4 posts tagged “reinvention”

Change

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I am writing because I have to.  I need to.  It's how I sometimes process things that feel too big: talking out loud, writing in a diary, here in a blog where the people you value might have some nugget of wisdom to clear the smoke.  Right now I'm listening to one of my favourite songs:  "Change" from Tracy Chapman's "Where You Live" CD.  I've tucked the lyrics in with this pic on Flickr.

Rambling alert: this is the "talking out loud" part ...

The past few months have been increasingly chaotic.  It's an odd thing to say when the past year was actually one of profoundly poor health, and this is the part where I'm supposed to breathe easier because I'm getting better and most days feel pretty damned great.  Thing is I'm having one of those "Aha!" moments where you cannot breathe at all because you're hovering between the grief of leaving the old and familiar behind, and that incredible feeling of anticipating when you're brave enough to let yourself imagine new things.

Why is it so hard to change?

If you're not entirely happy with the status quo, with parts of yourself or your life or your choices, then why is it so damned hard to let them go?  Human nature is contained in such a predictable set of boxes at times, one of the big ones being this false sense of safety and normalcy so long as we keep doing what we're doing, whether it makes us happy or not.  We learn to a certain extent to control things and survive them by developing a handful of coping strategies.  Sometimes that means giving up on dreams, or unhooking important parts of ourselves like feelings or needs or pieces of our character that are actually very important parts of who we are.  I know because I've done this, over and over and over again, for years.

I have little notes scrawled on pieces of paper around my desk, tucked into favourite books, slipped under a coffee cup.  One of the ones staring back at me accusatorily right now says this:  "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results".  Pretty damned wise.  So why is it so hard to take to heart and translate into some sort of meaningful "do something"?

Do something.

I've said that phrase hundreds of times.  I'm usually saying it in light of my role as a better world scout.  It's a challenge statement as much as an invitation, and rolls off my lips as easy as could be ... until I listen to it in the context of my own life.

In March of 2003 I was driving home and stopped the car only two blocks from my house.  I turned and looked at my kids and said "something big is coming.  I don't know what.  I don't know what it means for us, but I know it's going to turn our lives upside down and we have to be ready".  A week later I got the phone call.  My mum was dying and my father had collapsed, and I had to go home to ... well ...

I had to leave my own family behind, young kids, and make unspeakable choices for my parents that haunt me to this day.  Not to belabour the details of that time in my life, but I'm thinking of it now because there is that same sense of ominous foreshadowing going on the past few days, and it leaves me restless and full of anxiety.

I don't do well with the unknown.  I'd rather have the difficult news full on, however bad it might be, so I can begin to wrap my head around it and prepare.  Essentially I am a control freak, and what I know I can set into order to whatever extent I can.  I don't like my back against a wall.  I don't like not having thought things through so that I can react intelligently and safely and sanely when the time comes, whatever "it" might be.

What's driven me to sit myself down and simply write about this today is sort of the perfect storm of coincidences in my life at the moment: personal, professional, community, all of it.  It's like the universe is conspiring to dump me the hell out of that comfy bed where I'm hiding under the covers and right onto my feet pointing, frowning, saying "Choose!"

Sounds like a whole lot of hubris going on ... ~laughs~ ... but this is in fact how it feels right this moment.  Sometimes coasting along is okay, if the choices that placed you there were healthy and wise.  Sometimes it's just lazy and irresponsible, and at the moment, I guess I'm leaning toward the latter.  I've got a handful of decisions to make.  Some of them are really bloody hard.  Other's have been taken out of my hands completely.  In any case, here I am, at a turning point, recognizing that like it or not it's time to choose, and if I'd let myself believe it, the perfect time to see the opportunities I've just not been brave enough to consider.

Am I brave enough to walk away from a career that's made me a public figure and provided me with some of the most incredible moments of serendipity in my life?  Do I have enough faith to believe that I've got the power to create something better and that really fits?  Do I have the power to walk away from an online community of better world scouts that I've been part of for three years and that is soon shutting it's doors, and figure out "what next?"  Do I have the power to imagine myself as something other than a fulltime mum when that part of my life is over so very soon?  Am I brave enough and do I have enough faith to hang in there with personal relationships that are in turmoil because of life's changes?

I've always considered myself to be strong, brave, a person with great conviction and faith.  Today I'm sitting quietly, feeling very uncertain, and recognizing just how comfortable it's been to live with the status quo.  Thing is, it hasn't made me very happy.

So now what?

I'm trying very hard to dig down deep to see if I have what it takes to reinvent once again, not on one front, but on many, maybe simultaneously.  I've watched someone I care about very much doing exactly that, not easily, but bravely.  It gives me hope, and yet I feel like such a coward.  What's familiar is comfortable.  Sometimes you have the luxury of choosing to piss your life away continuing to walk that path until it's very deep rut and almost impossible to get out of.  Sometimes the choice is taken out of your hands.  In any case, when you're standing there at that turning point, it's scary as hell.

Mostly, this is just talking out loud because it's how I wrap my head around things that I really don't want to be thinking about at all.  Doing it in my blog is admitting I don't have it all figured out, and because I'm wondering how other people find the courage to make big changes in their life and get on with it.

I think I've nearly worn the tracks off of Chapman's "Change", and yet I just looped it again, because I still need to hear it.  I really need to hear it today.

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Whenever I'm about to reinvent myself in a significant way, I find myself reading a lot of Emerson.  Today I came across something he'd written that I'd not heard before, but I found it both provocative and essential:

     “I find that the Americans have no passions, they have appetites.”

        -- Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Being neither American nor inclined to want to be beaten with a large stick ~grins~, I'll simply say that this observation spoke to me personally.  It identifies one of my greatest internal conflicts: stickiness.

I have always considered myself to be a very passionate person.  Having said that, this nasty little poke with a stick from Emerson's 1800's brand of wisdom has me asking myself if I have the right to claim this label at all.  I do feel things fiercely and deeply, and that is wonderful fuel spurring me on when I go running headlong into the next thing that calls.  But there's the rub: so many things do call, and my ability/desire to stick with them is often my greatest challenge.

This is a problem if you look at it in almost any light: makes it tough to stay put, stick to a career, be happy with one person, or to ever really feel full or know the true sense of the word "enough".  Some people might call it OCPD, or ADD, or simply fickle or even selfish and irresponsible.  And yet I've managed to be successful in spite of it.  While I do look back and feel at times a sense of grief over recognizing this as a deficit in the traditional sense of a person's life, I am also deeply grateful for living in the place and time I do.  In the niche that I've managed to carve for myself it's served me well.  As a journalist, being constantly propelled by "the chase" is a delicious habit.  It keeps me hungry, curious, always running after the next story to share.  As an artist, it keeps me buoyant and colourful and constantly inspired.  God bless the internet and Second Life, for those two mediums have provided the most provocative and fertile playground for the two most intrinsic parts of my inner life as a breadwinner and insatiable consumer.

Where this is a challenge is in personal relationships.  There are people that I connect with in a very rich and heartfelt way, and yet no matter how much I enjoy their company, I rarely seek it.  I do tend to hold people at arm's length.  Even my closest friends and family know what a gigantic pain in the ass I can be when it comes to simple, normal things.  I hate talking on the phone.  I don't do well with a lot of small talk, and within minutes of reconnecting I am often restless and uncomfortable again.  A pretty boring, run-of-the-mill personality disorder I'm sure, but an inconvenient one when you really do care a great deal about the people that you have so much trouble wanting to connect with in a deeper way.

There are exceptions.  It's at odds with my bleeding heart, because at my core I remain a better world scout and always will be.  My partner Baron is also an anomaly in many ways, perhaps because he's so much like me and doesn't question or seem critical of the quirks.  But Emerson's observation does have me scratching my head and asking myself how much I may want or need to confront this particular issue if I really want to move forward in my life.

Do I really have passion, or merely appetites?  Constant, glorious, intense appetites, but appetites nonetheless.  It's not that I haven't found my niche.  In fact, I've found it again and again.  It's that in spite of the thrill of the chase, and often getting what I want, I still feel quite empty at the end of the day.

I know because of the few anomalies that do exist in my life that there is a great reward attached to cultivating a more mature and intimate relationship with the people and opportunities in my life, and in my gut I know that I do want to know what it feels like to say "this is enough" and finally mean it.

In those instances I've allowed myself to let it in, what I am gifted with is richer, deeper, simpler and more enduring happiness and peace of mind.

So, tonight I'll thank Emerson for poking me with a stick, and hope that I'll be wise enough to really listen and finally choose it for myself.

Party in the Basement Club

Baron and I had just finished putting out the new vendor in the Ironworks and Light shop and decided we needed a little play time.  We noticed that a spontaneous party had broken out just a stone's throw away from where we were standing.  "The Basement Club" is a smokey little hole in the wall beneath one of the shops on Sanctum Sanctorum.  Baron threw a wonderful concert and party there last year for my birthday, and since then people have sort of adopted the space.  How could they not?  He filled it with rich, dark wood, old crates, lush ferns and a walk-in humidor, all fashioned after a sultry little "cigar lounge", speakeasy-style.

A handful of groups and secret societies have spawned around this hidden little space, and also at The Standing Stone Pub.  It's wonderful to see the spaces come alive with people that just seem to "fit there"

This got me thinking today about something that Baron does very, very well.  He understands the intrinsic value of "attraction" versus "promotion".  He knows that if you cultivate a space with character and ambience and care that the right people will naturally find it.  He diminishes the retail side of our SIMs in favour of creating wide open spaces that beckon people to explore.  He's passionate about interactivity, especially when it means we can secretly inject opportunities for learning along the way.

We joined the crowd in the Basement Club this afternoon, largely German, and kicking up their heels to some fine Irish Rockabilly music by the time I walked in.  Baron was sitting in a deep, comfy chair, smiling like a Cheshire Cat.  I know that smile.  I see it when we break our hermit-dom and get out on the sims to mingle (something we are trying to do more) and have the pleasure of seeing how people are making our spaces their own.  That smile is like Christmas.

We're seeing this happen at the Opera House too, where first life magazine photo shoots are being done, concerts with first life artists and opera singers being planned, and even a Gilbert and Sullivan production afoot with an off-broadway crew.  None of these things were our doing.  We simply created a space and allowed people to find it and decide how it would come to life.

We're about to do a major overhaul of the sims once again, with a fourth one arriving imminently.  It's nerve wracking to think about the beloved haunts that will disappear to make way for the new, but I'm learning with time that one of the most valuable things Mr. Grayson imparts is that constant reinvention is the stuff of passion and renewal, and it's always better than ever when it's done with an eye to creating spaces that allow the accidental communities they attract to shape the life within them as they grow.

There's a difference between "attraction" and "promotion", and a reason that Baron has never been one to advertise.  He knows the wisdom of creating something you truly love yourself, and letting the right people find it.  The rest simply takes care of itself ...

Adventures with the Estrogen Army!

Note to self: get off your arse and do it.

Some things are a calling. They tickle your brain and drive you completely mad until you are no longer able to just sit there and ignore them.

A few years back I had one of those divine little moments of serendipity. You know the ones: kind of feels like waking up after a long sleep and seeing the world for the first time?

I don't have the time to do it now, because I'm on a deadline, but I keep saying to Baron how what I value most about having this blog is that in simply saying something out loud I am able to hold myself accountable.

So, this is another mental bookmark, because there are women -- amazing women -- that I want to celebrate, and in a significant way. They're women who know The Secret: life doesn't end at 21. It's just getting started, baby! Some of us are wildly happy to be in the back half of the game, because that's where the really good stuff starts to happen.

The one thing I know for sure: when you gather a group of kindred souls around the kitchen table and just start telling stories, amazing things happen.

The impulse to say their names out loud right here is overwhelming, because I want to celebrate some of the extraordinary things that ordinary women like myself have been able to accomplish later in life, but I know the moment I do that, I won't be able to help myself, because I'll have to tell you why each of them is amazing, and I cannot do that now ... ~grins~

Hate deadlines. Love Vox. It gives me a chance to get things out of my noggin' and back into the light of day, so I'll not be tempted to leave them languishing any longer in a mental closet.

Consider yourself warned. There's an army in town, and we're a handful ~winks~ There are strong women who reinvented themselves after 40 and are having an unconventional adventures.

I want to ask each of them to tell meaningful stories about each other, rather than about themselves. I want it to challenge other women who suspect this is the part where it starts to get good, but aren't quite sure how to grab hold. I want us to ask each other:

• What is your dream?
• What was your sin?
• What gave you the courage to do this?
• What would you most want to know about other women?
• What role did your mum play in shaping your path?
• What is your favourite word? Your favourite book? Your favourite mantra?
• How did your calling/adventure find you?
• Were you doubted, criticized, ridiculed for your choice?
• Did it cost you friendships and other important relationships in your life?
• How did you deal with other obligations in your life that may have been pulling you in the opposite direction from where you were feeling called? (kids, spouse, job, values)
• What one question do you think woman should ask of themselves? Of the world?
• What are the three best pieces of advice you could give to other women thinking about reinventing themselves too?

I don't want to read another magazine about fashion. I want something with meat. I want a mirror that shows me myself in the context of other women who are ordinary like me, but who have created extraordinary adventures for themselves later in life. I want a workbook that maps out a simple plan to help me "just do it!" and a posse of allies with their elbows on the table beside me, laughing and swapping tales. I want to know that's it's not selfish, and that through it I can be a good example for my daughter, because this is Really Important Stuff.

In getting sick this past year, I put a lot of things on hold, but this isn't one of the ones that I want to wait on anymore. Time to dust off it's web site, and the forum, and gather my kindred sisters together again. It's a purely selfish journey, but one I cannot seem to shake. It keeps on finding me again, so I know it must be time ...