We arrive in this world with birthright gifts—then we spend the first half of our lives abandoning them or letting others disabuse us of them. As young people, we are surrounded by expectations that may have little to do with who we really are, expectations held by people who are not trying to discern our selfhood but to fit us into slots. In families, schools, workplaces, and religious communities, we are trained away from true self toward images of acceptability.

We are disabused of original giftedness in the first half of our lives. Then—if we are awake, aware, and able to admit our loss—we spend the second half trying to recover and reclaim the gift we once possessed. 

Parker J. Palmer — Let Your Life Speak (p. 12)

So much of adulthood is undoing the programming we received growing up. This isn’t a knock on our parents—they did the best they knew how at the time—but it’s a fact of life that we all were conditioned in one way or another as children.

So much of being an adult is recognizing our conditioning and how it affects us even still. What would you believe if you were born on the other side of the world? Who would you be if you had different parents, went to a different school, chose a different career?

Are you living every single day using your birthright gifts? If not, I wonder why. It could be you accepted less for yourself in order to put food on the table, or pay your mortgage, or pay off student loan debt. What would it look like to take one step closer to using your giftedness?

Have a blessed day.

Peace and Love,

~Travis