When the Grand Canyon calls, answer!

October 5th, 2017

You know that feeling

when you get a call from your 86-year-old mother, who was on her way to see the Grand Canyon for the first time in her life, and she tells you she’s arrived at the Phoenix airport to meet her best friend from college who was going to be her travel companion,

and her best friend reports a family emergency which means she can’t go, and your mother is heartbroken because of the sad news of her friend and also because she can’t swing the trip alone,

so you jokingly say “need someone to join you at the Grand Canyon?” because you’ve never been to the Grand Canyon either, and your mother says “Yes, in fact, I do, Come!” so you take a breath and say to yourself “Wait a minute can I really go to the Grand Canyon?” and the voice inside your head doesn’t have to think too hard to say “Yes! Yes you can!”

So you say to your mom, “OK I’ll come!” And then in the next breath you say, “But I’m gonna have to do some work while I’m there.”

So you book an early morning flight to Phoenix and then drive to the Grand Canyon with your mom and when you get there it’s dark so you wait till morning to go to go see the canyon and when morning comes you decide to open your computer and get some work done before heading out,

but it turns out the only wifi is in the lodge that is full of people and when you hunker down to work the Wifi is sooooooo slow and there’s not a phone signal so you realize you can’t make all the calls you were gonna make and you’re like “What’s up Grand Canyon? I’ve got work to do!!”

but you keep at it and the slow wifi is making you tear your hair out and oh those phone calls and you swear a little and think erg I’ve got calls to make and emails to send and a speaking mastermind for women starting soon that still has two more spaces to fill and you’ve got websites to update and newsletters to write and gigs to book and content to create and you hadn’t really planned on a vacation this week.

And you can’t really do any of that work. 

You know that feeling? 

Then there’s this little voice that whispers in your ear…

“Um…Johanna?….hello? Are you in there?….um…you’re at the Grand Canyon. Go be with your mama. Go soak in the majesty. You can make that call / send that email / update that website / fill that program / book that gig when you get back to Boulder in just a few days. Everything’s gonna be fine.

Those women who are ready to stand on the rim of the canyon of fear and excitement and call their name out to the world? They’ll come.”

So if you’ll excuse me for just a minute, I gotta go stand on the canyon rim and call out “Hello World!” and see what the canyon calls back to me. 

Sending love from the Grand Canyon. 

Johanna