free fallin'

"Every great dream begins with a dreamer.

Always remember, you have within you

the strength, the patience and the passion

to reach for the stars to change the world."

Harriet Tubman

Today my assignment was to skim my summer reading book, an extremely helpful job-hunting book updated frequently, titles "What Color is Your Parachute?". As I began to fill out the puzzles, tests and diagrams I discovered, to my horror, that I don't really know myself very well at all.

This may seem stupid considering I would have bet my life on the fact that, other than God and maybe my mama, I would definitely know myself best; wouldn't we all?

However, I now have a complete "flower" diagram of traits, personality characteristics, values, working conditions and more to guide my search for my dream job, and ultimately my dream life that seem almost foreign to me.

I feel like a more appropriate title might have been "Where do you want to land?" or "Stop fooling yourself, you know nothing about what you actually want," But no one asked this skeptic..

Now I feel like I've filled out my manual but have no idea how to read it. As I stare at the diagram of patterns of my own life I'm almost more confused than ever.

I now know what I'm good at, where I would want to live, what range of salary fits my line of expertise and which "people environment" I'm best in..all on paper that is. Why is it that on paper everything sounds fabulous? It's like a trick our minds play on us; "This is what you want, Anna, it says so right there!" But what happens once im there (wherever there is)?

"You've got to be careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there."

-Yogi Berra

The truth is you can't know. I can't know. And this book can't know either. Only God can know where my life will lead and when and where it will intersect with my dream job and dream life. And the truth is, me sitting here worrying about my future won't make it any less complicated. This is one of the many, many times where I'm just gonna hafta take my knowledge, experience and dreams... and leap...

..Here goes nothin..