“What is just around the curve in the road is out of sight.”
Back in 2005, I was driving past a small town in New Mexico—really more of just a truck stop at the intersection of two highways—when my cell phone rang. I answered the call and all I heard before losing the signal as the road descended down from the somewhat dry and baron mesa was “This is Harpo Studios calling”. As you might imagine, I was beside myself to the point of even questioning whether I had heard the woman’s voice correctly. Once the highway reached the top of the next mesa, I pulled over to the side of the road hoping that the signal was strong and the phone would ring again. For two hours I waited on the side of a lonely two lane highway, with nothing but two cows and a broken windmill in sight. The stark difference of the ordinary afternoon aside a New Mexico cow pasture and the possibility of a call from the studios of the daytime queen, Oprah Winfrey, was nothing less than surreal. And then, the phone rang and my life changed in an instant. I was headed to Chicago to appear on the “Oprah Winfrey Show”.
Prior to that call, my life had been a training ground for what would come later although I didn’t know it at the time. I will always be grateful to that wonderful Harpo producer and to Oprah herself for taking a chance on a very nervous and camera-shy, unknown author. After that episode aired, my book “The Velvet Rage” slowly began to take flight and reach gay men and their allies around the globe who had struggled with shame as I had. It was a book that two years prior the senior editor of Simon & Schuster had rejected saying “This book does not represent any gay man I know.” In my younger years I had written to achieve the dream of being a famous author, but no longer. Now, I wrote because I had no choice but to write. My writing became deeply personal and vulnerable in a way it had not been before as I chronicled the difficult task of repaying the debit of childhood shame caused by growing up gay in a straight man’s world.
My life has had highs and a few personal lows, and through it all I’ve learned an important lesson: You don’t know what’s around the bend in the road. We peer down the road and think we see the end, but it is an illusion, for the road always bends just out of our sight. Every time my life has changed, it has been in an unanticipated instant—a call came, an email was received, a person entered a room, an opportunity seemingly fell from the sky. For all my dear friends who are struggling to find success in a realized dream, I can’t promise you that your dream will come true. But what I can offer is what the writer James Miller aptly describes as “the 100% money back guarantee”: your Oprah call will come just around the bend in the road. If you will honor the present moment with all the focus you can muster, be grateful for the “day job” that supports you, and hold to what is true, authentic and at the core of your being, you will have everything you need to answer that call, no matter how ordinary it may seem. These things are the necessary ingredients for joy, and if you have joy, you will have love.
And if you have love, all will be well.