Category Archives: life

It’s not narcissism if someone else writes it

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He wandered in from the past like a daydream.

The words in his email hung in my reality like a cartoon balloon.

I had spent months trying to track him down,

hunting him like he was an endangered species,

 trying to bring him back into the safety of our tribe.

But he was in the wind.

He left no scent of his trail and he had found refuge in his own world.

 After leaving the chase behind,

we became the hunted and he, in turn, became the hunter.

There is a muted sound that is made

when two worlds collide.

It is the sound of making right what was wrong,

of discovering things you hadn’t realized were lost,

of filling a space you had forgotten was empty.

 And even after all the time that has elapsed,

some days it feels like he never even left.

He is that consummate friend you know will always be there,

even if it is twenty-five years later.

He is the man who any mother would be proud of,

(and other mothers would have a crush on).

He is a man I am honored to call my friend.

It is not often you can find another heart on a sleeve

that recognizes that placement as a strength and not a weakness.

He is a kindred spirit, a confidant,

and he is a friend I will not let disappear again.

When a Bubble Guppy goes from a mystery to a memory

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Life is a perplexing thing.   There is no rhyme nor reason to the circumstances of our daily existence.  If there were a giant book of instructions and an elongated list of logic explaining the happenings in our lives it would be in a language nobody could decipher.

We are not meant to know the meaning of things that occur while they are happening.  We are merely challenged to learn from the events we encounter and use that knowledge to enhance our future.  I found myself in the middle of one of those moments last week.

They were a lovely family, originally booked to visit the lodge in July but had to postpone due to a medical diagnosis that required immediate action.  Even after rescheduling their vacation, a last-minute trial became available to help battle her recent diagnosis of Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.  Two trips to St. Margaret’s Hospital during their four-day “vacation” were made much more bearable by their one “magical” day at Shamrock Lodge.  I was extremely fortunate to be a part of that magic by being asked to make a “Bubble Guppy” cake for her daughter’s 2nd birthday.

I had no idea what a Bubble Guppy was but my longing to make this vacation memorable was overshadowed by my ignorance and this is the cake that arrived at their table and made three generations of their family smile….especially the two older generations.

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I will forever remember driving home that afternoon to finish the cake for an early celebration because her treatment came first.  I will always cherish the look on her two-year old’s face when she realized this cake was for her and it was a Bubble Guppy cake.  And the moment that I will hold closest to my heart is being a part of a celebration that may not happen again if the medical trial fails.

Life is a perplexing thing.  But watching a family hold each other close and truly celebrate together helped me slightly dispel the mystery.

Life is about commemorating the moments we are able to celebrate.  Life is not about worrying about what comes next or what we may miss.  Life is about making the most of the time we have together and living in the now.  Life is about having a Bubble Guppy cake and being able to share it with the family at your table, not ever considering they may not be there for the next birthday celebration. And life is just about being with those who you hold closest to your heart for as long as you can.

If I have learned anything this past week, I have learned that life is too short to spend on things that are not number one on your list.  If there is something you want, chase it.  If there is something you yearn for, pursue it.  And if there are people in your life that make your days brighter, do everything in your power to make the sun shine on them for as long as you can.

You never know when that Bubble Guppy will revert from a cherished memory to simply a mystery.

 

 

To covet or not to covet, that is the question

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I remember the word covet securely fastening itself in my brain after I watched The Silence Of The Lambs.  I had always admired the word as part of the English language but never truly gave it the power it so richly deserved.  For having a mere five letters, the word yields much more of an impact than meets the eye.  With the pun intended in that last sentence, I began to realize how it easy it could be to covet something that was so far removed from my reality, yet so much of a presence in my daily thoughts.  I could always see what it was that I wanted.

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Signs and portents of the things we covet will surely present themselves in a myriad of ways and those glowing neon reminders will only serve to keep that item at the forefront of our brains.  Though we may not have access to the object of our attention on a daily basis, the wish plants a small seed in our brain that sprouts and grows every time we give it a moment of thought.  That lingering speculation permeates the moments of our day and the spark of what could be fuels the evolution of our fascination.

By giving ourselves permission to covet, we allow ourselves the opportunity to keep our desires alive, to live with passion.  And, even if those dreams never come to fruition, we were privately granted the right to give that fantasy a breath of life, if only for a few fleeting moments.  There is no legitimate way of telling our heart it was wrong.  It will beat the way it wants to beat and we are powerless to its incessant drumming.

I am intimidated by the fear of not following my desires, of never having opened the door to possibility and thus never being able to define what is truly important to me.  Coveting those things, identifying the wants that truly envelop me but knowing they may be the things that I can never have, affects my world on a scale beyond my comprehension.  But those impervious wants, those things I covet,  allow me to begin to sketch the blueprints of what it is that I truly desire.  The idea that I may eventually attain those things satiates my thirsts and attempts to quench that desire.

To covet is to wish.  To wish is to dream.  To dream is to live.

Finding little pieces of myself along the way

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I lose time.  I don’t mean I have dissociative fugues and the inability to recall past events.  Time simply rushes by me at such a fast pace that I seem to lose little pieces of myself along the way, pieces caught in the vortex of the life I am living that is whirling by at a great speed.

Those missing bits seem to fragment during my busy work days and I don’t always recognize their absence until I inch closer to my day off.  I feel like a part of me has been eclipsed, hidden in a shadow, waiting to be rediscovered.

Today I had the benefit of finding some of those remnants of myself and putting them back where they belong.  Today I came home from work, knowing that tomorrow is a day free from structure, and allowed myself that moment to finally relax and let those misplaced segments of my life re-establish themselves.  Today I put my feet into the wading pool, bought for my dog, and let the water wash away the lingering moments of my work day.  Today I put together the puzzle that is me with the pieces I had lost during the week.  Today I made myself feel like the garden AND the rose.

It is important to take that quiet moment to collect all of the pieces of ourselves that are essential to us and recreate the whole picture of ourselves.  Segments of us will get lost along the way but the significant substance of who we are will always find its way back.  And in the moments that I was gathering the scraps of me that I had left behind, I came across this picture and it all made sense.

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I’ll take 40-something over 20-something any day

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Arthritic pains, hot flashes, stress and wrinkles withstanding, I would not relive my twenties if you paid me.  That creased, hot-to-the-touch skin cloaks me in a sense of comfort that I was never afforded two decades ago.  In those days, I wore a skin that never felt comfortable.  That twenty year old skin never seemed to feel like it fit on the body that was attached to my brain.

Perhaps these wrinkles are the road map of the journey that led me to where I am now.  Each crevasse that is etched into my skin marks a milestone that ensured, not only a lesson learned but, a memory was created.  Like every foolish twenty something, I thought I was invincible.  I didn’t necessarily feel like the world owed me anything but I felt like it was my oyster and it was my destiny to find that pearl.

It took me that span of twenty years to realize that I am the pearl in the oyster of my reality.  The epic search for the jewel encased in a hard shell was actually the search for my true self.  The walls that I had created in my teens and twenties became the shell of my oyster and the pearl was me.  Slowly, over these many years, that pearl has come to represent the confidence I now have in myself in every facet of my life.

Spending time chiseling away at the outer shell of my oyster has allowed me to gradually peer into the real meat of my reality and open the doors of that tomb that was my shell.  I no longer feel the same constraints I did in my twenties and if some remnants of those constraints still remain, I don’t care.  It is only a matter of time before the sand on the beach of my reality wears away the residue of that shell that still threatens to inter my world.

In my forties the world has become my oyster, once again, but in a completely different way.  I know who I am and I finally can admit to what I want.  My obstacle now is not the boundaries of my shell but the only the boundaries of my courage and my imagination.

A warped sense of entitlement

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I have never been one to define myself by my generation but the more time I spend just existing in each day the more I realize how profoundly different my perspective is on what this world owes me compared to the twenty-somethings of this new generation.

When I was in my twenties, and even now, I never for one moment thought the world owed me anything.  It was up to me to put in the work to earn my place on this revolving planet and prove to everyone that I deserved my spot here.   And I have continued my journey in that paragon of reality.  But so many of the generation of today feel a sense of entitlement and hope to gain the greatest amount of accolades with the least amount of effort.  They seem to expect everything for nothing.

The thought process plagues me and I spend countless hours wondering where this ideology began.  Where did they acquire this sense of entitlement?  How is it they can feel so exempt from basic human nature as to not strive for achievement and the resounding sense of accomplishment that follows without putting in the work?  They have become a generation of people willing to rest on the laurels of others and take the credit for the blood, sweat and tears that they have not emitted.  They live in the pampered dog world – not the dog eat dog – world and it makes me fear for their longevity in the authenticity of being a member of the human race.

A sense of attainment is based on hard work.  You get back what you put forth.   That dog eat dog world promotes the attitude of “survival of the fittest” and those who are deemed fit are those who actually compete.  If you are sitting on the sidelines and simply relishing in the victory of the team without playing, you are winning by default.

There are some members of this younger generation who have made it out from under the blades of “helicopter parenting” and are becoming successful adults who are willing to work hard and take responsibility for their own success.  But the vast number I have encountered rely heavily on others to do the work for them.  A word to the not-so-wise, if your mom calls to get you a summer job your resume will find itself at the bottom of the pile.

To those particular slackers, I say – participate in the outcome of your own journey.  You can only blame other people for so long for any supposed limitations before you are forced to subject yourself to a heaping dose of introspection.  The only limit in your life is the amount of effort you are willing to put forth to strive for personal success.   Life isn’t easy, but the satisfaction achieved when you are successful is well worth the energy exerted to create that success.

Hey twenty-somethings – reality is calling….it wants you to join us.

Finding the beauty in exhaustion

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I absolutely love what I do for a living but the long hours and the physical demands of the job can take a toll on the state of my well-being.  I have just organized and worked a wedding and dynamic conference back-to-back.  If you asked me to spell my name right now I would have difficulty providing that information with any sort of accuracy but the reward I have reaped far outweighs the strenuousness I have endured.

At the end of my arduous days, I feel content in the fact that I have given 110% to, not only give great service to each of these functions but, help create a memory for each of my guests.

Where I feel I should lose energy in the many hours I work, I gain strength from the energy of those around me.   This strength does not come from knowing what I am capable of.  This strength comes from my perseverance to give my best effort and make sure I represent all of myself and not just part of myself, not only in work but in every aspect of my life.

That is the beauty of my exhaustion.  I can sit back and relax knowing that I have given everything I have.  I can take solace in the fact that I do my job well.  And I can absolutely appreciate when I receive praise for my efforts because I truly feel like I have earned it.

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Although my weariness does come at a price, the satisfaction I get from knowing that my efforts positively affected so many others makes that extreme fatigue all that much more bearable and makes me want to do it all over again.

 

Turn off the light on the vacancy sign

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Drawing-Room-Empty

The hotel in my brain had been open but every room, on every floor, seemed to be empty.  I got home from another 13-hour work day yesterday, opened the laptop and stared blankly at the screen.  The lobby in my hotel was lifeless, the elevator was stuck on the ground floor and there was no movement in the confines of my cranium.  The hotel in my head, for all intents and purposes, was closed for business.  The hamster on the wheel of creativity was dead.

After a much-needed ten hours of sleep, the elevator is faintly humming once again.  The front desk staff are present and smiling and the bellman is waiting patiently to assist me with my words.  The neon vacancy sign still hums but the ideas are slowly coming to check in and the hotel is back in business.  I’m hoping after a few coffee breaks the writing staff will be comfortably ensconced in their suites, ready to work, and the writing hotel will soon be sold out.

I have enjoyed the interaction with other people over the last five days but I will eagerly anticipate the required maintenance being finished at the hotel in my brain so I can hop on the elevator when I get home and reach the penthouse of idioms upon my return.

The vacancy sign of inspiration is flickering because the ideas have begun to occupy the rooms in the recesses of my brain.  I’m hoping by tonight the prolific hotel in my mind will be sold out.

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I’ll show you a full moon!

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Yesterday was an interesting day.  The energy in my work space was charged with an unknown element and the entire day felt like I was living in an alternate universe.  People were doing inane things, the simplest conversation turned into a painful thirty minute ordeal and the tension could have been cut by nothing less than a chainsaw.  My rhetorical question was to ask, “is it a full moon?” and the response was an embellished “yes”.

Although there is no direct correlation between the phases of the moon and human behavior, the full moon gives human beings a fantastic excuse for acting like idiots.  The blame is put solely on the celestial orb, taking the onus from the one acting completely out of character but, when the sky is dark, strange behavior is accepted as exactly that with no other plausible justification.

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Many of our references to luck, or the lack thereof, are written in the stars.  We wish on a falling star.  Our horoscopes are creatively tied to constellations in the sky.  And we blame a magical orb of light for any unfavorable happenings during the phase in which it finds its truest beauty.

On those days that society deems the moon to be the cause of all of its woes,  the child who still resides in my mind hopes that the fantasy man who inhabits that enchanting sphere is truly giving us the full moon.