The Power of Asking

A couple of years ago, right after my Dad died, I fell into this funny mid-life thing where I felt really flat about teaching – felt in fact that I had taught everything I knew how to teach – that I was doing it with my eyes closed and it wasn’t serving me or anyone else. It started when I watched my Dad die a few months earlier. There we were, the whole family, my sisters and brother, my Mom – all of us sitting around Dad’s bed as he took his last breath. And as he did, this huge WHOOOOSH came straight from him to me and it screamed silently LIVE! As in STOP FUCKING AROUND WITH EXCUSES AND REASONS WHY YOU CAN’T DO THIS AND WHY YOU CAN’T DO THAT. It was a HUGE call to myself to wake up to what I was doing and to reflect on the things I’d wanted to do but told myself I couldn’t. So I made a list of some of the things I’d always wanted to pursue. I got back to guitar lessons. I moved into a coaching program, I scooted around the world of commercial ethnography – and that was all great – just the exercise of trying new things was energizing. But what I really wanted to do, if I could do anything, was to travel around the country and study with all of my favorite writing mentors – nobody I actually knew – but people whose books I’d read and taught from for years. Thing was, I didn’t have the time or the money do that....