ordinary sparkling moments :: thinking small

by christine mason miller

Me in a slightly less than keynote-worthy moment with my best
friend Melissa, who drove up from Raleigh to be there for the
event. This was taken the day after my speech at one of our
favorite college haunts, Carol Lee Donuts.

I’ve been asked to be the keynote speaker at an alumni event at my alma mater Virginia Tech, and I just finished my speech. I have procrastinated on this project more than usual, waiting until just over a week before I am scheduled to speak to coherently organize enough thoughts, stories and anecdotes to fill a space of about twenty minutes. When I was first asked to speak, I felt like my life had come full circle. The roots of creativity, entrepreneurship and risk taking that were set when I was a student at Virginia Tech have since blossomed in all kinds of different directions – from a greeting card business, to travels around the world to publishing Ordinary Sparkling Moments – and now I’m returning almost twenty years later to share with some of my fellow graduates how and why I’ve followed the dreams I’ve had.

This feels huge.

And when I think about how huge this feels, I get nervous, and I start to panic, and I begin to have a secret hope that I’ll get laryngitis or the plague or some other ailment that will allow me to call them up the night before and say, “I’m so sorry, but I can’t be your keynote speaker!” This would be the best of both worlds – I would get to brag about being asked to be the keynote speaker, and show that I was, in fact, on the schedule, but, alas, I got sick, so never had to do the actual speech. Which is why I kept putting this off – if I get sick and don’t have to speak, why plan too far ahead?

But then I take a deep breath, and I remember a few things:

· The women I will be speaking to are going to be there because they want to be inspired. They want me to do well. They want the positive energy and messages I am eager to give them.

· I am speaking for twenty minutes – twenty minutes! Think of that in relation to my entire life, and this is barely a blip. I will be introduced, walk up to the podium, and then – blink – it will be over, and less than 24 hours later I’ll be headed off campus, on my way to another event.

· I’m probably not going to impress, inspire or charm every single person in the audience, but there will be at least one person who I am going to reach, who is going to hear what I say and be inspired to take a leap. I might not ever know who this person is or what I inspired her to do, but I know this as sure as I know it is physically impossible for me to resist a Krispy Kreme doughnut. I will reach at least one person, and this is what makes it all worthwhile.

That evening, I will have a job to do. That job isn’t about giving a speech that will go down in infamy or sharing a message that will change the course of the world. My performance will not be analyzed, graded, or judged. What will happen that night is much simpler, and much more intimate. My job that night is to share my stories in my own voice - stories that are positive, meaningful and uplifting. My job that night is to inspire, and I don’t need to make it any more complicated than that.

It feels huge in my heart, in a proud-of-what-I’ve-accomplished kind of way, but it isn’t huge to most of the world, and sometimes it’s OK to see the things we do from a smaller perspective. In a space on my college campus, a few of us will share an evening. I’ll tell some stories, and then we’ll part ways, and we will return to our lives with new memories, new connections and maybe, if I do my job well, a little extra sparkle.

Post Script: I gave my speech on Monday, June 1st on the Virginia Tech campus and it was a wonderful, inspiring experience. The best part: All those tiny moments of heartfelt connections with old friends, new friends and my beautiful college campus.