Back when I was a pre-teen, there was this game that I always wanted but never had called “Mystery Date”.  In the commercial for this game, which you young people can find on YouTube, one of the lines asks, “will your date be a dream?  Or a dud?”  I found myself thinking about this as I was waiting to be paired with someone I had never met in a breakout room during a virtual workshop I attended yesterday.  So the question was, would this person be a dream or a dud?

As the screen opened,  there was this lovely woman, about my age with beautiful silver hair, sunshine dotting the room and her face.  Not knowing the proper etiquette of zooming with someone you had never met, I think it was a little awkward at first for both of us, so I introduced myself and proceeded to follow the directions we were given by our hosts.  During our conversation, I found out she was from Helena Montana but just as she told me her name, a glitch occurred and I didn’t catch it all, so henceforth, she was Karen from Helena.

We had a total time of a half hour together, and there was a part of me that wondered what we could get out of this in such a short amount of time?  What could I possibly learn by going through this little exercise and listening to this woman I had never met before for the next 15 minutes?  So I began taking notes of little things.  Her name, where she lived, what she had done for a living and what she was doing now.  And then she told me her story, her “flaming curve ball” as our hosts were calling these.  It was not  unusual, but a universal story of someone who had been degraded by another human being, seemingly out of the blue.  The curve ball that happens, just when you think you’re doing everything to the best of your ability and someone looks you in the eye and tells you that you’re not enough.  We had heard several of these stories already that afternoon, but what I wanted to hear was how she had dealt with this curve ball and how she was doing now.

As we hit the 5 minutes mark, she said two things that I couldn’t write down fast enough.

“I wasn’t ready for the end and not ready for a change”

“If you don’t find the reason to leave, someone else will”

In the workshop, we had already talked about the idea that we are where we’re supposed to be, but it begs the question, is there a time when we should should have left a situation or made a change but we didn’t? Is it necessary for life to throw us that flaming curve ball for us to take the next step we were meant to take?  Does it take something uncomfortable or a person to say or do something unkind to make us take the necessary steps to get where we are really meant to be?

It was an “ah ha” and yet not so “ah ha” moment for me as I’ve gotten older, in that I’ve experienced several of these.  Sometimes I entered a situation with a feeling that it wasn’t where I was meant to be and I did it anyway, only to find out my feeling was right.  Sometimes it was because I was afraid to leave where I was or saw no where to go from where I was.  Sometimes it was something completely out of my control and it was only later that I saw that the situation didn’t happen TO me but FOR me as our hosts were talking to us about.

So as Karen was sharing her story, which was sadly cut short by the timer, she told me how she began to recognize patterns of this kind of thing happening in her life, how she had allowed people to treat her in these ways and how when she looked back, that there were always signs that she had refused to see or accept.  Now she had made the change and things were improving and that’s the other thing – improvement may not happen right away – as with everything it’s a process and a process can be messy.

Now as I look back on the last several years, where I had made a career choice and the choice, while it allowed me to learn different things,  was merely a springboard for where I was to go next.  I was forcing the change and not waiting for the right opportunity perhaps, but as life would have it, it takes the choices you make and rearranges things so that the outcome was where you needed to be all along.  It’s not easy, sometimes not very pretty, but change requires transformation with it’s necessary awkward stages.  I have been in those situations where it took someone being unkind for me to take steps to do something else in my life, sometimes with family or habits and in my career.  Sometimes you are happy with where you are but it takes the curve ball to take you where your full potential lies, to see how strong you really are.  As I listened to another Karen share her story yesterday, I saw where this woman has a whole set of strengths that she might not have used had it not been for the flaming curve ball that is Covid 19.  And in her journey, she gave the rest of us a gift of perspective and a chance to experience empathy that perhaps we might not have had the opportunity to experience otherwise.  I for one am grateful.

So my mystery date was certainly a dream and not a dud.  Karen from Helena was a quiet gem of wisdom, sharing her story so that others could learn and grow in the own stories.  Perhaps that is our lesson here.  As we experience our own flaming curve balls in life, whether it’s connected to this pandemic or not, are we bravely sharing our stories, the messy process of change, the lessons learned and what this experience is doing FOR  us and not TO us?

My thanks to Karen from Helena.