Inspired Real Estate For Today

Depending on your perspective, this post has nothing to do with real estate or everything to do with it.  This is a follow up to a post I wrote  about underestimating the value of a penny. In looking for larger, more important looking notes, there have been many small blessings which escaped unnoticed.  Thankfully, my "chance" meeting with my friend Patricia Jabbeh Wesley in a grocery store some 15 years ago was not one of them.

Patriciahas just published her third book of poetry.  As an acclaimed African poet, her entrancing style of writing about her native country Liberia is studied in universities and colleges throughout the United States.  The Title of this Book is The River Rising.  I've just read Patricia's blog. It's an amusing look at what it feels like to give birth to your third child...I mean book. :)

In some ways the analogy that Patricia draws upon mirror the stages I've experienced in my real estate career.  I vividly remember my first listing.  I was so surprised that someone actually wanted me to list their home that I literally panicked with misgivings. I had arranged this appointment with a girlfriend and her husband to "practise."  I was flabbergasted when they said, "OK, so where do we sign?"  Fortunately, a "midwife" in the form of my brokers' wife jumped into her car and hurried to my side to deliver my first baby...a brand new listing!

Although there have been hundreds of listings since that first one over 12 years ago, I've never lost the thrill and excitement of another opportunity to meet and serve people.  Every listing has it's own personality.  Some are born easy...they are easy to show, easy to market and sell quickly.  Others require special attention and loving care.  Like a child whom you pray for day and night until they turn from their wayward ways, some listings have required special doses of patience. Within each situation has been another opportunity to grow and learn a little more about life and myself.

It has been a wonderful gift to see Patricia's collection of published work grow and mature.  I vividly remember the many long hours she put into giving birth to her first manuscript and prior to that the agonizing process of writing an autobiographical account of what her family experienced through the civil war in Liberia. 

I realise now that I was observing not just the birth of a book, but the rebirth of a woman who walked through the ravages of war and hatred and emerged to change the world by transforming it one poem at at time. In a sense, that's the true purpose of life's work regardless of the specific calling?  Are we not all called to leave something in the world which was not there prior to our arrival?  I think so.