Just Start Doing It

The secret to unlocking the universe’s power to support your dreams? Just start.

You know that phenomenon where you’ve heard a piece of wisdom several times, but it doesn’t reeeeeeeeeaaaaallly land until that one particular day? When it actually lands?

Today was that day. The wisdom goes like this:

The universe responds once you start taking action.

I’ve heard this truth before—you’ve probably heard this truth before—we’ve ALL heard this truth before—but it finally clicked today, when I was in conversation with my oldest son, Ethan.

See, my kid is a woodworker, entirely by accident.

None of us saw that career path coming for him. Not his dad, not me, not his stepmom, not his brother or his roommates or his grandparents, and least of all him.

He moved to Vancouver in the spring of 2025 after finishing his private pilot’s license here in Victoria, and got a job working on the airport ramp slinging luggage. That fall, his company scaled the ramp agents’ hours back, and that just won’t do for a guy who’s paying rent and car insurance, buying food, and saving whatever’s left over to pay for flight hours as he builds toward his commercial license, all in Canada’s most expensive city.

So he went and got himself a job with better hours and better pay in construction. Which was a feat, considering the current job market for young folk. His gap year working in demolition helped immensely.

Hazmat suit on a scorching hot day, peeling lead paint off a government building downtown good times

Because he’s 22 and a Manifesting Generator (they’ve got mad energy, have a ton of projects and interests, and can literally manifest shit out of thin air), he would come home from his job in construction, have a quick dinner, and get to work on the train layout he’s building in the sun porch off the back of his house. The kid has always been train crazy, and after years of pining for a room in which to build a train layout in our house (there wasn’t one), he finally had his own place and a landlord who’s totally fine with the entire back room of his rental property being reconfigured as a train carnival.

He’d be in there tinkering and hammering and sawing away late into the evening, building a U-shaped series of tables that traced the walls of the room. Just him and YouTube and my dad’s old HO-gauge trains, just making it up as he went along.

Because his boss liked him, he gifted Ethan a bunch of tools to support his hobby.

About six months into his job, he got laid off. It was a shock: he liked the work; his boss liked and appreciated him; the company seemed to have stable gigs renovating restaurants for a big multinational. But for whatever reason, something sudden and mysterious happened, and the HR manager caught up to him in the yard one day and told him they needed to let him go.

Huge bummer.

But because he’s 22 and relatively new to adult life, he didn’t pause for a moment to sulk Why does this always happen to me? like an older person tends to, or allow his brain to come up with any limiting beliefs or stories about how hard it is to find work in this economy as a Gen Z.  

Nope. He marched straight across the yard to the woodworking shop that a couple brothers had been renting from the construction company. He’d done some work with these guys over the months he’d been with the construction company, so he just opened the door to the woodshop and stuck his head in and said, “Hey guys, I just got laid off, which is kind of a drag, and I’m wondering whether you need another person?”

It took them all of two minutes to say yes.

So now the guy’s a woodworker, a massive surprise career shift that took place in the span of, like, an hour. In fact, he’s just passed his probationary period, earned a raise, and is now fully ensconced in a trade.

WAT?

Hammering together offcuts with second-hand tools in his spare time so he can enjoy his passion…leads my kid into a kick-ass future?

Kay. I’ve been faffing about for YEARS feeling around for the stoke in life. I started out as a teacher, but that frustrated me because I didn’t agree with our paradigm of making a diverse group of children learn the same thing at the same time when their brains are absolutely at different stages of development—not to mention their interests being entirely unique and not always overlapping with curriculum expectations. Then I had my own children and worked as a freelance writer, but Covid swallowed my clients and then ChatGPT swallowed my whole fucking industry.

I wrote a bunch of books in there and did author talks at schools, but the freelancing really burned me out from writing. I didn’t even want to write books anymore. I stopped for about ten years. Just put the pen down and walked away.

After Covid I trained as a somatic coach, because my world had been rocked by The Untethered Soul and Parmahansa Yogananda and Gay Hendricks’s books about the breath, the body, and how we get our own selves into the shitmixes that our lives turn out to be. And believe me, I wanted to reconfigure the shitmix that was my life at the time.

But I had a family to support and I needed a much longer runway to pivot and reestablish myself as a somatic coach when all anyone had ever known about me was that I was an author and wordsmith.

So I retrained again, this time as a book coach, knowing that it blends all of my writing and editing skills with my voracious curiosity about the business of publishing, and it’s been a wonderful move so far. I can work from anywhere in the world, the projects are always interesting, I never have the same day twice, it’s an intellectual and psychological challenge trying to figure out how to position my clients’ books in a volatile marketplace, and my clients become my friends over time.

But still, I’m yearning.

I’ve come back to my roots as a writer and have started creating again. Year of the Fire Horse. Raising our voices. Following our truest true north. Creative expression rising. Last summer I got my world blown apart by an inexplicably strange and cosmically engineered the-fuck-was-THAT? event, and it reignited my desire to convey significance through story.

Through that total realignment experience in 2025, I came back to the mountains that I grew up in and that I love to the bottom of my heart. I rediscovered Banff, Revelstoke, the Bow Valley where Camp Chief Hector grew my soul, the Kananaskis River where I took people rafting, Rafter Six Ranch where I worked as a wrangler.

I’m just going to start.

This reconnection with the terrain of my heart, in turn, has reignited my passion to tell stories rooted in the history of this astonishing country—stories of hard work and heroic living in the days before we knew anything about the costs of resource extraction. Driving back and forth through the Rockies brought me back into contact with the trains that lumber faithfully back and forth across all 4600 kilometres between Vancouver and Montreal, day in and day out, transporting to the coast the grain, coal, fertilizer and car parts that keep our country’s economy afloat.

I’m fascinated by the railway in a way I can’t explain. I could stand for days next to the sheer energetic presence of old steam engines or between the peeling mildewed walls of decommissioned dining cars, imagining endless lives and journeys of restless searching. Probably something is rooted deep back in my ancestral line, some ancient etching of the plaintive wail of the steam locomotive in my DNA, because the romance of the railway won’t let me go, and now it’s got my kid, too.

Mining holds me in a similar thrall: the danger, the darkness, the diligence, the dignity and daring of those men, pushing and pulling and hammering and scraping in the cold, damp blackness so their families could eat and so they could save up enough to buy a little homestead and maybe grow wheat or cattle so they wouldn’t have to spend their days bent over and breathing in naphthalene anymore. The complicated and demanding lives their women led as they oversaw a household and children and sickness and injury and laundry and baking and paying the butcher and feeding strangers who turned up at their door smelling like fear and gambling, and darning torn socks and watching helplessly as pneumonia slowly suffocated their babies and milking the goats.

Later this month, I’m heading back into the Crowsnest Pass to reconnect with our country’s history of mining. I’ve just finished reading All Fall Down: The Landslide Diary of Abby Roberts, one of the Dear Canada series for middle graders. If you ever want a crash course in a topic and don’t have time to wade through the web, read a children’s book. All Fall Down is about the enormous landslide in April 1902 in the town of Frank, Alberta, just 20 kilometres east of where the pass itself sits atop the continental divide. I’ve visited it twice in my life: once with a group of 40 fifth-graders on an overnight trip, and once with my two children at the tail end of a cross-Canada road trip where we were so exhausted we just pulled over, got out of the car, climbed up onto the huge rocks and took pictures, and then beelined across the bottom of the province to catch the last ferry to Victoria.

I’ve never wandered the Frank Slide Interpretive Centre, lingering over old photographs and writings. I’ve never visited the graves at the base of Turtle Mountain. I’ve never lain on the stones beneath which still lie the bodies of Ruby Watkins and Rosemary Leitch and James Arthur Ennis and Nancy Elizabeth Ackroyd and dozens of other people whose cottages were crushed flat by a thundering nighttime monster they could hear coming but never laid eyes on.

I’m going back this summer, and I’m going to immerse myself in all things mining. Let the stories take me over and breathe me. So many stories in the Crowsnest.

I’ve spent the last number of years stuck in Victoria, stuck in my house and stuck in my head, and not doing the things that 2026 is now pushing me to do.

I want to move. I want to travel. I want to explore. Not far, not abroad. I have no interest in taking selfies in Europe or bagging peaks on the Annapurna circuit (like I could lol). There’s more than enough to discover and dream about in my own backyard. I love long road trips and have done several with my sons—crossing the prairies to go kayaking on Lake Huron, visiting the national parks in the western US, driving the Oregon and California coast.

I like driving. I used to want to drive rigs. I’ve fantasized for years about driving across Canada, or hiking across Canada, or even riding a horse across Canada because that’s actually the pace at which we’re meant to see new places, but I’ve always worried about How am I ever going to afford that?

This year, I have a new plan. I’m just going to start doing it.

Just like my kid.

Woodworker by accident? That was by design. And it’s exactly how the universe works.

Just start. You’ll feel excited, and the ethers will pick up your frequency.

You’re not an author yet. You don’t have your book yet.

Just start writing.

I don’t have my F-350, nor have I got my hard-body camper. I have Belle, my 2011 Nissan Rogue, all 243,000 km and broken windshield and acorn-dents-across-the-roof-and-hood of her.

Hotels add up, so I’m going to be camping. I just bought myself a spanking new tent yesterday, having worn out my last one.

But I’m 52 now, and while camping in weather used to be a fun battle between me, the tarp, the wind and the trees, now it’s a definite buzzkill. I want to be able to stretch out inside the hatch if I roll in late or if it’s rainy and I don’t feel like setting up a tent.

So my kid who’s a carpenter? He’s building me a sleeping platform for the back of Belle, and I’m going to kit her out with all the things I need to be a self-sufficient wordsmith on wheels. 

I’m just going to start.

We talked this weekend about his book. I’m coaching him, which is a total thrill because he’s twice the writer I was at his age (Manifesting Generators, remember), and then I was telling him about my book and how, over the past few days, I’ve been down the rabbit hole of the Canadian Pacific Railway, reading about the trains that crashed before they built the Spiral Tunnels and the working conditions and the men who died building the trestles over those terrible gorges and the wretched work that was given to the Chinese guys and how they were shortchanged at every single turn, including being pushed out of that iconic picture of the last spike being driven at Craigallachie.

such a big moment for Canada, but so many Canadians left out of the picture

Which is what got us onto his passion for trains in the first place, and how we want to do an epic tour of train museums and dive into train lore together, which got us onto the building of his train layout, which brought us back to talking about the sleeping platform and isn’t it awesome that he just HAPPENS to be a woodworker? And that we can do this trade for book coaching?

I tell you, that universe. It bends my damn head. 

So. Off I go in ten days’ time. Starting in Vancouver, then wending my way to Grand Forks to visit a maybe-someday-client who’s going to take me hiking and show me around her beautiful West Kootenay region. Then it’s on to the Salmo River Ranch for an epic dance party at Shambhala Music Festival (right at the height of the cosmic shift, too, that third week of July. I might never come back!). Then it’s over to Kimberley to maybe see a book coaching friend, and from there, the mines. Feet on the earth as much as possible, swimming in the lakes and the rivers, lying out under the meteor-streaked nighttime sky, knowing that I am a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars.

Maybe I’ll be back in the Rockies for a little CPR at some point. If you’re in northwestern US or western Canada and if you need help writing your book, my wanderlust could be your windfall.

I just want to try stuff out.

You know, start.

Finally, my path is becoming clearer. 

In my 20s, I dreamed of getting my Class 1 and driving trucks. I had a yes for that work, but I let fear and other people’s opinions talk myself out of it.

I hereby reclaim my joy in being a road warrior.

I’ll take my baby steps this summer and fall, crawling along the Crowsnest highway in my baby-sized camper, visiting family in Alberta. Maybe a trip down into Montana to trade coaching for a stay with a former client who’s working on their memoir. Maybe another trip down to Mexico (OK, I won’t drive) to visit my own book coach, who’s Torontonian but has made her home in the mountains of Xalapa these past 20 years. More time in the Rocky Mountains, exploring and percolating on where might be a great place to gather for a writing retreat. Researching the railway. Researching our mining history. Building the books that the world needs now.

she be little, but she be a boss

In time, I want to expand the dream. Find me that F-350 (maybe I trade coaching for that, too?) and invest in a hard-body camper and be the wild, nature-connected, wandering Hector girl I started out as, exploring the parts of Canada that have long captured my heart and my imagination, and writing books about them, including creating in partnership with somebody whose roots are Indigenous to this land so we can bring more of their side of the story into the world. I have a lot to learn.

I want to journey. And camp out—or camp IN—with people who are writing books and who want to trade a shower, bed and a couple weeks for help with their writing. I want to explore, and feel the terrain, the terroir, the terre de lumière of this place I call home.

And all I need to do—all WE need to do, ever—is just start.