Feeling Happy to be a Red Tulip in a Field of Yellow

As I pondered what to write about this month, all the news headlines felt too heavy, inundated with Covid death-toll and destruction stories and the military coup in Myanmar. International Women’s Day came to mind, but I already posted a blog on that topic. I thought about Black History Month, which led somehow to Harry and Meghan’s interview with Oprah and their challenges with racism within the royal palace. I began a post that addressed racism, disrespect and criticism, but I seemed to ramble and unravel all over the place.

I started again, then stopped. My words felt as negative and preachy as the media and social media platforms I was frustrated with. I quoted a statement by Morgan Freeman I read on Facebook: “I don’t want a black history month. Black history is American history. There is no white history month.” With absolute clarity, it hit me. All of the people who don’t fit into the narrow constructs created by social norms, are hurting. But true healing needs to go deeper than a day, week or month to honour diversity. It needs to begin at the root of the problem. We need to change our social stories, where definitions of success are limited and often unattainable.

In Canada, where I grew up, the narrative for success is easiest to attain if you are white, male, heterosexual and intelligent, with no visible or invisible disabilities. The trajectory goes like this: childhood > university > marriage > white picket fence > 1.7 children > successful career. There is also an expectation to be fit and attractive. The end game is idealized as a life expectancy of 85, at which point death occurs swiftly and painlessly while asleep beside the loving first wife of over fifty years.

Clearly, this limited vision leaves out most of the population. It is unrealistic and creates unnecessary suffering for all those who don’t fit in. It lacks originality and imagination. I’m reminded of a recent conversation I had with one of my daughters. She shared that sometimes she feels like she’s falling behind, because at age twenty-five she hasn’t found a career she is passionate about nor a life-partner. Intellectually, she understands that we all have our own journey and that life events don’t always occur according to a timeline, but the social success story is so ingrained, she falls into the hole of self-judgment and has to work at pulling herself out. She’s learned she has to create her own definition of success based on who she is and what she values. And this is where the magic begins.

My heart was in the right place, my muse was inspired and the words began to flow. As part of my research for an up-coming interview, I tuned into The Symphony of Love, featured on the A Quest for Well-Being podcast. The serendipity was uncanny. I listened as the host, Valeria Koopman, spoke with Karina Hsieh. The main theme they discussed was how we all need to be encouraged to find our own way to happiness and success.

One of the messages Karina spoke about was her opinion that the purpose of your life is to discover who you are. She went on to say that to do this, you need to lead from the heart and let yourself flow, rather than go with the tides of society that condition us to follow a prescribed path. Karina stated that we all have different words or explanations for the experience of our flow. We might call it our heart, intuition, love, source, energy, spirit, or higher-self.

Valeria asked Karina how she knows when she is in the flow, and she described it as a feeling of contracting energy in her gut when she isn’t versus an opening sensation in her heart when she is. It made me think of one of my own measurement tools. I feel heavy when I make decisions that aren’t in alignment with who I am and light when they are. I was particularly drawn to a phrase that summarized this perspective with poetic accuracy: “Live life by design, not colour-by-number.” 

Karina took her first step to finding her own way when she decided to quit her job and backpack around the world solo. My daughter began her self-discovery journey when she chose to travel to Australia and Bali on her own. I went on a quest to discover my authentic self when I left a life that wasn’t serving me to begin again on Vancouver Island. 

I don’t know if travelling is a necessary part of the self-discovery process, but I do believe that hurling yourself out of your comfort zone and away from everyone else’s expectations can create the right environment to support this kind of learning.

I’m inspired by the wisdom of my good friend Carol, who once told me we get to choose our reality. We can always switch directions. We decide what we want to do with the precious time we’ve been given and who we want to spend it with. We can practice setting healthy boundaries that honour our values and communicate our commitment to love and accept ourselves. We can take a deep breath, go inward, and find the love the resides within us. 

I would like to encourage my readers to take a look at the life they are living and ask themselves, am I living in my flow? If you are, that’s wonderful news. If you aren’t, perhaps it’s time to change things up. Planning to travel the world might not be the easiest while Covid restrictions are still in place, but no matter what is happening in the external world, you can always take a journey inwards, to discover the core of who you are and your life purpose.

So yeah, I’m feeling happy to be a red tulip in a field of yellow.