Big, beautiful flowers growing wild. They’re only weeds if we decide we don’t want them around.
Are you willing to be wild? That was the challenge motivational speaker Vicki Clark issued to a room full of Junior Leaguers at a talk several months ago in Rumson, NJ.
The workshop was entitled: The 11 Commandments of Wildly Successful Women.
The event was not my first reminder that maybe at this time in my life I really, really need to go wild. As a friend’s bumper sticker reads, “Wild women don’t get the blues.”
If you’re open to passion, it doesn’t take much to bring it on. I had a moment in my very own kitchen the night before the workshop. An earlier library visit had yielded Otis Redding CD with “Try A Little Tenderness” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azpUTXntVagon it. OMG! That song—rocking out in the kitchen as the music built and built, it got me positively vibrating with visceral certainty that life—and Otis!—are goo—oood!
Then I just had to put on my ratty, tatty faded old video of the movie Pretty in Pink, where “Try a Little Tenderness” has a featured role. I soaked up Molly Ringwald’s classic lesson in rising above stereotypes and embracing toe-curling passion. Wild!
I started thinking about wildness again when introduced recently to Traci Bild’s Get Your Girl Back movement http://gygb.com/. Don’t you love it? Getting my girl back is about remembering who I am under all the conformity, responsibility and plain-old life-fatigue. Who I was, I mean, when I rode my bike fearlessly down a flight of stairs. When I swam out to the middle of the pond. When I told off that snotty English teacher. When, country bumpkin that I was, I took on big bad New York City after college.
I’m not a teen or a twenty-something any more, and haven’t been for some time. But passion? I sure know something about that, and now that I’m older and wiser, I know that passion are as much about life itself as it is about youthful romance.
Passion is about being all in. About searching for what you value, then living from that place, knowing, as it says in the Bible, that “a prophet is without honor in her own country.”
The moments don’t have to be big ones. A big smile, a dollar and a little dance move to the sounds of a subway drum duo, that’ll do it, thank you. Yes, lots of people looked askance-ish (New Yorkers don’t stare; staring is too intimate; they just look, with a flat expression.)
But the drummers, and one spectator smiled. We had a moment. Then I moved on, refreshed and renewed by a nice dose of wildness.
What are you going to do today to remember who you are under all the grown-upness?