It’s Oprah’s fault

April 23, 2021

I could not sleep last night. Why? Because I was thinking about the book I am writing. My book is about creating More Joy for your life. One big focus area in my book is guiding people to identify what their dream life looks like, sounds like and feels like, and then helping them develop a plan so they can work towards their dream life one step at a time.

Seemingly unconnected to the above thoughts, one of the exercises in the author’s course I am taking has you identify your expertise – why you have the expertise required to be the author of your book. This exercise took me back to the start of the journey I am currently on. In 1998 I was a mom with two children under 5, I was working part-time and I was very unhappy. I didn’t know who I was anymore, I had lost “me” in becoming a wife and mother. I had a wonderful husband and two great children, but being a mom is hard, especially when you expect so much of yourself. I felt very ungrateful for what I knew were great blessings. I was miserable.

Enter Oprah.

I was not generally a fan of talk shows, but there were many episodes of Oprah ’s show that were different. They taught me lessons for life, they introduced me to books and authors I had not heard of, they showed me a world I was not aware of. Every episode I watched lifted me to a higher pathway than the one I was on when I “arrived” to the show that day. I love learning and so I loved these episodes.

The Episode that Changed My Life

Sarah Ban Breathnach was a guest on Oprah’s show sometime in January of 1998. I do not know the exact day, but I do know that episode changed my life. I bought Sarah’s book, “Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy”. I can still remember reading the dated entries for the second half of January while I simultaneously “caught up” by reading the entries and completing the activities for early January.

What was my hinge point, the practice that changed the direction of my life?

My Gratitude Journal.

I’m sure many of you have had a similar experience. Keeping a journal of what you are grateful for can change your life if you let it. You become a different person. I remember that in my early days of keeping my gratitude journal I had great difficulty coming up with 5 things to be grateful for at the end of each day. One day, while driving around the city I was living in I remember seeing a banner on a bridge that said, “When you can’t breathe nothing else matters.” It was an ad for a fundraising campaign. I remember thinking, well at least that gives me one thing to be grateful for. Yes, I was that desperate for 5 items for my journal.

Over time my gratitude journal, together with working through Sarah’s book and continuing to learn from Oprah and her guests changed my view on my life and opened my soul to dreaming again. I started swimming with a coach at the local pool. My husband and I talked about the future and our dreams. I believed in dreams again! For the previous three or four years we had a “5 year plan” to move out of the city and build our own alternative home on a country property. Our plan though, was there in title only – we had done nothing to “plan” for our goal and the five year plan never advanced past year one. With Sarah’s book and my newfound outlook on living, that changed.

We clarified our dream. What did we need? What did we want? What were we willing to live without?

The Mountain to our Dream Life

I drew a mountain. At the bottom was where we were, at the top was our vision for the future: having Christmas in our home with our extended family. The year at the top was 2025…I think. I can no longer find that original mountain drawing, but I know I have it here somewhere. I do know I was focussed on how we would feel 25 years in the future…

On the side of the mountain I wrote the things we would have to do to reach our dream, one small step at a time.

Over the following 18 months we followed those steps. We researched the type of property we would need to live self-sustainably, the type of alternative home we wanted to build, what size it would be, what sources of energy we would use, etc.. I started looking at properties. We couldn’t afford to buy property in the area near our city. We talked about what that would mean. It meant leaving our current jobs and looking for work in another area. I started researching job prospects elsewhere. The research results fell into my lap. The best time to move would be just as a large group of people in my profession were retiring so jobs would open up. That would be around the year 2000. Now we had a goal date for buying and living on our property. We planned for a camping trip to an area we liked during the summer of 1999. I contacted a realtor in the area. He kept an eye out for properties that met our requirements and in August 1999 he gave us a list of properties to look at.

We couldn’t find one of the properties on the list. It was getting late so we agreed to meet him the following day. That evening we had a wonderful night of camping, storytelling and roasting marshmallows with our children. Life was bliss.

The next day we met the realtor and followed him to the property. The road it was on was not named. The laneway at the end of it was overgrown. It was obvious it had only been driven on by a farm tractor.

It was a very long laneway, about 1000ft (300m), and it was rough. It ended in a very large field surrounded by trees. It was a hot day. We all got out of the car. The hay in the field was over the kids’ heads. The kids and I investigated near the car while my husband and our realtor walked the property. They were gone a long time.

Where were they?

This was before the days of the cellphone.

The kids and I got back into the car and rolled down all the windows.

About an hour later they came walking back up the laneway.

They had gotten lost, came out of the woods at a neighbour’s property and walked back up the road and the laneway to the field.

We loved the property.

We made an offer and it was accepted.

In January of 1999 we were now the proud owners of the first part of our dream life!

And that is why I could not sleep last night, because we are living our dream life in the home that we built as a family, working with my husband on our property and writing the book I’ve dreamed of writing for years. I have the expertise to write my book because we are living proof that living your dream life is possible. It has taken a lot of planning, a lot of hard work, and one step up our mountain at a time.

And it’s Oprah’s fault!

I would love to read your story of how Oprah or Sarah empowered you to change your life. Please feel free to share it in the comments section below or email it to velvetrollin@gmail.com .

Velvet