At thirteen, like most adolescents, I had an emotional crisis. My meltdown wasn’t, however, due to raging hormones. It had nothing to do with so-and-so having said such-and-such or the fact that, while most of my friends were being courted, I had caught the attention of exactly zero boys. It was because I had a grandmother living across the country in a small town in South Carolina and I had never met her.
The problem was, we were poor. My mother was a single parent of two and we lived on borrowed land. Asking for money was out of the question.
But my determination was insatiable. I got a job cleaning house. Each Saturday I scrubbed the toilets and oiled the hard wood furniture of an elderly couple for $7 dollars and hour. I saved every penny of my gross income: $28 dollars a week. After approximately 8 months I had enough to purchase my flight.
I spent the entire summer building relationships with family I didn’t know I had, doing things I had never thought of doing. I picked berries. I made jam. I played in creeks where the mosquitoes drank me alive. I swam in rivers and jumped from rope swings into lakes. I tried my hand at fishing and failed terribly. I even kissed a boy. By the end of the summer, I sang along with country radio and talked with a twang. It was magical.
But it wasn’t magic. Magic has no explanation. In my case I had:
- set a clear goal
- kept that goal in focus
- internalized every moment of achieving it
Magic is found in the nectar of your labors. Without hard work, there is no fruit.
Which of your goals are you ready to harvest?