas here I can definitely use! If so, that’s great– but it’s not guaranteed and it’s not typical.

Or. . .you might have completed this and are now saying to yourself, “Well, that was silly! What the heck is the point of coming up with all these random nonsense ideas?” I laughed. “The whole point was to defer judgement and quiet your internal problem-finding critic.” They recommended coming back to the work to see if you could see it in a different light. I hadn’t tried that yet.

In the meantime, I wanted to continue salsa dancing more regularly, but my friend didn’t have time.  So I googled to see if I could find a salsa partner or write an ad to find one. I wrote an ad on www.dancepartner.com. Then I posted on Facebook that I was looking for one. I heard nothing from both sites all day. I had done this exercise years ago, which was fruitless then as well. I decided not to let not finding a partner hold me back, so I researched classes at a dance studio close to my house. I was worried that the classes wouldn’t be challenging enough, and I was curious to know what intermediate really meant.  At 10:45 p.m., I was driving home and I was about to pass the studio, but I saw that the lights were still on, so I pulled into the parking lot. It was past open hours, but I saw the instructors standing around and the door was unlocked so I walked in anyway. They introduced themselves, and I found out a new set of salsa classes was starting in a week and a half. The owner told me I could drop in Thursday to try out a class.

I came home and texted my friend that I was excited that I was going to try out the class. I explained that I had driven by that studio a thousand times. I was curious about it when I would see it, but would forget about looking into it.

I texted her, “Be mindful of unopened doors. They lead to other opportunities.”

She told me she liked my quote.

I logged into Facebook just before 11:30 p.m. to scan the latest posts. I saw this.

 

 

 

 

I couldn’t believe my eyes! I knew then that this was my next post. And here I am writing about designing my life and salsa dancing!