Coming Alive

3……..2……..1……..Grad School!!!!

 Do not wait; the time will never be ‘just right.’ Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.  ~George Herbert

In my head I hear, “Really? This is a crazy idea!!”  I have a daughter in her final year of early college high school, which means college applications begin over the next month.  A middle son in his first, and most challenging year of the same early college high school. My youngest son weathering through one more year of middle school. A busy husband enrolled in the local community college while still commuting an hour to work. All while, I am starting my second year as a Legal Assistant in a local Immigration law office, serving as Secretary of the NC USNC UN Women Board/Vice President of the Wilmington Region, Apparel Coordinator for the kids’ high school, and sewing assistant for Journey Productions.  Sure, this sounds like the PERFECT time to start Graduate School—oh my!!!

But, then I read the words of George Herbert, “Do not wait; the time will never be ‘just right’.  I found what lights me up and I have written about it all over this website.  It’s time to take the leap.  There is something BIG I’m supposed to be doing in this world and it is not scanning, copying, organizing, and drafting documents in a law office.  Don’t get me wrong, this job came into my life at exactly the right moment and I am incredibly grateful, but in this position I have had to step away from all of the things that I long to do.

Last summer, my friend and mentor, Dr. Paige Tan Ph.D., Professor and Chair, Department of Political Science at Radford University, sat and coerced me to look into the Master’s in Public Administration program at UNC-Wilmington.  Knowing she would never steer me wrong I went home and started researching.  I knew instantly that this was the education I needed to give all of the advocacy and board work I had been doing credibility.  I made a point to write about it here on my website as a way to hold myself accountable for the decision I was making:  Coming Alive Again and Again and Again.

However, taking the GRE, facing the technology age gap, and stomaching the cost of college have all been obstacles to overcome.  At first I talked myself out of it daily.  Then over the winter there were some life events that pushed me inward again.  Our life here on this earth is short and I want to leave it knowing that I lived fully and true to myself.

When we first moved from Indiana I tore a page out of an “O” Magazine—Oprah just knows how to push us forward, as does Barbara Kingsolver (one of my favorite authors).  It sits in an old broken Pottery Barn frame right on my dresser to remind me to step out into this world and do what I am called to do.  It reads:

“Every one of us is called upon, perhaps many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job…And onward full-tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another–that is surely the basic instinct…Crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never

So here I go…….3………2……….1………..Grad School!!!