Bearded men draped in white seem to float past me while caucasian girls wearing wrinkled Indian style tunics over their dusty jeans bend under the weight of overstuffed backpacks. The sound of bangles jingle as the woman beside me answers an email and across the expansive carpeted corridor a small child writhes out of his mother’s embrace. He screams at what I can imagine is the injustice of his early wake-up call, the long line he endured through customs and immigration and, the restricted 5×5 square foot area his parents continue to chase him back to.

With the already unfamiliar bitterness of a Starbucks latte on my tongue and a fresh page in front of me, I crouch over my journal and capture the world as it passes me. Six weeks in India and 8 gloriously unplugged days on a tiny little beach in Goa and it’s already time to board my flight and circumvent the globe. As I wait for the first of my 3 flights to be called, I can’t help but reflect on the difference a year makes.

Last March, I sipped chai in the Cross-Cultural Solutions flat in New Delhi and wrote the following entry into my journal, “Next year, I should bring a group of 8-12 survivors to India for a 2 week program that includes volunteering and a trip to the Taj.”

Then in August of 2012, I took deep breaths and published this post: The Time For Big and Hairy Is Now. A few hours later, my good friend and fellow dreamer Gary Thompson of CLOUD sent me a message that said, “I see you’re writing the future again. Good for you.”

Writing the future? I had never thought about it that way. Maybe he was right. Maybe simply by putting my dream in black and white, I could change the course of my life. With no idea how or if this big hairy audacious dream could become real, I kept writing and kept believing that somehow my “morning pages” and this blog would show me the way.

Morning Pages & How They Changed My Life.

In the spring of 2010, with my body ravaged by chemotherapy and no energy to get off the couch, someone gave me a copy of Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way. Julia’s advice changed everything. For a period of 12 weeks, I had to commit to waking up every day and writing 3 pages of whatever came to my mind. I had to write these pages before I talked to anyone. Before I checked my email. Before I took a sip of my first coffee (ok I never could follow that rule). These pages had to be hand-written and I couldn’t read over them or edit them in any way. I simply had to write and turn the page. This 12 week assignment has stretched into a ritual that has lasted through 3 years and 15+ countries.

If you were to read my morning pages over the years, you might die of boredom. Literally. Almost every day starts with some variation of the following sentences “I’m tired”, “I don’t feel like writing today”, “I have nothing to say” or even sometimes (let’s be honest), “Did I really need that 2nd or 3rd glass of red wine last night?”

Yet somehow – pristine, empty journals have become tattered, messy anthologies – stuffed with the humdrum banality of life. AND – here’s the secret – on most days, about a page and a half in, magic happens. After my judgy internal critic has gone into a coma from the mindless drivel, a thought pops into my head and I write it down without evaluating whether it makes any sense or is even possible. A thought like, volunteering in Africa would inspire me, OR what if I could travel around the world and volunteer on every continent, OR wouldn’t it be amazing to take 8-12 cancer survivors to India to India to pilot this audacious idea for the Fresh Chapter Alliance Foundation?

Because these words are written when my internal judge has nodded off and because I can’t hit the backspace key to delete them and because I tell myself that no one will EVER know how wild my dreams can get, I am able to write them without needing to breathe into a paper bag.

The crazy part is that when I flip back through my journals, I can see that EVERYTHING in my life has come out of these pages. The blog, the travel, and the big hairy audacious dreams. Everything. Each morning I wake up and have no idea how to turn my dreams into reality, but each morning, the pages help me get a little closer. Do I miss the occasional morning? Absolutely. But, on most days, those 20 minutes with my first cup of coffee or tea ground me and inspire bigger things for my life than I ever thought possible.

Are you too busy to try this or are you staring at the screen (while rolling your eyes) because you don’t believe that one simple practice can change your life? I dare you to try it for 3 weeks and see if magic starts to happen.

What would you write about? Anything. Everything. That is the beauty of it. Write about your fears, your anger, your dreams, and your belief in anything being possible. But be careful – you just might find yourself penning the future.

As for me, I need to cap my pen and board my flight. Although I will be jet-lagged and caught in a fog somewhere between India and Vancouver by the time I post this, I will have already filled up many more pages with schemes and dreams for another life-altering adventure in November. Stay tuned. There is so much more to come…