100 Days of Wonder – #2

The picture is of me in January 2006 in the lobby of the Contemporary Resort at Walt Disney World in Florida. It was my first trip. I didn’t care about Disney, I tagged along for the Florida winter sun. That trip changed EVERYTHING. It taught me to suspend reality. It taught me to throw myself into my imagination with reckless abandon and to trust it. Trusting my imagination was something I had lost studying law, imagination had felt mostly irrelevant to my degree and in many ways to the PhD I was working on at the time. But re-discovering my ability to imagine different ways of being and thinking have been key to my development as a law teacher and academic. The trip also reminded me of the power of good story telling and that drew me into Disney. Not that I knew it then, but that being drawn into Disney set the safety net that I would need, years later, when academia so nearly broke the joy and wonder in that twenty-something year old little kid in the picture. Sometimes I miss her and I often wish I could whisper in her ear: ‘It’s fine, you’re doing it right!’