Why You Need A Heroine's Adventure!

Or... Canalysis Paralysis - My Wake-Up Call From the Universe

Something happened in my early thirties that changed the course of my life.

It was cold, the kind of weather where every incoming breath makes your lungs sting as if they’re forming ice crystals on your insides. I’d just dropped my infant daughter at my mum’s house, but I was late to work. My boss had called a morning meeting, and damned if I can remember now what it was about, but at the time, it was earth-shatteringly important. I was earth-shatteringly important. So earth-shatteringly important, I decided to risk the canal road (you know, the road next to the canal. How’s that for foreshadowing?). The canal road shaved twenty minutes off my ninety-minute commute, but it could be icy. There were no worries today. When the road was dangerous, they dropped the barrier. The barrier was open. It must be fine. Right?

I wasn’t going fast when I hit the black ice. Faster than I wanted because of the Mercedes riding the bumper of my little 80s Toyota MR2 (shush, it was all I could afford), but only maybe twenty miles per hour. The ice, though, had plans of its own that morning. The ice decided I would have no control over my nippy little car. I turned into the skid as Driver’s Ed class had taught me, but... nothing. As I raced toward the grassy embankment to my right, the wheel turned fruitlessly in my hands. I bounced, pivoted, and catapulted toward the canal.

You know when people describe the world moving in slow motion, with time stretching like taffy, and you dismiss them as exaggerators? I am here to tell you that it happens for real. In what must have been seconds, I had enough time to recognize I was about to take a fifteen-foot nose dive into an early-morning swim. I had enough time to think, “Don’t worry, you saw this on Oprah. You know what to do?” as I calmly pressed the button to open the electronic driver’s side window. I had enough time to watch in shock as the passenger side crumbled inward as I scraped past a tree. I had enough time to think, “This might be it.”

The car executed a flawless Olympic-worthy dive (no splash!) straight into the water’s icy embrace. I watched the leafy, muddy bottom of the canal rush toward me before the car slammed into it. My arms jammed hard against the steering wheel, and my seatbelt sliced into my shoulder. The car bounced, popped to the surface, and began to sink rapidly. I tried the driver's door. Nope, too much pressure. I tried the passenger door. Nope, too crushed. I’d only managed to open the window about eighteen inches, but it was my only option.

I couldn’t move. Why couldn’t I move? Seatbelt, stupid! I pushed the release. Imagine me, the woman with a severe deficit of hand-eye coordination, shimmying through that window. I was the Limbo Champion of New Jersey 1999, escaping right before the car took a drastically perpendicular tip forward in its continued descent. I can not recall how I got from that window to standing on the car's taillights. All I remember is a man standing at the top of the canal embankment above me screaming, “Jump! Jump!”

I’m telling you, heroines, I was like Super-Woman on steroids. There was maybe eight feet between myself and the tiny lip of earth bordering the canal at the bottom of that embankment, and with gravity-defying grace, I soared over that yawning gap like I was wearing a cape. I landed and turned just in time to watch my car sink below the icy water.

After scrambling up the embankment, the nice, screaming man said, “I’m calling 911.”

And I said, “Is this an emergency?”

Here’s what I would love for you to take from this story. It was an emergency. But not the type either of us is/was thinking. It was the universe dialing my number, yelling, “Wake up!” And if you know me, you know I think the universe is our brain. So, it was my brain calling. The brain that then gave me a lot of crap as I stood shivering with cold and shock on the edge of that road, dodging an R-rated (intense or graphic violence, or other adult themes) version of the Ice Capades; car after car sliding, crashing, and stalling.

“You’d never have gotten Emily out of that backseat.”

“Was that meeting important enough to die for?”

“Thank God I watched that Oprah episode.”

And finally, “You are miserable! What the Hell are you doing with your life?”

The call to adventure smacked me in the face like the steering wheel nearly did when I hit the bottom of the canal, and it drove me to start the long journey of figuring out what my extraordinary life should look like. It wasn’t easy.

Over the next twenty-five years, I asked and answered questions like,

“Who am I? What do I believe and stand for?”

“Why am I here? How do I want to live my life?”

“Am I in charge of the plot? How do I become a Choice Agent?”

“What relationships do I have, and why are these people important (or not!)?”

“What are the journeys and transformations I want to undertake as a result of all this self-exploration?”

Answering these questions led to my Extraordinary Life, which, over the years (and with a lot of additional education and life experience), I distilled into a practical yet magical course and community, The Heroine’s Adventure. My life’s purpose is now to help as many women as I can plot and create their extraordinary lives.

In the years since I crashed into that canal, I’ve wondered if my brain was also a sneaky and incredibly risky bastard. Was there a part of me complicit in that swan dive to disaster? I had no death wish. Not even close (especially not as a new mother). I thought I had it all figured out. New house, high-paying job, marriage, new baby. What more could a person want? Well, it turns out a person could want a lot more when they discover they are living for other people instead of living for themselves. I was in the Ordinary World phase of my Three-Act Journey. I had zero Aligned Desires (check out The Heroine’s Adventure if you want to learn more about how to use all those authory words to change your life).

My point here is sometimes things just happen to you. And you think, oh, that just happened. That sucks. But do you ever think, why did that happen? Do you ever dig deep into that scary shadowy part of your belly and ask, “What is the universe (i.e., your brain) trying to tell me?” Don’t neglect the profound impact of your unconscious choices.

Did you know that 60-70% of the drivers in a submerged vehicle do not survive (primarily due to drowning)? Maybe my brain should have focused on that statistic instead of being unnaturally and frankly scarily over-confident that Oprah could save my life.

Journal Prompt:

Bust out your journal and your gel pens! Have you ever had something “just happen” to you? Write about it. What happened? What were you thinking at the time? How did you deal with it? Was it a hidden call to adventure? Was your brain sending you a message you refused to hear? We all try to avoid challenges, but it is often in the challenges we discover the hidden message we require for our growth.

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