Читать книгу How Did I Get Here?: Navigating the unexpected turns in love and life - Barbara Angelis De - Страница 18

Last week I was driving to an appointment at a healing center in the foothills of the nearby mountains. I’d never been to this place before, but had clear directions that told me to follow one road for a while, and then look for the turnoff to the center, so I wasn’t concerned about getting lost. It was a beautiful afternoon, and I was enjoying the serene atmosphere of the countryside.

Suddenly the road stopped and there was nowhere else to go. DEAD END, the sign read. “How could this be possible?” I wondered, utterly perplexed. I hadn’t seen the turn I was supposed to take, and I was sure I’d looked carefully for it. There was nothing to do but slowly retrace my path. Sure enough, several miles back I noticed that there was a very small lane winding up the mountain, its identifying sign partially hidden behind an overgrown flowering bush. I remembered passing that road but dismissing it, certain it couldn’t be the one I was looking for. Now I understood how I had missed the turnoff—I’d assumed it would be a well-paved street, and clearly marked. I didn’t recognize it when I saw it because it wasn’t what I was expecting.

Sometimes in life we come to what appear to be dead ends, but are actually missed turning points. Suddenly it seems we can’t go any farther in the direction we were traveling, and we feel trapped, lost. We don’t remember seeing any alternative routes; we don’t recall being confronted with a choice. We simply feel stuck. “What am I supposed to do now?” we lament as we stare at the emotional equivalent of a no way out sign. The answer is to do just what I did on that country road—we need to retrace our steps, to go back and see if we can find the turning point we missed because we weren’t expecting it.

One of my clients is a very successful and well-known film producer. When we first met, I asked him how he got started in the entertainment business. “I was desperate,” he answered with a grin and went on to explain his story. Nelson was a struggling screenwriter who moved to Los Angeles with his wife and newborn son in hopes of breaking into the film industry. For two years he tried to sell his scripts with absolutely no luck. Soon he had gone through all of his savings and didn’t even have money enough to pay the next month’s rent on his apartment. He had reached a dead end and didn’t know where to turn.

“I was about as down as a person could get,” Nelson confessed to me. “I’d had these big dreams, dragged my wife away from her family in Texas, and here I was with nothing to show for it. I knew what I needed to do—pack up everything that could fit into the car and drive back to Texas to get a job selling cars or insurance or something. But I felt desperate at the thought of actually going through with this.”

Then Nelson had an impulse to call his friend Jimmy, whom he’d met in a screenwriting class. Jimmy was always very upbeat, although he, too, hadn’t ever sold a script. The last time Nelson had spoken to Jimmy, he’d been excited about some independent film he had agreed to help produce, and asked Nelson if he wanted to get involved. “It doesn’t pay anything now,” Jimmy explained, “but it is great experience.” Nelson remembered thinking what an optimist Jimmy was and what a sucker—he was working for free, which surely couldn’t get him anywhere. “At least I should call and say good-bye before I leave town,” Nelson told himself.

That phone call changed Nelson’s life. Jimmy talked him into working on the tiny film, which ended up becoming an underground hit. Nelson realized that he loved producing and had a talent for it, and soon he and Jimmy formed their own production company. Within a year, they’d produced a movie that became a surprise success and went on to create a multimillion-dollar business. “If things hadn’t been so bad,” Nelson reminisced, “I would have missed that doorway.”

This is often how it is with turning points—they seem to occur at crucial moments, moments in which we could easily get stuck unless we look for the opening they offer us. The word crucial is derived from the Latin root crux, or cross. Again, through ancient language, wisdom is revealed:

Hidden within crucial, challenging times are crossroads, transitions and turning points, easy to miss, but promising us wonderful journeys to places of delight and fulfillment we cannot even imagine.