Today was such a whirl-wind!! I had a morning meeting scheduled already but last night I learned the GTFF is on strike which opened up a whole slew of openings in my afternoon. I was telling my second coffee date (Tina, from previous post) about how sometimes I feel like my life is a little like the story in Slum-Dog Millionaire. In case you haven’t seen the film, the main character is a poor boy from a slum in India. Through a lucky set of events, he becomes a contestant on the game-show Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Impossibly, or so it seems, he is able to answer EVERY question right and the producers of the dhow (perhaps all of India) is incredulous as to how he could have completed this feat without cheating. In flashbacks throughout the movie, however, he identifies otherwise random life events which somehow gave him trivial knowledge. In the end, these bits of trivia are all he needs to answer the questions in the game show/ Interestingly, even one missed experience, one missed bit of knowledge he had unknowingly picked up along the way would have ended his journey towards winning the show.
In reflecting on my own journey, I often feel like the main character. While my challenging times are nothing compared to his, the circumstances of my life from the most random to the most intentional have all taught me things. In many of the cases, I don’t even realize what I’ve learned or how it will help me later. Inevitably, I find myself in situations where I already have a skill, a relationship, or some foundational knowledge that opens a door that would otherwise be closed, and I feel like a lucky if not undeserving game-show winner.
In my current awe-struck life, I am appreciating the random afternoon in February when I decided to put off doing other work to revise my resume. That lead to a good conversation with Hillary (thank you Hillary!) and I felt confident in “cold calling” with my resume in search of internships. The one opportunity that came out of that (teaching the workshop with Laurel at NPCC) has subsequently spawned a slew of other connections and opportunities that all seem to be snowballing in positive, professional directions. I still don’t know what direction I will be going next or which skills that I’ve picked up in the last year will be most useful, but I feel confident in the overall direction of this journey and my preparedness for whatever comes next.
Learning Through Difference, LLC 
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