Memory Keepers = Bricklayers

When my husband shared this 2-Minute Monday Motivator by Rick Houcek with me years ago, it struck me to my core. Even though Rick’s wife wasn’t speaking specifically about memory keeping, I read it and instantly thought about my own journey.

I am a bricklayer. I am a memory keeper paving the way for future generations. As memory keepers and bricklayers, we will never finish our job (nor are we perfect) but hopefully we have done enough to make it easy for future generations to continue to lay the bricks of the memory keeping journey we have started.

Read the 2-Minute Monday Motivator below and let me know if you see the correlation, too!

 

Perhaps Your Most Important Job
By Rick Houcek, President, Soaring With Eagles

My wife is a brilliant energy therapist, working exclusively to empower women — both one-to-one and in groups — and she gets rave reviews from her clients, I’m proud to say.

She recently completed a series of life-building empowerment workshops for a group of junior and senior women at the University of Georgia.

What she told me afterward was jarringly profound — and has application for us all — women, men, young, old.

In the workshop, she told the women a story of a vision that came to her in a meditation. (Interestingly, she had not even told me this beforehand.)

In the meditation, she saw herself walking on a long, flowing, winding path of bricks — that seemingly went on forever…

…until suddenly the bricks came to an end — beyond which there was no road at all. Only muddy slop.

What? Where do I go next?, she wondered.

It struck her in that moment — that the bricks were symbolic.

They had been laid by women before her whose job it was to create a path and lead the way for the generations of women behind them.

The end of the road meant it was now my wife’s turn to lay new bricks ahead, to pave the way for the women who would follow her.

That, she intuited, is one of the most important meanings of life.

That we are all here…

…to extend the road…

…to be grateful for the bricklayers before us, and pay it forward, by building an ever-longer, ever-wider road…

…to broaden the possibilities for those behind us.

This is not elective, she thought. It’s obligatory. We all have a duty to be bricklayers and road builders.

She went on to tell the young women that, no matter what mistakes they’ve made up to now, no matter what failures they’ve experienced, or harm they’ve caused…

…they are fully capable, fully empowered, and possess all the brilliance, and know all they need to know…

…to lay the bricks up ahead anyway.

Past disappointments do not signal the end of the road.

Quite the opposite. They make us wiser to build it better, sturdier, and more robust, with experience as our teacher.

Concluding her remarks, she noticed the women were frozen in tears. Unable to speak. Stunned. Trembling.

Three of them jumped out of their seats, ran up and hugged her tightly, thanked her, and said no one had ever talked to them like that before.

No one had ever shown them the magnificence of their own personal power in such lofty, visionary words.

No one had ever made them feel so validated, so strengthened, so capable, so emboldened.

Several others remarked they never saw themselves as worth much, and felt their possibilities were limited.

Still others said they walked in to the session feeling powerless and lost… but now had hope, inspiration, and a clearer path forward.