Editor’s Note: Ever feel like you’re in a rut? Then read this. It’s a bit of inspiration from a woman who knows how it feels. This article’s by Katherine Hunt and she’s offering a free ebook of her poetry.  The download link’s at the bottom. It’s awesome stuff and we hope you enjoy it.

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Learning To Fly

By Katherine Hunt

A few years ago, I was house sitting, and awakened to a sporadic and piercing beeping noise. At first I thought that a burglar alarm was going off. However, after fifteen minutes of stealthy, heart-pounding investigation, I realized what was really happening: the batteries in the fire alarm in the guest room were starting to fail.

Being stubborn, I crawled back into bed, covered my head with a pillow, and attempted to go back to sleep. When my alarm clock finally went off at 5am, I saw with relief that the sun was coming up. I leapt from the bed and ran outside.

Birds were chirping. The air was fresh. The sky was painted with brilliant colors of red and orange. I was suddenly free from the torture that I had forced myself to endure for the last few hours. I took a deep breath, and in that moment I found a profound sense of peace. I realized that I could have moved out to the living room for the rest of the night. It was only my own preconceptions of where I “should” be sleeping that had kept me from moving to a more restful location than “my” room. And it struck me that much of life is like that: we get so fixated on what we expect; so accustomed to pain that we don’t see the simple solutions to ease our own suffering. Sometimes, though, the solutions aren’t as simple. Or, perhaps, they are simple, but terrifying, because they mean that we will have to change.

Around the same time, I was feeling very discontented with my job. What had once been challenging and interesting had become terribly routine and mundane. But I felt that I couldn’t leave. What else would I be doing? Where else would I go? I felt like there was no other purpose for my life, and what I was doing was, “safe” so I “shouldn’t” leave. The experience at my friend’s house shifted my perspective. Maybe I just couldn’t see what I was meant to do. If I just looked at other possibilities, perhaps I could give myself permission to leave a position that had become dissatisfying. Perhaps I would find something that I loved to do, and do it. Perhaps I could find the courage deep within myself to take a chance and make a change.

As a symbol of this realization, I drew a picture of a red-winged blackbird in a cage on my whiteboard at work. Every time I felt like I was closer to giving myself permission to quit, I would erase another bar from the cage. Other things about the picture changed, too. A potted plant grew and blossomed. A mountainous background took shape. One day, I was thinking about hope, and I drew a bluebird as a visiting professor for my blackbird. Some time later, I was looking at that picture just before walking to a mailbox at lunch. Leaving my building, the first lines of a poem popped into my head:

An eagle lived inside a bamboo cage.
His needs were met, he knew not love or rage.

What? I thought, What is this? Poking at it gently, I found more lines coming:

He thought he’d lived there all his little life,
and so he sang no songs of joy or strife.

I could tell that inspiration had hit in a big way. So I sprinted to the mailbox, threw my letter in, and ran back to my desk. An hour later, I had—there’s no other word for it—channeled the poem that would become the text for my book, Learning to Fly. Over time, the eagle became a falcon, but there were few other changes to the piece. Whether this is a good thing or not is up for discussion. But the point of the tale stands: living a life that is cramped, and less than what you are meant for, is dissatisfying. If you are willing to accept the truth of what you are and are willing to work at being that, then you can break free of your cage and learn to fly.

Of course the question is, what if, like the falcon, you don’t know what you’re dissatisfied about? For some, a teacher will arrive and point it out directly. For others, a more indirect method may be needed. It may require workshops, therapy, or paying attention to the things that cause you envy. But finding your passion may also be as simple as sitting down with a journal after asking, “what would make me fulfilled?”

I started asking myself that question and discovered that part of my life’s purpose is to help people see that there is a brighter world out there. Thus, it is my great honor and pleasure to be able to share my little book with you. I hope that you find it inspirational.

Just click here to download the book for free »