That’s what my co-worker said to me when I was venting about my experience from the night before. Usually, I tend not to like this saying. The idea of ignorance being beneficial to us in any way is absurd. Naturally, the more information you have, the better prepared you are for anything in life. How can it ever be a negative thing to have information, knowledge or knowing? Awareness equals empowerment, right!? That’s my own slogan!
However, when I heard her say it on that day, I nodded. I had just submitted a proposal for a talk titled: Do you believe in magic? Bridging science and spirituality. This was for the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) conference in Los Angeles. I was explaining to my colleague how I had totally lost my cool and been emotionally taken back to my days of stressing out about deadlines during the ridiculous submission process. The whole idea of speaking in this conference had come from an inconspicuous company message asking if anyone would be interested in giving a talk at the event. On that particular day, I must have felt optimistic, spontaneous, and confident, so I had replied: “Sure, I’d love to give a talk!”, without even knowing exactly what the conference was about.
A day later, I had received a courteous reply from one of the affiliated women engineers in my company asking what I had in mind for the speech. I sent her a quick email containing some of the floating ideas in my head, and she replied: “This sounds amazing! Let me know if you need help with the submission!” Encouraged by this, I felt exceedingly good about myself. I would easily whip something up for a presentation and have a great excuse to apply company funding for a little trip to Los Angeles.
Eventually, I realized why she had offered to help me with the submission. She emailed me a bunch of resources that I didn’t bother to open for a couple of days. I thought that it can’t be that hard to write a short abstract and send it in. But since the deadline was approaching and I didn’t have anything more urgent to do, I started going through the links she had sent. Still feeling skeptical about needing any help in the process.
What I discovered were pages and pages of instructions, rules, guidelines, and examples of how to prep your perfect abstract. The material included meeting recordings with past speakers talking about their experiences, and what made their proposals stand out in this very competitive environment. Whaaa..?! Competitive? I don’t like competitive. And I like rules and guidelines even less… The more information I gathered, the more reluctant I started feeling about the whole process. My confidence and optimism were dwindling, and I wondered what I had gotten myself into. I do like to be challenge, but then again, I didn’t expect to do so much work for something that may not even pan out in the end.
I’m not sure, if it was the encouragement from the wonderful lady engineer who kept checking up on my progress, sending me information and suggestions with heartfelt eagerness for me to submit my abstract. Possibly it was my pride of not giving up since I had already envisioned myself doing something like this. Maybe it was the curiosity about this opportunity to embody a slightly different role while connecting with other science professionals. Or, it may have come down to the synchronistic way that I had initially replied to the company post, which made me feel that there must be a reason I was in this mess and now needed to see it through to find out what the universe had in store for me. Most likely it was a combination of all these things. Whatever the reason, I kept going.
I had written down a fancy multi-sentence title and a looong explanation of what I would like to talk about. The abstract rules gave me 10 words for the title, and 150 words to share all my passion for humankind. It’s not words that I’m afraid of, it’s the restriction of using them that trips me. How was I going to summarize all the things I wanted to talk about? The brain networks, psychology of intuition, what life coaching and spirituality can give you, emotional intelligence, vulnerability, and how all this ties into our capacity to empower ourselves and others to stand up as the pioneering leaders for this dawning Age of Aquarius. Oh boy. Was I in for a task?!
And that was not all. I needed to state three key takeaways, record a 1.5-minute video pitching my speech, write a short bio of myself and my credentials, have a photograph ready, select the talk category, subcategory, how long of a presentation it would be, and so on…! If I had known all these requirements before agreeing to this, I probably would not have even started. Moreover, when I finally thought that I had all the material needed, the actual submission portal had about 10 more questions, and more word counts for things that I was not prepared for and now had to whip up together at a last minute.
But damn if I can’t see this through! So, I was yelling at my kids to shut up, yelling at my husband to stop talking to me, answering N/A to all questions I had no idea how to answer, swearing at the computer while it was painfully slowly downloading my pitch video onto the online portal, and pressing the submit button repeatedly in a mad frenzy at 9:04 pm PCT… 4 minutes after the submission time had closed at midnight in the East Coast.
I was afraid to see something along the lines, “Sorry, we were unable to submit your proposal, the portal is now closed” on the screen, but it went through! At least I think so… I received a confirmation for my submission, timestamped 6 minutes past the deadline. Now I’m cautiously hopeful that they will consider my efforts even though the abstract ended up in the system a few minutes late.
So, when my colleague mentioned the old ignorance quote, I felt the truth in it. The blissful ignorance set me onto a path until other forces kicked in and held me in the process. I’m now even more excited about the potentiality of being able to talk to the women engineers about science and spirituality, and super curious of what kind of feedback I’ll receive for the abstract. It’ll be couple of months before I know the answer, so it’s up to the gods now. And obviously, if I do get approved, the saga is not over by any means. But yes, thank you ignorance for pushing me into the right direction. Even if you’re not bliss, you may be helpful at times.
