The Future You Imagine

Me & BJ, our Clydesdale horse, 1984.

There are many times I’ve gone out on a limb.

The times I quit my job (4 times actually) not knowing what my next steps would be. The time I left the country on an open ticket not knowing when or how I would return. The time we bought a horse and wagon knowing nothing about horses or harness driving.

I think back to those leaps of faith when my soul was calling me to grow. Was I scared? Absolutely.

I didn’t know the shape of the future but I also knew that if I didn’t make opportunities to do wild things, they might never happen.

There have been scary moments in my life when I came close to catastrophe. 

Like when we were travelling in our horse and wagon and one of the wagon shafts got caught in the horse’s collar. BJ, our horse, couldn’t turn his head to see the path in front of him and was starting to panic.

We were perched atop of a steep gravel driveway down to a camping spot. I was hauling on the reins while pulling on the wagon’s brake for all I was worth.

“Give me the reins” my husband called.

“No” I screamed back.

I thought I could control the horse by pulling harder, I was in fact spooking him more. I had to surrender the reins.

That’s when I learnt a very hard won truth.

I was shaking with shock and fear. I was anticipating the worse.

A Toad of Toad Hall disaster with horse, wagon and me upended and rolling down the hill. One minute of indecision. Of fighting that compulsion to try and control everything.

Then I handed my husband the reins.

He proceeded to carefully guide the horse’s head around, so that BJ could see the road. We plodded down to our beautiful camping spot on the river, catastrophe averted.

Turns out that we sometimes need that guiding hand.

In life, as in creativity or business, in fact anything we commit to with passion; it’s good to have someone to quietly step in and intervene when we need guidance. When we feel like we are going nowhere or can’t see any way forward out of our current situation. That’s why I continue to invest in mentoring and have become a mentor myself.

We are facing uncertain times. A future with no role models. That does not follow anything our parents, grandparents or great grandparents could envision or know how to navigate.

Yet I hear their voices in my head saying put one foot in front of the other, one step at a time. They are a quiet presence inside me, guiding me to keep going. To be resilient.

To reach out and surround myself with others who are entrepreneurs, innovators, creators of new ways to be in the world.

I went to a talk many years ago. I can’t remember the name of the speaker but he said something like this: “If we don’t imagine the future we want, we will be stuck with the future we are given”.

Choose how you want your future to look like, then walk towards it, one step at a time.

BJ our horse with my husband Alex McDonald and me, leaving the river camp site 1984.