I posted this video to my personal Facebook page earlier today but it’s so very good that I wanted to post it again and write a little about it.
First off, I feel the need to confess that I’ve not been an Oprah fan for many, many years. I hadn’t really considered when I feel off the bandwagon but I think it was in the late 90s. Ironically she speaks to the “confrontation” programming that the show went through around that time because well…that’s what everyone else was doing. I think that was about the time I lost hope in Oprah.
For me she went from this woman who was “making it” despite all the odds being stacked against her…bringing amazing stories of triumph to the forefront…to a talk show host that had lost her way sometimes unintentionally humiliating guests. Rather than stick around and watch what I thought was surely a downward spiral, I bailed. It can be a fickle world after all and I lost interest.
When she started her own network, I was still unimpressed. Sure, her line up was amazing but I still had that impression of exploitive Oprah in my head. I would catch a Super Soul Sunday every now and then when the guest was someone who I was really, really inspired by….like Brene Brown or Pema Chodron. But other than that, I still wasn’t an Oprah groupie and I didn’t pay much attention to what she did or said. Until today….
Princess Grace (my friend, not the real princess) sent me a link to the Stanford interview and something compelled me to click on it. Maybe it was because she sent it or maybe it was because I needed to hear the message. Whatever the reason, I was blown away. BLOWN AWAY (yes, I did just yell that)!
As I watched the interview, I saw Oprah as a person….not a personality. I better understood her struggles and successes. But most importantly, she spoke of her Personal Legend (see Day 21). She didn’t use those words, she used her own but that’s essentially what she was speaking of. Her belief that we are all put her for a divine purpose and that if we listen to our intuition we’ll find our path and great success…however we chose to define success for ourselves. I almost felt like she was speaking directly to me when she said things like,
“Knowing what you don’t want to do is the best possible place to be if you don’t know what to do.”
“Who are you and what are you going to do with it?”
“Align your personality with your purpose and nobody can touch you. You wake up every day and you are fired up.”
“You don’t have anything to give that you don’t already have.”
And possibly my most favorite — although it’s hard to pick from just this list alone:
“There are no wrong paths.” #boom!
I want to say it again, “there.are.no.wrong.paths”. A lovely Mermaid friend asked me right as I was preparing to leave my job if I wished I’d left sooner and made myself a priority when I was younger or if I thought it was better to be leaving now. It was a such a great question that I had to sit with for a bit before I could answer. Believe it or not, I hadn’t ponder that prior to her asking. After taking some time, I said that I thought I was exactly where I was supposed to be. That I had lessons to learn…mistakes to make…trials to go through…to be able to fully appreciate where I am now. To fully appreciate the direction I’m heading. To fully appreciate what is important to me and why.
There was a time in my life when I questioned my mistakes…not looking for the lesson but asking why such-and-such happened…asking why life was painful…asking why I felt so alone. I think the answers were that I was going down the paths I needed to in order to learn some very valuable lessons. Maybe I’m a slow learner since it seems like I repeated some mistakes a couple of times or maybe I needed to go a bit deeper into the lesson. Whatever the reason, I don’t question it anymore. To echo Oprah, “There are no wrong paths.”
Our divine purpose is set when we are born and everyday we are working toward it. Some may take a straight line and arrive sooner. Others may take some turns and side roads and arrive a little later. Still others take the scenic route and get distracted every now and then, but we all eventually find our way there if we pay attention to the signs.
But to do that we have to have our eyes open…our ears open…and our hearts open. Because when we find ourselves stuck…or realize we took a left when we should have gone right…we need to stop and remember “The way to get through the challenge is to be still and ask yourself ‘what is the next move’?” And then we have to listen for the answer.
Enjoy the video! It’s an hour but I promise it is well worth it.
(all the quotes are from Ms. Oprah Winfrey….love her) 🙂