Help For The Journey

The people that we come across in our lives are not accidental and on the journey to fulfil our purpose and pursue our passions, we will need people to teach, challenge, encourage and inspire us.

Some people will put obstacles in our way not to hinder us but to force us to rise higher than we ever thought possible.

So meet two dear people – Claire and Xenia. Some years back, Claire was delivering a course I was on and I shared a few lessons that I had gleaned from my father when I was growing up.

Claire told me that she always found my stories inspiring and encouraged me to write them down. A seed was planted that day and I pondered on it for a while. After a couple of years, I decided to make it happen.

By this time, Claire, Xenia and I were now working on the same team. I told Xenia about my book and discovered her passion was to be an editor and she offered her pro-bono service to me.

I still didn’t know what the next steps would be. Each time I thought about that, I got a sensing in my spirit that said, ‘just do your part’.

I gave myself to my part and stopped worrying about the next steps.

A couple of weeks later, I was returning from Edinburgh and sat across from a South African lady. I was exhausted and just wanted a quiet train journey home after a hard week’s work but I couldn’t resist smiling and saying hello.

If you’re a Nigerian, you grow up knowing that the polite and expected thing to do is to always greet others when you walk into a place. So that’s what I did while hoping that would be the end of it.

She leaned in and soon enough we were deep in conversation. She commented that she found me inspiring. I thanked her for the compliment and told her about my book.

She smiled and told me she was a retired book publisher. She offered to work on my book and connected me with other people who helped make the book a reality.

My book, ‘Flying High in a Polka Dot Dress’ was published in 2015 and it was a dream come true.

I had a passion for story telling, writing and inspiring people. Claire planted the seed to turn my passion into a dream project, Xenia and a random train journey companion helped make the dream a reality.

I learnt some lessons:

Help does not always look the way we expect

One lesson from this experience is never to underestimate the people who come across our paths. We have to set aside biases, pride and self-seeking agendas.

We don’t know the package our help will come in. Some of us could be looking for help to come from certain types of people and consequently we treat them with respect whilst looking down on others who may actually be the ones assigned to help us.

Play your part

Ideally we want to have the whole journey planned out but that’s often not an option.

We have to be willing to do our part and trust that the Master planner and Creator has the rest in hand.

Be alert and ready

We will come across people and opportunities in life. We have to be alert to the opportunities we are presented with and be willing to walk through doors that are open to us.

A casual comment from Claire kicked off the idea, a casual conversation with Xenia moved the idea along and a casual meeting on the train made it a reality. These ‘casuals’ could all have been overlooked or bypassed.

Thank you for reading, liking and sharing my post. See you next week and in the meantime, stay alert and be ready to maximise ‘life’s casuals’.