**Flying Lessons**

I'm taking Flying Lessons! I know, you are probably imagining a plane and me in the cockpit. Instead, I don't need a plane, I just spread my arms and fly! Let me start at the beginning....

I have always been a creative type. At the age of ten, my grandma taught me to cross stitch and also to crochet. The cross stitch still hangs in a frame in my mother's home. It was a teapot and was done all in pink. Everytime I see that teapot, I smile to myself and remember all those years ago sitting with my grandmother and how much I enjoyed that. Next on list, was learning to crochet. I am left handed, and my grandmother was right handed. Now that had to be challenging. But she did it and I can still crochet to this day, more than 20 years later. I am so thankful for those memories and also the skills that I learned. The creative bug, just kept building and building in me.

When I was a kid, I used to watch "Who's the Boss". Does anyone remember that show?  I wanted to grow up to be just like Angela Bauer, she was president of a marketing company or something. What intriqued about that was, not the business side as much, but art side of it. I thought that was so cool. So when I graduated from high school, I enrolled in a Commercial Art program at the local community college and was on my way to becoming Angela Bauer. When I was finished with the first year, I liked 50% of what I learning in the Art program, and hated the other 50%. While taking my art classes I really enjoyed the more technical aspect of art, and I remember drawing file cabinets in isometric views and having to render them, to appear life like. That REALLY interested me and computers were just coming in to play here (around 1992), we were learning Illustrator and PageMaker, and I loved doing page layouts on the computer.  I especially liked the technical aspects of art.

I really love the creative artsy side of me, but I also have a side that likes order, organization, analyzing and mathematics. I refer to myself as a creative Type A personality. I know, probably sounds like a weird mix, but hey, we are all different right? So, I don't remember the exact event, but I decided that when I finished my Commercial Art program, I wanted to go back and get a Drafting and Design degree. So after 2 more years and 15 years later, here I am. After I graduated, I got a job in a publications department as an illustrator at a company that made mechanical equipment. That was fun for a while, but after about a year I got restless and decided that I wanted to design the products and put my Computer Aided Drafting Skills to work. I moved into the engineering department at the same company and became pretty good at 3D design on a computer. I have always been able to imagine things in 3D, so it was pretty easy for me. After a while, I got restless again and went to a different company that made different products, but doing the same thing. And then a while later it was a different company, different products. After I while, I realized, it wasn't the company or the products that was the problem, it was me! There are parts I really love about being a mechanical designer, like drawing on CAD, and bringing things to life in 3D, but I had gotten to the point, where my heart really wasn't in it. And I was wondering, what do I want I want to do when I grow up? I don't know, but it's not this! I kept having these whispers as Kelly Rae Roberts puts it and images of my inner spirit in cage that just wanted to get out and "fly and soar above" and having feelings of jealousy, (even though I was happy for them) when I would hear of other people who were running their own creative businesses and actually supporting themselves doing it. I would watch shows on HGTV, (yes I'm an HGTV junkie!) and people on there were selling their house or redoing there rooms, and in the intro o the show they would say "so and so is an artist and they work from home". And they would show their office or design area and I thought to myself, other people are doing it, why can't I do that?  Finally, I told myself, you can do that! I know it will take hard work and it won't happen overnight, but that can be you! So here I am, after a lot of self realization and introspection, I am working towards that dream.

That's what ended up bringing me to "Flying Lessons" Next time, I will talk about what I have learning during my "Flying Lessons"....and maybe you will find something that might inspire you to find that inner spirit in yourself, and what you truly want. I believe all of us, whether we realize it or not, have some type of inner yearning that wants to come out. What is yours? I would love to hear about it!