Email Excerpts: The Astronaut & The Artist
I have found, lately, that my head is so full of thoughts and ideas that I often have a hard time whittling it down to one concept. As I start to embrace my personality more fully, I find that one of the strengths that’s on fire right now is finding connection, often between things that wouldn’t seem logical – an analogy of inner thoughts as mosquitoes, or artists as trees, or granite as courage. Words and theories jumble together in a mess of run on sentence-thoughts.
As an extrovert, I tend to think externally; through conversation or by writing until my brain feels clearer. Often, my saintly husband listens to my run on sentence-thoughts until they start to become well-formed paragraphs. Or, as has been the most recent trend, I will throw all these thoughts in an email to Greg and see what emerges; something akin to the spaghetti on the wall test.
In honor of this new trend, I wanted to share some recent excerpts with you from these email conversations, to give you a sense of the deep and brave exploration I’ve been embarking on lately. The content below is taken from an email chain entitled Childhood Revelations.
On the way into work this morning I was listening to Tim Ferriss’ podcast interview with Caroline Paul, author of “Gutsy Girl“. It’s super fascinating. She was the first female San Francisco Fire Fighter and was talking about her journey toward that career. Right as I was turning off of 395, she said that she never imagined that she’d be a firefighter, but knew she couldn’t do an office job. It got me remembering what I wanted to be when I grew up:
- Astronaut
- Professional Singer
Right? So. I’ve thought about this several times before – especially the strange clash of wanting to be an astronaut and a singer simultaneously. (You’re going to laugh at this part. There was a brief period in High School where I was literally torn between paths and related the N’Sync album to the pop star path and the Savage Garden album to the Astronaut path, mostly because I was all about the Savage Garden album when I went to Florida with my Girl Scout troop and visited Cape Canaveral). ANYHOO! Back to the real point. I was always torn between being an explorer and an artist. For the longest time, I couldn’t marry the two. I couldn’t figure out why I wanted to be both, or how I could be both.
For some reason this morning, it finally made sense! We’ve been talking SO MUCH about being adventurers and artists. Right?! Vagabonds and visual storytellers. I’m finally figuring out how to live both of these at the same time!
So there you have it. A very terse overview of my SERIOUS excitement on the way in the work this morning. It’s the first time in a long time I’ve almost FELT a light bulb go off in my head, and I hope and pray that it begins happening more often – that things continue clicking. Because MAN, it is AWESOME!
End of email.
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