Climbing a Mountain

I was surprised to find that blogger and adventurer Drew Jacob had mentioned me in a blog post published yesterday.  I was happily reading the post thinking "Yes, I agree with this!" when I came to this paragraph:

You might not be interested in climbing a mountain. Neither is Laura LaVoie, as far as I know. Her challenge was to build her own tiny house and downsize her life to fit into it. Then she went to Africa to use her house-building skills to help orphaned children.

Wow. He even links to my Tiny House blog and the donation page for the Zulu Orphan Alliance. I was stunned. I was more stunned because this isn't the first time Drew has mentioned me in his blog.

Other people always see you differently than you see yourself. I don't consider myself heroic in any way. In fact, what I do is nothing compared so some of the heroes I've been working with in South Africa. 

But one thing I do agree with is that profoundly changing your life changes everything. If we had never decided to build a tiny house, we would have never had the opportunity to travel to South Africa. Small steps became bigger steps and next thing you know, we were doing this thing. I don't want to live a conventional life. I've done that. I want to live an extraordinary life. And while it is exciting to see people like Drew talking about the things I do, I don't do any of it to be famous. I want to live an extraordinary life for ME.

One of my primary mottos or mantras is to Just Do It. If there is something you want to see happen, I promise you it won't just happen. You have to make the change you want to see in your life. I have done this. I am doing this. I have failed just as much as I have won.  Sometimes that happens, and it has to be okay.  But if you put forth the effort to make positive change in your life, positive change will happen. Maybe not in the way you expected, but it will.  In order for anything to happen, though, you have to actually do it.

I had to laugh, though, when Drew suggested that I didn't want to climb a mountain. He's right. It just isn't my thing. But interestingly enough, climbing a mountain was one of the things that gave me the strength to do what I am doing now.  You can read about it in the Winter 2007 issue of Neokori's newsletter, He Epistole.  (Go here and click on Issue #15).