Sometime in the next five years

Last weekend, after my haircut, I tripped into a new age shop and started looking around. I met an Astrologer with a short haircut I really liked and we got to talking about hair. I told her I was new to the city and about my barbershop experience. She had a nice face so I asked her about the Astrology readings and before I knew it, was making an appointment for a reading. I went home to unpack for a while and then headed back out to my new city for a new experience.

After generating my birth chart on the computer, Linda looked at me and said my chart suggested that I was an entrepreneur, someone who should have my own business or work for myself and that she was surprised that I had moved up here to work for eBay. I had to stifle a laugh when I heard it out loud, for some reason it sounded ridiculous that someone would go through what I just went through for a job at some generic big corporate Internet company. I told her that I would love to work for myself but I just haven’t figured out what the thing is. "You will," she said, "sometime in the next five years."

She said I had an issue with commitment because I am in constant conflict with myself. One the one hand, I want stability and need a home, I also want enormous freedom and have a need to travel. She suggested that I use home as a base instead of an anchor, and that I write down this phrase “freedom through commitment.” Committing to something doesn’t mean I can’t do the other things, she said, it just means I’m going to do that one thing fully. It made me realize, again, that in my ideal world I would travel the world, take pictures, interview people and write articles. Maybe for National Geographic, maybe just for myself.

Later when I recalled the details of a reading to some friends at a brunch, a woman I’d just met told me a story about a guy that works for her ad agency. He’s a guy, she said, who wasn’t sure what he was doing, just dabbling in graphic design and some other things. He put together a video for this job of his torso and arms walking the viewer through his world and what he does. He got the job and ended up directing the HP hands campaign based on his video resume. Now, he works part-time at one of the most prestigious ad agencies in the world and lives in his native London and wonders how the hell this all happened. The point was that you don’t need to know how to get where you’re going; you just have to do what you love.