100 Days of Wonder – #4
If something is worth doing, it is worth doing right. Attention to detail and bothering with detail in the first place makes a difference to how people feel. I am utterly useless at attention to detail in the way it is generally used in the professional sense. I’m big picture and ideas not crossing Ts and dotting Is. I can’t proof read to save my life but I am good at the detail of life. I am good at doing the people things right and creating the space for their magic to happen. Seeing detail like the detail in the lamp makes me smile. Disney didn’t have to do this but they did. It reminds me to stop and think about what little detail might make someone smile today. How can I add just a little bit of pixie dust to someone’s day. Sometimes it was as simple as knowing a student’s name, thanking a colleague for their efforts or sending a text or email to check in with someone for no other reason than because you were thinking about them. I think about my friends and colleagues all the time. I’ll try pause more to let them know how amazing I think they are. Spreading a little joy really isn’t that difficult!
100 Days of Wonder – #3
In spite of the smile in the photo, I hated most (all?) of my first Disney race. It was a half marathon. Training had been awful, I hated running and I did it only because we were doing it for charity. Our friend Rachel had died the previous year and nothing much made any sense. The run was for her. I look back at that run with wonder and awe. At this point the only thing running had taught me was that I hated running. I don’t know how I did it. I don’t know how I got round. I had no clue what I was doing. That woman in that picture there – she had so much mental strength, she was so determined to finish and she crossed the finish line purely because doing anything else would have been unthinkable. On this occasion doing the impossible wasn’t fun, not at all. But I look back at this picture and smile. It’s the perfect reminder that we are always stronger than we think we are. I suspect that this run also set the scene for what is now a more than 10 year love/hate relationship with running and with RunDisney in particular. I look at 2013 me with so much admiration that I sometimes forget that’s me. But it is and I find both joy and wonder in that.
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!’
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