“How long the road is,
but for all the time the journey has already taken,
how you have needed every second of it
in order to learn what the road passes by.”
~Dag Hammarskjöld
~Poster on my wall in residence
at university

I was nine years old when I started to write my first book, a mystery novel.  I never finished it.  When I was eighteen I started to write another book.  My English professor at Dalhousie University, where I was studying at the time, supported my writing efforts. Although I completed my manuscript and submitted it to many publishers, I never got it published.

After I graduated I started a business offering custom calligraphy.  The word “calligraphy” comes from the Greek words, “calli” and “graphos”, meaning “beautiful writing”.  It seemed this was as close as I was going to get to the actual beautiful writing I’d long dreamed of doing.

Sixteen years later I discovered Aromatherapy and began marketing essential oils.  This inspired the creation of Terra Cotta Pendants.  Just as the computer age was rendering our calligraphy business obsolete, the Internet was providing another way for us to make a living.

During that time I married my wonderful husband and business partner and we had two beautiful children together.  My focus and my passion had shifted from writing to parenting.  I was busy doing something my English professor, Dr Wainwright said I needed to do. “You’ve got to live life before you can write about it,” he’d said.  I was busy living.

…

Fast forward to the spring of 2010. An experience I had on a trip to Greece supplied me with the missing piece of a puzzle I’ve been constructing my whole life and gave me an idea for a book.  I began to work on my third manuscript.

Meanwhile, I started this blog “Life, for instance” in November.  It was an attempt at social media, a community-building exercise, a writing project and a way to drive traffic to Terra Cotta Pendants but now it has assumed an additional role. It has become the launchpad for the book I’m publishing in September of 2011!  Yes, that’s THIS MONTH!!!

Is it time, Dr Wainwright?  Have I lived life long enough to write about it?  I think so.

Life’s paths don’t always go straight and rarely do they take us to where we want to be as quickly as we would like.  There are detours and pit stops along the way.  We can’t see it at the time, but maybe the pit stops are necessary to the journey and maybe the detours aren’t detours at all. Maybe they are a part of the path.

How straight or crooked has your path been?  Are you where you want to be yet?  What’s your story?

photo credit: Luigi Crespo