There was a time when I thought freedom meant having fewer things to tie me down. I could have chosen a life that was relatively carefree, travelled to beautiful places, worn my glamorous high heeled boots and organised my days largely around myself.
Then a German Shepherd walked into my life.
Or perhaps I should say bounded into it, because very little about sharing your life with a great teddy bear like lion of a dog happens delicately.
The glamorous boots were gradually replaced by shoes that were flat, comfortable and capable of surviving woodland paths. Lie ins became a thing of the past. Dog hair began appearing in places where no dog hair had any reasonable business being. Walks happened regardless of whether I was tired, busy or simply did not fancy going outside. My life became dictated, at least in part, by the needs of another living being.
On paper, you might call that a loss of freedom.
I call it one of the greatest privileges of my life.
Before sharing my life with a dog, I had no idea what it felt like to be loved by one. I did not know the purity of being greeted as though my return was the most important event of the day, or the quiet companionship of another living being simply wanting to be wherever I happened to be.
I could have gone through an entire lifetime without knowing that love.
Instead, I get to share my days with this brilliant, almost divine being who has changed far more than my footwear.
My life did not become smaller when I accepted the responsibility of loving him. My world became larger.
Perhaps that is why I have been thinking about what I call the 2mm shift.
We often imagine that changing our lives requires a dramatic leap. We wait for courage to arrive in great quantities before we act. We tell ourselves that perhaps we are not ready, that the timing is wrong or that what we want might ask too much of us.
Yet when I look back at the changes that have mattered most in my own life, they rarely began with a giant leap. They began when I was prepared to stretch just a little beyond the boundaries of the person I thought I was.
Perhaps only two millimetres.
Then, having discovered that the world did not collapse, I stretched again.
There is a temptation to construct our lives around what is easiest to manage. We can become so accomplished at protecting ourselves from inconvenience that we inadvertently protect ourselves from some of the very experiences that might make us feel most alive.
Love is rarely convenient.
Neither is purpose.
Nor is building something that matters to us.
They ask things of us. They disrupt routines and challenge assumptions. Sometimes they require us to exchange the life that looks good from the outside for one that feels infinitely richer on the inside.
There is, of course, nothing noble about making life unnecessarily difficult. Nor should we exhaust ourselves trying to prove that we can carry everything. The point is not to seek hardship.
The question is whether something matters enough to us to make the stretching worthwhile.
That distinction matters.
Sometimes we look at another person and decide what should be possible for them. We make assumptions based on age, size, circumstances or the life they have lived before. More dangerously, we can begin making those assumptions about ourselves.
I have learnt to be wary of the sentence, “I am not the sort of person who could do that.”
How do we know until we move the boundary?
Two millimetres.
Then perhaps another two.
There is something very ‘The Shepherd Way™’ about that. Quiet leadership is not always about leading a team, an organisation or a room full of people. Some of the hardest leadership we will ever undertake is the leadership of ourselves.
It is knowing when comfort has become confinement. It is listening when something within us says there may be more. It is having enough courage to move towards it without needing certainty about where the road will end.
No grand declaration is required.
Sometimes nobody else will even notice that anything has changed.
But we will.
The female in the glamorous high heeled boots could not have known that one day she would find enormous joy walking through the woods in sensible shoes beside a German Shepherd.
She might even have felt sorry for her future self.
How wrong she would have been.
Because the measure of a great life is surely not how successfully we managed to avoid inconvenience. It is whether we allowed ourselves to experience the people, creatures, work, ideas and moments that made being here worthwhile.
Sometimes happiness is hiding only two millimetres beyond the life we already know.
We just have to be willing to stretch.
