Tea with a friend

I had the loveliest experience today. A friend of mine invited me for tea on the rooftop of her apartment building. She had just finished deep cleaning the suite where she and her boyfriend had been living. Their sublease was up; her suitcases -- one big and one small -- were packed and ready to go, and our tea was the last act before the curtain would fall and she would vanish into a taxi en route to a holiday in France.

So there were we at five in the afternoon, in a beautiful, old apartment, warm with the light of the late-afternoon sun. The walls were hung with canvases from artists new to me, and there was a bookcase devoted to music and another which was home to the kind of tomes that warm my heart: books about food by some of the most passionate and prolific writerly palates of today and yesteryear.

Mlle. Montmartre had scrubbed and tidied the place until it was as neat as it must ever have been, and she had only the fridge to empty and the bedclothes to bring up from the laundry before she could leave. Yet she was apologizing for being disorganized and inconveniencing me. I couldn't help but laugh and shake my head and assure her that she was doing no such thing.

Would I like the leftovers from the fridge, she wanted to know. Of course I would! There were blueberries and strawberries, olives and five different kinds of cheeses, an untouched pat of butter, garlic, sun-dried tomatoes, artichoke hearts, an enormous jar of Dijon mustard, nearly a full bar of the best dark chocolate, a few pieces of ginger root, and other goodies besides. Heaven!

We managed to fill four bags with leftovers. These delicious spoils were topped off with a small collection French and English paperback novels. Then Mlle. Montmartre and I headed upstairs to the rooftop to enjoy a mug of tea in the sun. We chattered away, happy as two birds, with the West End below us and boxes of lavender and summer flowers for company.

Some people are so full of life and joy that they can't help but transmit it to those around them. Mlle. Montmartre is like that. She's as bright and sparkling as champagne. She fizzes and pops and lends charm and excitement to her surroundings. She carries a little bit of her native France with her, and spending time with her makes you feel like you've wandered into a corner of Paris.

A scant hour later, Mlle. Montmartre ran downstairs to pick up the bedclothes, still nice and warm from the dryer, and we made up the bed in record time before locking up the apartment for good and delivering the keys to the next-door neighbour. A taxi was called, and we found ourselves outside, me with my four big bags of groceries, and Mlle. Montmartre with her luggage. She insisted that I hop into the taxi with her so that I wouldn't need to carry my spoils home, and dropped me off safely in front of my building, laden down with good food and buoyed by the fun we'd have together and the plans we'd come up with for the summer.

Good friends are delightful.

Cleaning out your dreams closet, continued

I wasn't sure at first.

Both directors had been frank, knowledgeable, and kind. Yet my intuition was telling me in no uncertain terms that the plans I'd been incubating so carefully over the last seven years were not ones I'd be well advised to pursue.

It was a few days before I recovered enough to dig deeper. I still wanted to become a counsellor, and it was painful to admit that I might be on the way to giving up my dream. When at last I did face up to reality, I had to admit that I hadn't connected with the director of the counselling psychology program. In fact, we'd been at several wavelengths' remove. The longer we spoke, the more certain I became that my values were on a direct crash course with the school's social-justice bent. Although I wanted to help people who needed it, I was more interested in coaching than advocating for social and political change.

The outgoing director of the organizational psychology program was a different story altogether. I appreciated her warmth, business-like demeanor, and quick wit. She was clear on the relative merits and disadvantages of her program and she was funny. Not only that, but she was well dressed and well groomed. All this felt strangely familiar. Where had I met people like her before, I wondered. Oh, right -- as in right in front of me. In fundraising.

At this point in my analysis, a wise little voice from somewhere deep inside me piped up: "Forget a degree in psychology. You don't need to go there. Fundraising has everything you want already, including psychology, and it won't cost you tens of thousands of dollars to get started. You're already well on your way."

I had to agree with the WLV. I *do* like fundraising. I really like it. It's just that the grass had seemed greener on the psychology side of the fence. Consequently, I'd spent so much time gazing over the fence boards that I hadn't seen the meadow lushifying around me.

Here's the part where you might benefit from my experience. I had to do more than daydream about counselling to come to this conclusion. I had to take a good, hard look at what it was going to take to turn my counselling and coaching dream into reality. It wasn't only the chats at my school of choice that had done it. It was learning how difficult it is to start a private practice in Vancouver, how saturated the market already is, and how much effort it was going to take to get where I wanted to go. The exercise helped me to become clear about what I really wanted.

So if you've got one or two dreams in your closet that you haven't tried on for size recently, please do. Don't postpone the moment of truth indefinitely. The odds are, it will either fit you, which is what you wanted in the first place, or it won't, and you'll be able to fold it up carefully, perhaps with a sentimental sigh, then more cheerfully make way for one that does.