Composing a Life...

This month my book club is reading Composing a Life, by Mary Catherine Bateson a book that was published seventeen years ago. Bateson focuses on life as a work in progress—the improvisations of five extraordinary women. It was a perfect choice for this month. There are five total in the club, very extraordinary beautiful women with families and all of us on a similar journey, to live authentically. I won’t go into details, but the path that lead me to these women is its own interesting journey.

Over the last three years, I’ve been passionately working on creating awareness about the epidemic of child trafficking. During this time, I have often wondered how and why I got involved in this issue. I think back, there sitting comfortable in my suburbia house watching that expose about child trafficking on Dateline NBC. My soul/essences started screaming at me to get my butt out my chair and really live…compose my life. It didn't let up for a year. Finally, I kicked myself into gear and started to tackle this enormous issue of child trafficking, which included I trip over to Cambodia in January of 2006 to check things out first hand.

After returning from Cambodia, there was this chain reaction that followed in every area of my life. Six months after returning from my trip, I quit my corporate job, stripped me from all the money and prestige that a management position offers. From there, I spent the next six months struggling to find myself, launching a consulting business, frustrated with my marriage, over-exposed to life as a stay-at-home mom and basically throwing my religious faith out the door and starting from scratch.

This cause has been the catyalyst for creating a new destiny for my life. In the book, Bateson describes one of the women, Ellen as “determined to be different.” She goes on to say,” At the same time, you cannot put together a life willy-nilly from odds and ends. Even in a crazy quilt, the various pieces, wherever they come from, have to be trimmed and shaped and arranged so they fit together, then firmly sewn to last through time and keep out the cold. Most quilts are more ambitious: they involve the imposition of a new pattern. But even crazy quilts are sewn against a backing: the basic sense of continuity allows improvisation. Composing a life involves an openness to possibilities and the capacity to put them together in a way that is structurally sound.”

I don’t think I would consider myself one of those crazy quilts, some of my villagers may disagree, but I am an ambitious type of quilt. I have this urgency to be the maestro of my life and make it count. I guess my key take-away about this passage, is as I create this new ambitious quilt pattern called my life, is not to loose sight that life involves a continual reimagining of the future and reinterpretation of the past to give meaning to the present.