Finding Your Radical Zone
A dear friend was over and we were talking about life talk and I was telling her the other night as I was facilitating a workshop in race and reconciliation, I had a real moment of divine clarity – I was in my zone. I was doing what I was made to do. After the very first workshop that I offered on parenting through anti-racism, my friend, a spunky and successful business woman told me that I fit this calling well. And I had to agree with her. I’m a natural on discussing this highly charged issue in a nonjudgmental manner – all roads that led me here converged in this knowing.
My friend was telling me of her work in Ghana, with young girls, mentoring them either into entrepreneurship or into school degrees. She said she really felt that she was operating in her zone when she was doing that work.
I’ve felt the same way in writing my book, The Elephant in the Playground, which is now being shopped around for an agent and a publisher. After years of being nudged and pushed in the direction of a book, the book nudged and pushed me to write it. As all things in life, the process is organic and cannot be rushed into a time table or agenda. Again, I entered the zone when I wrote it because it came from within me, not outside of me.
There are so many radical ways to be in this life. I have spent half a century trying to fit into other people’s notion of work and though the work has had its moments, more often than not it has left me hungry for the possibility of more. Always I hungered to find my place to be me. Give me a place to stand, and I will move the earth – Aeschylus said this so many moons ago and yet it still remains my creed.
Armed with this flow, I won’t put any demands on 2016, instead I am lightening my load as I enter the new year to be able to stay in my zone and do the work that is being born within me. I will give birth to these projects in their own time.
Dear readers, if you were with me in Spain, in 2010, when I was shaken by the dream of the bridge and the tempest. My reaction then was to turn around and head back to safety and comfort. So you’ll recognize my growth. In five years, I’ve come to have a different perspective of that situation. Now, I’m ready to take the leap into unknown waters.