Someday Ain't a City in France

Yesterday a client sent me sixty photos from Paris.

Sixty.

The Eiffel Tower.

Sidewalk cafés.

Her son holding up a croissant larger than his skull. 

Her family grinning together in places that had previously existed only in the someday portion of her brain.

Along with the photos, she sent me a message:

“Since you helped make it happen.”

And my face immediately started leaking.

For her privacy, I’ll call her Elle, oui?

When Elle began her eight-week Neuro-Proof Narrative Quest, she chose travel abroad with my family as her lighthouse goal.

A lighthouse goal is one concrete destination that points toward our favorite self.

Not our most productive self.

Not our most impressive self.

Not the self who finally figures out how to cram six more obligations into a life that already has no room to sit down.

Our favorite self.

The version of us who feels most alive inside our own life.

Elle and her family had already had their passports for more than a year.

She loved traveling.

New places.

New people.

New food.

She wanted Paris.

But she also had a demanding career, children, and a packed family schedule.

There were work responsibilities.

School calendars.

Coverage.

Money.

Timing.

Approximately eleven squillion decisions standing between her and the Eiffel Tower.

The dream was not impossible.

It was decision-heavy.

And our brains are exceptionally skilled at turning a decision-heavy dream into someday.

Someday is wonderfully accommodating.

Nothing has to be scheduled there.

Nothing costs money.

Nobody needs coverage.

There are no competing calendars, flight delays, permission slips, hotel reservations, or children who suddenly announce that they cannot possibly survive without the hoodie they left at home.

Someday allows us to keep a dream without taking any of the risks required to live it.

We get to want it.

And we never have to become the woman who does it.

Because that is what every meaningful goal eventually asks of us.

Not only action.

Identity.

Finishing a book asks us to become someone who finishes books.

Cleaning the garage asks us to become someone who makes decisions about seventeen unidentified cords and the broken lamp nobody remembers buying.

Learning to run asks us to recognize ourselves as someone who runs.

Surviving a divorce asks us to build a life for a woman we have never had to be before.

Traveling abroad asks us to become someone who travels abroad.

Our brains can resist every single one of those.

Our current identity has evidence.

Our next identity has a brochure.

Our brains know how the current woman lives.

They know what she postpones.

They know which responsibilities she handles.

They know what she calls unrealistic.

They know which dreams she keeps safely preserved behind glass under a little plaque that reads:

SOMEDAY. DO NOT TOUCH.

The next version of us is unfamiliar.

And unfamiliar can feel dangerous even when it looks like Paris.

This is why I use dopamine and play in my coaching.

Not because women’s dreams are games.

Because becoming someone new is hard enough without making every step feel like a punishment.

Play gives the brain a reason to approach instead of avoid.

Dopamine helps create movement.

Small wins become evidence.

Evidence makes the unfamiliar less unfamiliar.

So throughout Elle’s Quest, I made sure Paris kept arriving on her doorstep.

Eiffel Tower socks.

French cookies.

A puzzle of France.

Tiny, playful reminders that Paris did not belong exclusively to some imaginary future version of her with fewer responsibilities and a magically cooperative family calendar.

Paris belonged in this life.

The socks did not solve the scheduling conflicts.   

The cookies did not make reservations. 

Elle did the work.

She created options.

She delegated.

She made decisions.

She got herself and her family onto that plane.

Those small pieces of Paris simply helped her practice recognizing the woman who could.

Then the woman who could became the woman who did.

Months later, sixty photographs traveled all the way from Paris to my phone.

And I cried.

Not because I believed her accomplishment belonged to me.

It did not.

Influence is not ownership.

Her courage belongs to her.

Her decisions belong to her.

That experience belongs to her family.

But something we created together had traveled.

Conversations across two Zoom screens became decisions in her actual life.

Those decisions became plane tickets.

Those plane tickets became her family standing beneath the Eiffel Tower.

And somehow, a little piece of my life arrived there too.

We tend to measure our lives by what happens directly to us.

The places our bodies have stood.

The things our hands have made.

The goals with our names written across the top.

But our lives are so much bigger than the borders of our own experience.

They keep traveling through other people.

The friend who finally applies because we reminded her who the hell she is.

The child who enters the world carrying the curiosity we protected in them.

The woman who leaves because watching us leave helped her realize she could.

The client who stands beneath the Eiffel Tower after conversations that helped make Paris feel possible.

None of their lives belong to us.

But our lives have touched theirs.

Something moved between us and kept moving.

A question.

A kindness.

A challenge.

A ridiculous gift.

A moment when we saw someone’s favorite self before she could fully see her.

Most of the time, we never find out where those moments go.

Nobody sends us sixty photographs.

We do not know that the sentence we said five years ago still lives inside someone.

We do not see every decision that grew from a seed we planted.

We cannot track our influence through every friendship, family, workplace, conversation, classroom, hospital room, dinner table, book, or brave thing we did while somebody else was watching.

But our lives are traveling.

Right now, parts of us are living in places we have never visited.

Inside choices we will never hear about.

Inside people who may not even remember where the first little spark came from.

I do not have a passport.

As a chronically ill woman with mobility issues, I genuinely do not know whether I will ever stand beneath the Eiffel Tower myself.

There is grief inside that sentence.

There is also something breathtakingly beautiful beside it.

My body has borders.

My life does not.

Neither does yours.

We have all been places we have never gone. 

How far have our lives already traveled?