All winter the blue storage box sat alone on the floor of the garage, calling me.
Years before, my husband and I, on our way to more traveling, had left it with my daughter for safekeeping. She returned it in the fall, but I didn’t open it, knowing it would require something from me that I didn’t feel ready to do – face all those memories from the past.
Finally, on a beautiful spring day, I was ready to face the contents.
Out came yearbooks, a bunch of videos – destined to be converted to DVD’s after tearful watching – my dance thesis, and a gaggle of picture albums.
Underneath all that, I glimpsed the scrapbook that I had once treasured, and had thought I had lost.
Once again, I stalled opening something from the past. I put it on my reading chair.
It sat there for days, inviting me to look at it. “Not now,” I said to it, “Later.” I knew that once I opened the cover, things I would want to write about would fly out, and I would be “forced” to sit down and start writing.
Why do we resist what we most want?
See, there is a whole series of blogs I could write about this craziness we indulge in, but before I get started down that path, I first need to honor that scrapbook, and the past me that savored, and saved, those ideas.
On the first page, I found something I had saved from when I had just graduated from college and with my children was headed off into a new adventure, leaving the world of dance (mostly) behind, and heading into the business world. Scared and excited.
Also on that first page was a poem by Victor Hugo that I have carried with me for years. There was a note from my now-grown daughter, written in 5th grade, promising me that she would not give me any trouble when she was a teenager. I laughed – happy that she is now the one with a teenage daughter -and that she had kept her promise the best that any teenager could.
However, the treasure that filled most of the pages were cut out essays of my favorite writers. They had fueled my childhood desire to write, and move people the same way those writers were moving me.
I read one. It was even better than I remembered. I had to stop for a few days I was so overwhelmed with the happiness of this discovery.
This scrapbook contains many of the inspirations that helped me develop my first class on perception, called The Shift®, that I taught beginning in 1992.
Later I wrote a book based on what I learned teaching that class, and those ideas were added to the scrapbook. I see little notes to myself telling me on which page of the first draft of the book I had used certain quotes.
It’s the length of time in between that most moves me.
It proves, to me, once again, that life isn’t a disconnected series of events, but it moves as a whole unit, each spiral adding deeper and deeper meanings to every event.
It reminds me of our garden. Each year we add more nutrients to the soil, each year it is a richer and richer environment in which seeds can grow.
Our lives are like that too.
What I was as a child is still here with me now as a grandmother; just more of it, deeper and richer. What I wanted to do, what I believed in then, what I wanted to be, is still present, and the scrapbook is my witness.
That book, which first came from the scrapbook, is called Living In Grace: The Shift To Spiritual Perception. It was developed from a lifetime of observation and listening, and collecting ideas, as contained in that scrapbook, plus so much more. When I finished that book, I figured I had done my job, and that was all the writing I was going to do.
Turns out, it was just the beginning. It became the heartbeat of what I call The Shift® System. It is the end, and the beginning, of fulfilling the promise to myself, begun so many years before, to write with the intention of moving people as I was moved, and open up the world of possibilities that lies before each of us.
BECA LEWIS coaches, teaches, writes blogs and books, plays with art, and is addicted to reading. She lives in Ohio with her husband and has kids and grandkids scattered across the country.
