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Happy to be Sick

(30 sec read)

I have a little tickle in my throat, a wheeze in my breath, and I’m pretty stoked.

Here’s why.

Today’s been a down day full of defeated rants and negative self-talk. (Yes, even us die-hard optimists go there!) Things seem insurmountable, everything out of reach. I tried all my tricks and nothing worked.

I hate it when that happens.

It’s so easy to spiral when no one else is in the conversation. By day’s end, the burning reed inside my stomach had escalated to a brushfire. Grotesque and gradiose thoughts of radical life changes, wishes of day-long slumber, rapid-fire pot shots at my ego.

But now I’m free.

By the tickle in my throat, I know it’s the physical me that’s taking down the ship; the psychological me is just along for the ride.

Yes, it sucks, but at least now I don’t have to blame myself, just the germs.

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Judging the Kids

(90 sec read)

My daughter and her 2 friends each made a glass of lemonade, all different: one pink, one with ice and mint, one with a giant lemon wheel and some lost seeds at the bottom. (I couldn’t tell if the seeds were there on purpose.)

They came into the room, proud smiles, with these 3 lemonades on a platter and asked us, the adults, to judge them.

Molly and I looked at each other, a silent conversation between us. It was obvious the one with the seeds was not the winner, nor the pink one with no ice. Who makes a lemonade without ice!? Especially on a hot day.

But we didn’t speak. We tried to figure out who made which one so we’d know who we were hurting and who we were propping up. Did the one we were propping up need propping or did the ones whose feelings we’d be hurting need the propping more? Was it better to slam our own daughter or our daughter’s friends? These thoughts raced through my head like a parade of elephants. I could see the same stampede shadow-flicker in my wife’s eyes.

The girls stood there giggling and holding out their lemonades.

Then I realized what was happening… They were imitating a TV show, one of those contest cooking shows with the asshole head chef who demands that someone has to go home.

So I threw on a fake French accent and judged the crap out of them. Then I tasted each lemonade and judged them some more. (I was right; the mint one was the best.)

They laughed and went back into the kitchen. The next batch was better than the first.

Iterative Development… Tenacity… Fail Fast and Fail Early… If At First You Don’t Succeed… When Life Deals You Lemons…

All that shit, born out of a Fake French accent and a pile of criticism.

More than that, from their boisterous post-contest conversations in the kitchen, it was clear that they, the initial tasters of their own lemonade, had already known how good and bad they were.

Had we dropped only sweetness upon them, they would have seen right through our sugar-coated critique.

Hmm.

In this particular lemonade tasting contest, it seems the children weren’t the only ones being judged.

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The Tragic Thing of Age

(90 sec read)

It’s sad, indeed.

As you sit on your sunny mountaintop, back and knees sore, you look down at the traffic in the valley. From up here, you can see everything, even the things the drivers can’t see, like those dark clouds on the horizon and the winds picking up. It only takes a few minutes before you make the decision to go down there and let them know.

Everyone is out of their cars, leaning against them, in conversation. There are hundreds of voices down here on the road, maybe thousands. They sound like seagulls.

You’re tapping on windows and tugging on shirtsleeves to point out the dark clouds, but everyone waves you off because you’re using the wrong hand signals and your pants are too high (or too low, depending on how long you’ve been up on the mountain).

You keep waving your arms because it’s the right thing to do. You’re doing this for them!

And then you see it, the small unpaved road that exits the freeway, the one you know goes around the hill in front of them, the one that will completely evade the storm that’s building on the horizon. That’s the one.

You keep pointing at the road and pushing them toward the exit but it’s like being in a park of statues, like being the only one moving around in a child’s diorama.

Exhausted, you peer over the shoulder of a young couple who look friendly enough, but you can’t read their map, and so they give you a look.

That look. That look says everything.

That look makes you stop trying to get into the cars and into the conversations. And, as you search the overgrown weeds on the side of the road for the path back up to your mountaintop, you look back and notice something that makes you feel lonelier than you’ve ever felt.

You realize these people aren’t in traffic.

They’ve stopped their cars on purpose. It was always a parade and now, without much intention, it’s becoming a town. It’s clear they’re going to be there for a while. And they could care less about what’s on the horizon.

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The Truth(s) Shall Keep Us Apart

(1 min read)

From the outside, finding, discovering, and following the truth can look a lot like becoming brainwashed. Once we settle on the answer and never leave it (even for good reason!), people who think differently may view us as not being able to think for ourselves.

Add to this the challenge that facts float around us like driftwood these days – there are so many truths to be had and they’re so easy to find, especially the ones that support our own beliefs!

As divergent thinking continues to expand so too does the idea that more and more people (the people we don’t understand or relate to) are becoming brainwashed and lost.

This is dangerous. It turns ‘diversity of thought’ into a thousand sharp swords held by feuding tribes.

All of us, we will never inherently have the same values, the same upbringing, the same books. We will never start out on the same wave, or crest at the same time, for we can’t control the sea. And so we will cling to different things that keep us afloat, simply by where we started off, where the tide is going, and what we learn along the way from the people floating next to us.

And for this, we remain separate, holding onto the things and people we gather for survival, as others do the same until we are all islands on the surface, fooling ourselves into thinking we’re tethered to the ground.

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A Break From The Sea

(1 min read)

There is a moment when clients come to realize that I’m the real thing.

It’s usually on the phone, during our initial consultation to discuss their resume, when something clicks into place for them. They see a glimmer from way offshore.

I’m not sure if it’s my voice, my laugh, my questions, my expertise, but I can feel them shift from guarded to vulnerable, from business to casual, which is when we start to get some real work done.

At this moment, the money they paid, the research they did on me, the referral they followed, all falls away, and we become two people committed to their well-being. It’s special: being allowed to visit someone in their favorite rooms at one of the most pivotal times of their lives, invited to sit for a moment while they talk in front of the fire of the things that make them whole and the pieces that are missing.

Sometimes, I see my business as an elaborate invention of levers and cranks and air vents and dials – a puffing, clanging tower that sits alone on the edge of the world, like a lighthouse, with the sole purpose of calling people in to safety so they can catch their breath, dry their clothes, and remember where they’re headed.

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The Email Test

(1 min read)

Here’s a little test for you.

When you’re away from work and wrapped up in something else, the next time your email notification sound goes off on your phone, stop and notice what happens to you. What emotion pops up?

Anxiety? Joy? Wonder? Dread? Resentment? Excitement?

The email notification chime is the present-day Pavlovian Dog. The very sound elicits an immediate response in all of us, as reflexive as a dog’s drooling at the call for dinner.

This response can tell you how you view your work, your job, your entire life.

If the emotion you experience is an unwanted one, I suggest changing 2 things:

First, change your notification chime so you can give yourself a chance to create a new pattern. Then, and here’s the important part: change what you’re getting in your email box. Bear with me here…

It doesn’t have to be drastic. Just disrupt the pattern. The cool thing about email is you can design your inbox how you need it to be. I don’t mean visually redesign it – though that can help too – I mean design it by content. Those horizontal strips of content running across the screen are voices from the wishing well.

If everything speaks of task-oriented seriousness, send out a silly question to get back something whimsical.

If your email is full of obligations, request a (small) activity or piece of an activity you actually want to do.

If you’re anxious about who’s going to be in there and what they’re going to say, find another way to communicate with them, invite them in less frequently, or invite other people in more.

If all you get is work, email a friend.

Ultimately, you decide what comes in. And you decide that by what you send out. Email is one scenario in which Karma always works. Change what you ask for and you’ll change what you get back.

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The Loop

(1 min read)

Does this happen to anyone else?

When I’m watching a movie on my phone that I shot myself, I tend to laugh in the same spots and in the same way as I did while filming the original video. The end result is an echo of myself, past and present.

I like that this happens. It tells me that my laugh is genuine and that I’m fully experiencing the moment all over again. It’s crazy; I can watch the video over and over and I’ll laugh (or at least have the urge to laugh) in the same exact place.

But it’s startling at the same time because it signifies that the world isn’t entirely open-ended for me, that I’m on my own very specific course that’s as predictable as the sun rising and setting every day. If given a set of circumstances, I will respond in the same exact way, nearly every time. Like I said, it’s a bit maddening.

I don’t think many of us want to be predictable. I know I don’t! We’d like to believe that every moment is new and that our reactions are limitless, that we can choose to be who we are at any given time, that we are not merely a product of circumstances dictating clusters of behavior.

But we are just that: complex yet simple, intricately designed but broadly defined, deep thinkers with small parts, open yet closed as hell, traveling the world one foot at a time, on a thin line that loops back on itself.

That’s just the truth. If you want something fresh, you have to actively not make the loop and that can seem as hard as keeping the sun from dropping behind the horizon.

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Old People Are Less Employable

It’s widely known that employers want young people. Age discrimination is real. Young people have stamina, will work long hours, don’t have preconceived ideas that get in the way. They’re more flexible in their thinking, more willing to adopt the company’s ways of working.

At least that’s the theory. And honestly, isn’t it more or less accurate?

I’m on the cusp of being discriminated against so I think I have a right to speak; I’ve been young and now I’m old. At the risk of offending some of my fellow old people for speaking on their behalf without permission…

You’re damn right old people don’t want to work long hours, nor do they want to do things in a specific way without explanation, nor change their mode of thinking since it’s taken a lifetime of a wins and losses to get it where it is now.

Old people are less employable because they know, without a shadow of a doubt through late nights of trial and error, that family, personal growth, systems-level impact, and human connection are way more important than any single job. And they’re well aware that they’ve earned the right to live by this creedo, and to seek out employers who feel the same.

When it comes to work, no matter how much we love our jobs, our priorities inevitably change with age, slanting toward the things that grow our hearts, safeguard the future, and open up possibilities for the seismic changes that are only possible across lifetimes.

That’s someone worth having on the team. Isn’t it?

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Presents From the Past

Funny, how we get a second try at things in life.

I used to play soccer. It was a huge part of my life growing up. Great friendships, lots of championships, all before I was in high school.

Then puberty hit, for everyone else, not for me, and the game changed. It became less about finesse and ball control and more about power and stamina. My coach made the joke that he wanted to water my feet. I never laughed because I heard this to mean I was useless to him the way I was. I sat on the bench for the first time in my life.

I never watered my feet. Instead, I quit the team and left the sport. I grew up and got big and fast, but not until college, really.

And now, I see this same thing happening with my daughter, in her sport, where flexibility is giving way to power. She’s long and skinny like I was, her feet flare out to the sides when she runs just like mine did.

Sitting there watching her do her thing at her show, I was reminded of how the coach took me aside after one practice. He meant well. He tried to teach me how to run, hoping I’d cut off a few seconds in my 100-meter sprint. But it didn’t work. I remember the disappointment in my coach’s face upon realizing that I was just slow. That disappointment weighed on me, even though it wasn’t in words.

So here I am again, watching this scene play out, my daughter’s friends growing width-wise faster than she, the physical game taking precedent, as it does.

I don’t want to live through her. I’m careful of that. That’s not the point. But I believe, I may know better than anyone else right now how she feels in her body, or how she may feel when people ask her body to do things it can’t do yet.

I know that great training, great advice, and great jokes may not work; they may be swords instead of shields. I’m not sure what that leaves us in terms of a game plan, but I think I’ll know when the time comes.

The past has given me that.

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I Can’t Live Without You

I can’t live without you.

A refrain echoed in the heart’s of anyone who has loved past their limits.

But isn’t this untrue? It’s quite the opposite really: I love you so hard, you make me want to live.

Fiery red love – and not just romantic love, a love between any two people or two beings. That kind of love expands our heart, grows it bigger than is comfortable, beyond our own body, to the point of it getting scary because it’s so big we can’t protect it anymore.

A heart like that leaves us no choice but to explore, to walk around in the mystery of ourselves a little longer than we’re used to doing, to be comfortable getting lost, almost purposefully, forgetting the way home and stepping out of the tether so that we can attach to new things.

Love leads us astray. For the sake of the ones we love so dearly, we change our patterns, we face our fears, and we walk further outside the perimeter. It’s in these actions, so selfless and earnest, that love teaches us to live our lives fully.

This is the gift of love and the message from those that love us. The more we love, the deeper we love, the brighter the fire, the bigger the light. And the further we can see.