What Might I Have Been

I am an educator. No matter the context – coach, editor, tutor, private teacher, study buddy, classroom teacher – that is what I have always been. There was a point of time in my life when I wondered if that is the career I would have chosen for myself. I wondered if I was meant to be an educator or if I had become one only because that is what my father had wanted to do and had not been able to do. For me, at that time, it was a crisis of conscience.

During my year on leave after my father died, I spent a great deal of time with myself and being silent so that I could hear my truth amidst the noise of living. I remember making a list of everything I might do other than teaching. I plumbed my own thoughts, talked to my best friend, and even looked through the Yellow Pages. I allowed my ideas to be practical and outrageous. I still get a chuckle out of some of the ideas that made it onto that list. Without consciously knowing it, I was Decloaking™ to mySelf and Engaging™ with mySelf in order to connect to my truth.

And, at the end of my time of asking myself questions about my career choice and spending time really listening to the I AM that I AM, I know that being an educator was what I was meant to be at least on this go round in the physical world.

Even as I know that being an educator has been what I’ve manifested for myself in such a variety of expressions in this life and on this time line, I’ve sometimes played with wondering what else might I have done if I’d been in the physical world on a different time line. What might I have been?

I would have been a writer and a musician. When I started taking piano lessons when I was five, I enjoyed performing. Music speaks to my heart and my soul. It answers a deeply founded need in me. And I love language. I read voraciously and eclectically. And I write. Writing, too, answers a compelling need in me. So, I would have been a performer and a creator in a different sphere. And I know that, while I am still an educator, I am stepping into being mySelf as: Jean Winter, ‘C’reator.

My advice to everyone is: take the time to slow down and listen to your inner truth. Give yourself the time to explore everything that interests you. And choose for yourSelf and not for any external goal like fame, fortune, power, recognition, or acceptance. As I used to tell my students when any of them asked me about what subject they might study after high school, “Do what interests you and not what others say is valid or important or a good career choice because you’ll always have a job and there’s good money in it. School is challenging enough as it is without having to spend years studying something that does not light you up in any way.”

It is a good thing to remind ourselves that if we are doing something that we love, work will not become drudgery and we’ll get up every day and look forward to what the day will present. We will truly be able to ask ourselves how we, as godforces, choose to live each day and know that what we choose maps to our personal truth.