When I taught high school English, I loved creating lesson plans that helped my seniors connect personally with literary works and navigate their lives after high school. Polonius from Shakespeare’s Hamlet sort of inspired those lessons with his “To thine own self be true” advice to his son going off to college, but really, Oprah gets most of the credit. Before we had THE INTERNET, Google, and Pinterest, and Tik Tok, teachers had to find inspiration from trusted sources — like Oprah.

Oprah featured Sarah Ban Breathnach’s book Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort of Joy on her show several times in the 1990s. Obviously, I bought the book. When Oprah tells you to read something, you read it. I had no idea how much my students would love one of the activities I shamelessly stole from that book. It was called “Your Personal Treasure Map.”

In the January 29th daily essay, the author tells readers to create a collage of their ideal life and to use that collage as a map for discovering buried treasure. The way to start, she writes, is to “visualize your ideal life.” Don’t get me wrong…When she instructs us to close our eyes and “go within,” some of my students thought the activity was a little hokey. However, when she says we should cut pictures from magazines to match those visions, most students were All In. This is fun, not real school work, they thought. To be honest, they were sort of right. Taking the time to think about things like where they wanted to live one day — city or country; what they wanted to wear to work each day — dress up clothes or athletic wear; what kind of pets they wanted, etc., was seemingly just plain fun. And, then being required to look through old magazines and cut out pictures for a collage when they were accustomed to reading books like Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre for this class?? That was a blast!

The activity resonated with some students, while some just politely played along. It was the end of the year; most were finished with high stakes exams, and they were pretty much checked out of high school and ready for college. I remember Jennifer cutting out many pictures of outdoor furniture and even an outdoor bedroom. She wondered if she would ever have a “normal” home. She had a vision of sports being a part of her life, too, as she was a star athlete at Hunt High School. When I look at her Instagram posts now, I can see those same visions manifested in her “real” life. Her family members are outside a lot! I think they have bedrooms inside and whatnot, but they eat outside, sit by their fire pit often, and seem to enjoy having several acres for playing. Jennifer played soccer in college and was a coach afterwards. I think she found her treasure. Another student, Mahalia, mentioned this little activity in her published book, 30ish. (!!) I was shocked that ten years after high school, she remembered mapping out her future. Her visions did not quite turn out as planned, but she had one hell of a story to tell, and I dare say her life turned out to be more amazing than she had imagined as an eighteen-year-old. She has traveled around the world, has been a teacher, is a writer, and is the owner of Casita Brewing Company while also being the most amazing ambassador for our city.

The one component of the ideal life collage exercise I keep thinking about almost twenty-five years after I first discovered it is the final instruction: “When you’re finished, find a photograph of yourself that you especially like. Make sure it’s a picture of you looking radiant and happy…Think fun. Think delight. Think seven years old….This is a wish to the Universe. Our deepest wishes are whispers of our authentic selves.”

Recently, I decided to complete this part of the assignment. I rummaged through some old photographs to find one that reflected happiness and delight. I found these two favorites of a happy day when I was probably ten or eleven years old:

“Our deepest wishes are whispers of our authentic selves.”

—Simple Abundance

I love so many things about these pictures. I am wearing a t-shirt and jeans. My hair is messy. I am surrounded by puppies. I am wearing my POW bracelet with the name of Captain John H.S. Long, an American soldier who was Missing in Action in Vietnam. (I remember watching on TV, waiting and waiting when those who had been imprisoned came home. His name was never called.)

All of those details reflect who I was then, who I am now, and who, I suppose, I have always been — a no-frills fashionista, a dog lover, apparently a bleeding heart liberal before I knew what that was, a somewhat quiet activist, a homebody. I wrote stories and kept a journal even then. I dreamed of being a school teacher and a writer. I wanted to have a horse and even wrote a little book about that wish. I loved going to the beach with my family every summer and also loved being at home and having quiet time. The t-shirt I am wearing in the picture said “ESCO” for Electric Supply Company, where my mom worked; it was my uniform as the bat girl for the men’s softball team. I like that I was confident enough to run out on the field to retrieve bats in front of a crowd. I was comfortable in my own body, and I thought I was athletic. I had not started my period yet. I had not become overly obsessed with boys or slam books or trying to fit in with the cool people. I didn’t know my family was poor or that my jeans were not from a name brand designer. All that would come way too soon. I would eventually lose touch with the buried treasure of the little girl in those pictures. I suppose we all do as we grow up.

I think it is important, though, to think back to when we were kids and remember who we were before the world sort of reined us in and made us become teenagers and then grownups. What mattered when we were ten? What made us happy? What made us laugh? What was fun? These are important questions for kids about to graduate from high school, sure, but they are also relevant for older people figuring out careers and relationships, and for people in retirement trying to figure out how to enjoy our days and still matter. I am glad I dug around for the buried treasure of those 1970s photos to remind me of my authentic self. I like the girl I see in that picture. It is important to listen to the “whispers of our authentic selves,” to stop trying to be someone we are not and just be the person God made us. For me, it was someone with messy hair and Levi jeans and puppies all around.

Yep, that still sounds about right.