welcome to my journey

It seems appropriate to start by saying I’ve never considered myself a risk-taker.  I tend to think of myself as a person who does things by the book.  If I were to list my traits, adventurous and courageous would never spring to mind.  Even though I’ve ended up in a place in life that I could never have predicted, the many small steps I took to arrive here weren’t particularly relevant or earth-shattering or unique, but more just obvious steps that didn’t feel like any kind of stretch at the time. 

 

And yet, I’ve longed all my life to be an adventurer.  To take risks and be unafraid.

When I was young, I had a dream of joining the Peace Corps.  In high school, I cautiously sent away for a Peace Corps application packet.  When it arrived in a nondescript manila envelope, I paged through the document, dreaming of what I could write on its blank pages and the amazing places I could go.  And, for years, I carried with me a small round button, white with red stripes and a blue star.  I would gaze at that button, turn it over and over in my fingers, thinking about living in a small hut somewhere far away and doing something that mattered, at least to someone.  That button sang to me of infinite possibilities.

I never did join the Peace Corps, or even apply.  I went on with my life, thinking of it again only when I finished my master’s degree.  At that point, Steve and I embarked on what seemed like a massive adventure of our own, moving to Florida together and starting our somewhat predictable careers.   The Peace Corps was relegated first to my backup choice, if I had misinterpreted that we were in a serious relationship, and then to nothing at all.

Time passed, we both went back to school, changed jobs.   We moved to Memphis and had children.  And then, seemingly moments after my 40^th birthday, the unthinkable:   breast cancer.  In the very darkest week of my life, after I knew it was something intensely life-changing but before I knew it was survivable, I replayed the movie of my life.  One shining regret surfaced:  I never joined the Peace Corps.  And so, when the sun came out again and the darkness of cancer receded to the shadows, I was left with the knowledge that I needed to embrace my life and live without regret.  

Just as I was realizing these lessons, I got an email from IBM.  It said I had applications in the system for IBM’s volunteer program, the Corporate Service Corps, and encouraged me to actually submit them this year.  It was April 2011.  My first reaction was shock, of course, to know that they knew I had been filling out applications all along.  Then, I was shocked at being reminded that I had applied at all:   you see, in this program – called IBM’s Peace Corps –  IBM sends teams of international employees to an emerging economy to complete a community-based volunteer project.  

The Corporate Service Corps started several years after I joined IBM and caught my attention fairly quickly.  But, participants are required to stay a month in the host country to complete their project.  Yes, a month away from home.  Impossible.  Better than 2 years in the Peace Corps, but still impossible. 

As I sat facing my email on that April day, I was taken back to filling out the previous years’ applications mournfully, admonishing myself that as a new mother to first one baby, then two, there was no way I could leave my responsibilities.  So, I filled in the answers but never pressed “submit.”   It seemed too crazy, too irresponsible… not for someone like me.  Not for a working mother of two young children.

And yet, on this clear April day, a wave of fearlessness griped me:  power from overcoming another impossibility.

“Haven’t you supposedly learned to live your life?” I asked myself aloud in my empty room. “Haven’t you learned anything from cancer?  From these surgeries?  From facing death and coming back to your life?”

And with that, I furiously scanned through my previous answers.  I now added that I am a cancer survivor.  For the question about what I wanted to learn from an experience like this, I wrote that I want to learn to take risks, to live unafraid.  And in my rush of courage, I announced to my four walls I could hit “submit.”  That out of 400,000 IBMers worldwide and only 1200 participants, there was virtually no chance I would ever be chosen.  I pressed that green button.

And then, I promptly forgot about all of it.  You see, for me, the risk was simply submitting the application.  After that, it wasn’t even something that made it into the limited brainspace I have for things beyond taking care of my family, doing my job and working hard to maintain my precarious grip on health.  I jumped back into the daily rush of my life without another thought to the Corporate Service Corps or faraway places.  And I wouldn’t think of it again for almost 6 months.

Until another email would come one morning in the fall, telling me I had indeed been chosen.  But to find out what happens next, you’ll have to come back tomorrow.  #ibmcsc uae