My Heart Is Always Singing

When I read Dawud’s post about the songs in his heart, I knew I was a goner. My heart is always singing. It’s the way I wake up. It’s the way I go through my day. It’s the way I think of my friends. It’s my life.

Sometimes I think that everything I know has been set to music somewhere.

Right Outta Nowhere

by Christine Kane

I was walking with Richard in London. We were talking about his international travel, my international travel, my first trip to the UK, his trips to visit my office, and my bicoastal commute.

“In the last year,” I said to this lifelong friend, “the longest time I’ve been home is 21 days. Once I was gone for 63 nights. I have a “home” at home, another at Peg’s, and several in small hotels in cities like this. What d’ya make of it?” I was walking half-backwards to see him as I spoke.

He pondered. Then he said, “I think it means, you don’t want one home anywhere.”

I turned to walk beside him, keeping pace and thinking his thought. Then I turned back to say, “Could be, yet when I try it on, it feels more right to say ‘I want to live everywhere!’ ”

“Oh dear,” my dear friend remarked. “That is you, spot on. Takes courage, that.”

We think of courage as a loud battle, but in my life it’s never been a fight. It’s been a waking up to something that isn’t right.

When courage finally comes you never see it coming.

Just three years before that walk, I’d been hopelessly lost about life. I’d gotten caught in trying different clothes and dfferent shoes to figure out how to walk the road that everyone else was walking. I’d tried desperately, valiantly — with amazing resilience — to remake myself to fit the success story.

Some people got a lot to prove and that’s the way I used to be.

From the first misstep I took, I lived in my head, over-analyzing At the same time, I believed I wasn’t good enough, yet I thought that I could prove my value by changing who I am. Where’s the logic there? Look again —> prove the value of who I am by changing it?

Disconnected from my head, my heart knew I was moving in the wrong direction. It took a chance at being me again. My heart understood that I needed my own shores to find my place to stand. That’s where the courage came in.

Dream and the way will be clear.
Pray and the angels will hear.
Leap and the net will appear.

When my heart and head came back together, those shoes that fit were walking on a road away from trying to change myself to prove my value. It wasn’t easy, but it felt better.

And I could be sure that the folks who met me . . . met me, and those who like me . . . like me.

So when people ask me about how to find their way, I point them to Christine’s song a song in my heart and tell them what it says . . .

Right outta nowhere
Open your heart, believe in everything
And you’re going somewhere.
And all you need to know is that you’re free.

I had asked Richard before I ever got to the UK, “When I get to London on business, will you take me around to all of the publishers?” I’d been asking him for 6 years, before my plane actually landed.

I had to learn that I was free to go.

Right outta nowhere, you open your heart, have faith in everything
And you you’re going somewhere.
And all you need to know
Is that you’re free
to go.

Thank you, Christine, for saying it so beautifully.

Open your heart, believe in everything — especially yourself.
That’s how you get to where you want to go.