I did a thing today -- a thing that's taken two, nearly three years to do. I put myself out there. In a big way. In the kind of big way where one risks crushing and crumbling of tender butterfly wings, etc, etc, etc, if it doesn't work out. We sent our pilot to LA, in a beautiful package, stuffed with enough airy popcorn dreams to fill an entire warehouse with wishing. There are times when every cliche on earth truly applies. Now would be one. I'll unleash a few:
"It's not the destination, it's the journey"
"80% of success is just showing up"
"Want it and it will be"
"Just do it" (whoops, where'd this one come from?)
And then there are parts of the journey where no pre-packaged, well-branded slogan applies. Today is a day when the act of breaking through a pane of glass to get to something I could see right in front of me all along is monumental in a way that no one will ever value as much as I do. It's a quiet thing, to borrow one of my favorite lyrics from the great Kander and Ebb. A very quiet thing.
It was supposed to happen in a big, loud way. We'd planned for 5 months to put that pilot package in the mail together with a big, ceremonial flourish and then rush off to Balthazar to drink a minimum of two bottles of champagne and eat shellfish. Celebratory, right? Hell yeah! And then, naturally, those good old best laid plans pulled themselves up and re-laid themselves elsewhere (isn't that the cliche?). For a virtual plethora of tech-heavy reasons, the pilot didn't go out on our big day. But we went out. We went out and swam to the bottom of a couple of bottles of this and that, trying to internalize that whole "ratio of expectation to reality" thingy.
Five furious days later, today, I took it to the post office myself. I filled out the forms and addressed the labels and held it to my chest and surrendered it and waited until I walked outside the building to exhale. And that was that. Me and it. It and me. In my hands and then gone.
A very quiet thing, indeed.
And maybe, in the spirit of all things Chrysalis, the very best thing.
