How are we creating our future?
Get a notebook, Susie. You want one place to keep your ideas, think things through,
and sketch out your vision. Write it all down.” ~ Ralph deVille
I was headed up the stairs in my Dad’s shop, the Stone Lantern, in July of 1985. I was home from college on summer break and was working at the shop for a couple of months. Dad stopped me as I was about to run up to the Holt building to get a gift box for a package I was shipping out for a customer.
“I know how much you love paper,” he said smiling. “Do you want to see the journal I used when I first dreamed up the Stone Lantern?”
I looked at his hand and saw the small, ring-bound journal. I immediately knew how special, how important that little vinyl book was.
As I leafed through the papers, he stood next to me, explaining its history and contents. “I started this when I was at the business school at Harvard. This notebook is where I mapped out each detail about the shop.”
As I read the pages, I felt the transfer of knowledge emanating into my hands, traveling up to my shoulders, and exciting my heart before settling into my brain. Everything was in that book. Each detail of what he wanted to bring to life.
It was a passing of a torch, comprised of holy knowledge for my own journey.
When Hawaiians greet one another with “Aloha,” they are sharing a sacred breath together which they believe is the creation of life. Dad sharing his journal with me was a profound, Aloha moment, breathing his incredible passion, wisdom, creativity, and thinking into me, creating our future.
Dad was a couple years older at that moment than I am today. From here, this age, I can appreciate even more the depth of his intentions at the foot of those stairs.
Decades later, when I was thinking through my idea for launching a real estate company during the Great Recession of 2010, I got a journal and started dreaming and recording each detail. I had to be precise, exceedingly thoughtful about each aspect as I had scarce resources and one shot to get the plane into the air.
Any forgotten detail could sink me.
I sat for hours and hours with my journal during the weeks around Christmas. We had had a big snowstorm, and I was grateful that my part of the world stood still during those planning days. I got clear on what I wanted to call into being, as well as the precise details of the experience I wanted my firm to deliver.
I had no conscious recollection of the contents of Dad’s journal, nor his sage advice from 25 years prior. I came to learn later how indelible his journal was… how it was as much a part of my DNA as his eyes and flat feet.
About six months ago, out of the blue, I had a flash of an image of that journal, and the day at the foot of the stairs. I immediately was struck with a fierce zeal to find it. It had been over three years since Dad had died, and I wasn’t sure if my brother-in-law (the manager of the shop) knew where he might have kept that particular journal.
Jim pointed me toward a corner of boxes of Dad’s photographs, papers, memorabilia, and odds and ends. I dug in. In the last box, covered in decades of dust and grime, I saw the journal.
When I picked it up, a shock of memories coursed through me. Flashing, whirling. Snippets of our conversation, his smile, his explanations, his advice. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.
I sat on the floor, surrounded by all his things, and sobbed liked I had never cried before in my life.
When I pulled myself together, I flipped back the cover and began reading.
Lightning into each cell.
My journal of 2010 was an eerie mirror of the journal in my hands. My journal had almost identical sections and headings, including the same level of detail of desired customer experience, pro formas, people to approach for advice, design of the office space, and logo/branding brainstorming.
He even calculated how many sales he would need to make each hour….
And then I got to the page below. I could not believe my eyes. How could this be?
Dad and I had never spoken about the specific inspiration for the design of the shop, and how he came upon the idea for the building’s facade and display windows. As it turns out, a place that I hold to be sacred to me, Asilomar, had similarly grabbed his attention and interest.
He went on to create precisely what he had seen at Asilomar and in his mind’s eye.
He included photographs of Highlands Main Street in 1959. The shot below was taken from in front of the Stone Lantern.
And then there is this page… notes from a meeting he had had with his mother, my grandmother, Etta Josephine deVille, on April 27, 1959. I love the image of Dad sitting with her, probing her incredible mind and jotting notes.
We have so much more power than we give ourselves credit for. Our abilities to see what is not there and bring it into being are vast and often untapped. We can trudge along, day to day, without being cognizant that we are always creating our future reality, either with great intention and focus, or by default.
Get a journal today and begin engaging with the life force within you–the sacred, Aloha breath of creation. Exhale into our lungs what you see and seek. Stand next to us at the foot of stairs, and transmit your dreams into our hearts. Begin creating our future.
