Ordinary to Extraordinary

 

    I want to tell you a quick story: 

    On May 1st, 1994, after a 4-month battle with Leukemia, my 51-year-old mother died at home in her bed. I was 23 years old at the time. After walking out of her room, I sat down in her old recliner and looked around; I saw her address book, her nail file, her slippers, all of it exactly where they’d always been. A bomb dropped on me at that moment; nothing had changed, but everything had changed. Everything was the same in that room, but nothing would ever be the same again. I knew a massive part of my life was in the next room, and I now had to bury her. But to anyone watching, they would have seen a young woman sitting in a tattered recliner, looking around. An ordinary moment to an outside observer. An extraordinary moment for me. 

    Everyone has at least one extraordinary moment. The observer would see ordinary behavior and think nothing of it: a door closing, a car driving away, a dish in the sink, a young woman looking around a room—benign actions of normal people. But the emotional tectonic plates beneath the surface are shifting violently. Molten hot rage, grief, regret, betrayal, loathing, jealousy, and more…all building pressure, threatening to explode. 

    Those extraordinary moments are when you pivot. Your path shifts ever-so slightly, and decisions are made because of those emotions that pulse beneath the surface. You go around or tunnel through, but both dictate the outcome. Writers are tunnel rats. We dig. We enjoy the dark. It sounds morose, but it’s true. 

    When approaching your own memoir, the extraordinary must be part of your project. The beautiful thing about those moments is that they are easy to locate. Just think back to a time when your world stopped spinning, the clocks stopped ticking, everything went silent, and you had to remind yourself to breathe. Those ripples in the fabric of your life became permanent, and they must be honored exactly as they are…heavy, emotional, and complicated. 

    So, what extraordinary moment put you where you are today? Think. Don’t dismiss the idea because it’s there. Our paths forked several times along the way and we had critical decisions to make. “Do I want to take this promotion or move to the new job?” “Do I want to re-enlist and hope I get selected for promotion, or do I get out and accept this civilian job?” “Do we really want more children?” 

    One question will always lead to others when you give yourself enough room to freely think of all possible outcomes and why you chose your current path. Remember, honoring the moments that made you is critical for others who are taking those first tentative steps down the same path.