My Friend Met Her Courage - by a Wheelbarrow

Riding around the Mexican countryside with my friend we are talking about the huge changes that have taken place in her life since she visited me last.

Including professional changes.

A talented, empathetic, and beloved health practitioner she has made some seriously courageous choices in order to keep her integrity happy and her passion for helping her patients bubbling.

This is fun stuff to talk about, important milestones to celebrate, and always extra exciting to look at it all with the perspective of “remember when?” As Steve Jobs said: “You cannot connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward…” and there we were, connecting the dots and honoring them.

This is when she delivered a shiny gem, right there in my dusty car.

“You know,” she said, “it’s because of you that I became a Nurse Practitioner.”

I’m surprised. I want to know more.

“Well, first of course it was your Essence work,” she says. Ah yes. Essence work is often the magic sauce and so even though I don’t remember the exact moment when the clarity showed up for her, it makes sense to me. Essence does that.

“And then, it was also during that Retreat that I got brave.” This, I definitely want to know more about. So I ask.

“Well, it was when I ate out of that wheelbarrow.”

Suddenly I am transported back ten years, to the tiny fishing village where we had spent time as a group. And I remember that night, the-night-when-she-ate-out-of-the-wheelbarrow. Except that I had had no idea that this had been so important for her.

Walking around at night, high on the warm January air, we had noticed a woman pushing a wheelbarrow full of something covered by a cloth. I had approached her, always curious about something new, especially possibly something new to eat, and had returned to the group holding a paper plate piled with warm fried bananas. Oooooo boy. They were some kind of delicious and it wasn’t long before several people, including my friend, were buying their own bit of deliciousness.

It was great street food, we bought bananas several more times during our trip and I never thought too much more about it.

This moment, that night, the-night-when-she-ate-out-of-the-wheelbarrow, is what showed my friend how brave she was.

It was her first time in Mexico, she had heard a bunch of the stuff people sometimes hear about going to Mexico, and even though she had made it through the flight, the cab ride, the hotel, and a swim in the ocean, eating-out-of-a-wheelbarrow was scary as heck, really. The germs, the who knows what, all of it. And she had just done it. And loved it.

And that was that. Between two scrumptious bites of warm, soft, and sweet golden bananas, my friend had quietly met her courage.

This courage would stay with her forever and make her say yes to some really big things, including going home a week later and enrolling in a Nurse Practitioner course.

I had not known that and I am awed by the importance of this news. Mostly because it happened so calmly, so … small-ly. And yet is so huge.

I remember going to a Tony Robbins event years ago and walking on coals at midnight in San Jose, California. About a thousand of us, a big huge production aimed partly at showing each of us, through (mostly) not burning our combined two thousand feet, how powerful we were, how brave. It was cool - well, you know what I mean - and it did send a message. I’m glad I did it. And it was a big show, a whole lot of loud cheering. I don’t always love big shows.

But my friend? She-ate-bananas-out-of-the-wheelbarrow. And there on the sidewalk, she met her brave self and rocked the heck out of it in school, and way more. Last month, she opened her own heart-based healthcare practice. Last week, she sent me a photo of her zip-lining in the Mexican jungle.

These big moments? They are not always big. Often, they are very small and quiet and no one is there to see you live them, to cheer you. Often, it takes ten years before you even talk about them, if ever.

But YOU know.
And Life knows.