aMAZingly You!

When I was a teen I was big into mazes. I loved trying to find my way out of hedge mazes, hay mazes, and even a huge corn maze once. In fact, the seasonal “Maize Maze” staff warned us to plan a couple of hours for navigating our way through the huge maze, complete with look-out towers. They also gave us an emergency “help” flag mounted on a tall pole so we could be found and rescued, along with a quick lesson on how to signal for help! It was great fun! We prided ourselves on finding the right clues along with our sense of direction for getting out on our own.

Intermingled and prior to that, as a pre-teen, I made tedious, complex mazes that filled up entire notebook pages and then asked my parents to make Xerox® copies of them so I could do them later. It was a fun thing for me, I would spend hours drawing out the home path, then filling in elaborate dead-ends and fake routes.

Now that I’m *ahem* older I love the metaphor a maze presents for the unique paths we take along our journey. When you think about it, there is one true, deeply intuitive path we are each following. Many times we stray from it, we get lost, or we might get fooled or lured into taking false paths that lead us away from our core values, or our natural instincts. Sometimes we get stuck (cue rescue flag pole). Some of us simply choose to meander—whether we’re unfocused on our goal, or enjoying some extended opportunities while accomplishing our goals. Now and then these alternative paths lead us back to our original destination, sometimes they just end and we have to go back and figure out where we went off track. No biggie. Because, in the end, if we were to turn around and trace our steps, we would see this amazing journey that brought us to our end goal. We might gaze across a series of repeating patterns, mistakes, and doubling back; but we could surely appreciate the beautiful design it created. One that is so purely our own blueprint embedded beneath our creative decisions, growth, and actions at that moment of our life.

Life invites us to be amazing! Don't retreat into creative non-action because you are worrying about choosing the wrong path (or project), if it turns out to be a dead end or takes you away from your values, turn around. Create your own path, create your personal maze, YOU know the best route to your creative success. Make it fun, make it happen!