Raccoon Poop and Orange Peel

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-changes…

How are you with change? Massive, radical, unexpected change? Do you hold onto what IS, as tightly as you can? Or do you let go and let flow - into whatever life has in mind for you?

The best advice I ever got was to learn how to go with the flow. I’m not going to pretend it’s always been easy, but it certainly changed my life.

Something about me that isn’t particularly obvious to the untrained eye, is that when I started out, I was a linguist.

At University, I studied Modern Languages, my dissertation was ‘Women in the works of Gil Vicente - Whore or Virgin’. Mr Vicente was the Portuguese equivalent of Shakespeare, but totally, as far as I could perceive at the time, minus the LOLs. He had some very fixed opinions on the role of women in society, and tbh, we didn’t agree on much.

But I definitely had the advantage - in that I could talk shit about him without him being able to defend his position.

As part of my degree, I studied abroad for a bit - I went to University in both Lisbon, Portugal, and Asturias, in northern Spain. 

(Except, I didn’t really.) 

In Lisbon, I spent the vast majority of my time on the beach and in nightclubs. I have no regrets, it was glorious. Much of what happened, (35 years after the fact) is still under a sort of familial Official Secrets act, and my parents will never get the details. At least, not if I can help it…

In Spain, I taught English as a foreign language for my year out, because for the entire time I was there, the students and lecturers from my university took it in turns to strike. 

My particular pet topic to pontificate upon (at the time) was the linguistics and history of medieval Spanish and Portuguese - as they related to Sanskrit (obvs). And I’d joyfully argue the toss about which tense a particular translated phrase should best use - if people didn’t run away from me fast enough, that is.

I was a deeply committed languages nerd. And I lived in the dark ages of technology. I didn’t wear a beret, quite, but I absolutely had friends who did.

The Easter before my finals, the University Library got rid of my beloved microfiche system and went digital. I remember standing in the atrium, trying not to sob. I knew that I’d never find any of the books I needed, ever again, my degree would be a bust, and my life (as I knew it) was over.

Yeah, I might have been a little melodramatic too. A touch. Maybe. Perhaps.

But why would they take a perfectly good system and replace it with some fly-by-night computer thingy? Why? It all made as much sense to me as those funny little boxes with the keyboards attached. Which was to say: none at all.

Fast forward a few <coughs> dozen years, and I’ve recently returned to corporate. I did it because a) I used to work with a lot of the people in my new company and I am very fond of them, it’s fun. And b) because they pay me very well. The b) part comes from being what is probably considered ‘an authority’ on the software system they sell.

I cringe slightly as I type this, but it is true. I worked with the same system for 19 years. It’s been through various incarnations. I tested most of them. It was my job to try to break everything they wrote, before it went out through the door. And I was very good at what I did.

So good, in fact, that I was (not so) affectionately known by some of my colleagues as ‘The Code-F!*&%er Extraordinaire’. They wanted to get me business cards and everything.

So how the hell did I get from there (the Luddite) to here (the Technophile)?

Change. I got here by accepting change.

It was, looking back, a combination of trusting my gut and being forced into making changes that I wanted to resist. And for ‘wanted to resist’, please read, being dragged, kicking, screaming into the future.

The Cliff Notes version is that when I moved to the USA (totally out of the blue), I was hired as an interpreter for a company that had a lot of installations in South and Central America. I was there to interpret what the engineers said to the customers, and what the customers said back to the engineers.

That job lasted one week.

The following Monday, my boss cheerfully informed me that I was going back to college to learn how to code and administer databases. Apparently I wasn’t an interpreter any more. I was a DBA.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

From there, there were many winding roads to where I am now, firmly back in electronic bosom of tech. Working in IT has given me so much. It has formed the basis of many of the most important and enjoyable things in my life. I wouldn’t be who I am now if I’d continued down the path of academia, and done a PhD in Brazilian Revolutionary Poetry (a distinct possibility at one point). I mean… I’d be a very different person, obviamente.

But my point is this: change is. It just IS. And accepting it is the formula for a happy life.

Of course, we are self-directed. Of course, we influence our outcomes. We are sovereign beings who make decisions and take actions. But we are also tiny parts in a massive, constantly moving, constantly adjusting Universe. We are co-creating in every nanosecond, and sometimes we find ourselves part of a bigger picture that we can’t explain and certainly can’t see until we look back and join up our breadcrumbs in reverse.

Our guts are what give us the map.

The very fact that I ended up in the USA in the first place had gone against everything I’d ever said I wanted to do. Why would I go live there? I already spoke the language they spoke, there was no point.

But when the offer came up in conversation, there was a quiet nudge that I listened to. I was expecting the words ‘no thanks’ to come out of my mouth, but instead, I was shocked to hear myself say ‘yes’. It was the best non-decision I’ve ever made, for a million, gazillion reasons. 

I’m not sure what my point is today, other than that listening to your gut is a life-skill. And that accepting what it tells you to do is the short cut towards happiness. It might take a while (but less time than it would have done otherwise). And it might make no sense on the way. We know more than we know that we know, (I don’t really know why or how). But we do. 

Maybe it’s that we have eons of wisdom coursing around our veins. We’re made of stars, after all, so is it really that surprising that the elements that make us up have a wider view of ‘reality’ than we do? Perhaps we’re just sentient space dust.

With love, and reliving the glory days of my more esoteric poetry choices.

Alli

P.S. We may well be made of stars. But we’re also (probably) made up of racoon poop and old orange peel.

And that’s just marvellous.

P.P.S for no other reason than to offer you the option of reading more of my pontifications, I want to tell you that my latest book  - ‘Safe & Sound - A Modern Day User Manual for the Root Chakra’ is now on Amazon and getting great reviews. 

P.P.P.S If you buy the Safe & Sound book you get two others for free - The Chakras, which explains how they work. And The Invisible Entrepreneur - the Energetics of Visibility, which explains why sometimes it’s so hard to allow yourself to be seen. And more importantly - what you can do about it.