Tag: learning

Work In Progress

WordPress prompt: What’s your dream job?

I‘m happy to report I’ve already had dream jobs. A couple of them.

I was a researcher and fact checker at Maclean’s newsmagazine back in the day. That was sweet. They essentially paid me to read profusely and catch errors in articles written by successful, well-known, well-established writers before the articles were published.

Wow. Prestige AND money.

I loved my colleagues in the Maclean’s research department. Each and every one of them near genius. Geniuses in that understated kind of geeky way where those kind of people know a lot but don’t flash it around. They would have made excellent Jeopardy contestants.

So if there has been a recurring theme in my favorite jobs, it has been those where I learned a ton. As part of my radio producer role with As it Happens at CBC Radio, I HAD to buy about a dozen newspapers every day and as many magazines every month. That the CBC paid for! Then I got to read them cover to cover. I felt like I was stealing.

I don’t rightly know why learning and constantly stretching my brain are so important to me. I shouldn’t dismiss it. Had I not leaned that way from early on, I would not have been able to figure out and make sense of the looniness that plagued my childhood.

Smarts allowed me to gather three degrees which did wonders for my resume. The missing link, however, was that my emotional tank wasn’t quite as full. I finally figured out that with $5 and all of my degrees, I could get a coffee at any Starbucks. Likely closer to $8 now, but you get my point.

My real life work has been emotional. I had to learn self-regulation. I had to learn to sit with my pain. I had to learn not to act out my pain or fear or anger. This was by no means a dream job. But it was a vitally important one.

In emotional healing, I had to deploy the basics of project management. I could not achieve my life goals until the foundational elements I missed out on were addressed. That was terrifying but necessary work. A successful outcome was never guaranteed.

Emotional damage cost me relationships. It cost me jobs. It took a lot of what I had been or who I thought I was and threw it out the window. It turned me into someone I am only just getting to know. This me is more stable and more cautious than emotionally overwrought me. Less impulsive than I was in my youth. That alone is saving me a lot of grief.

So growing up has been neither a dream job or a cake walk. But it has been necessary. I’ve offloaded a lot of what doesn’t serve me any more. I’ve picked up some skills and attitudes along the way that I thought would be forever out of my reach.

And I’m living a life that at one time seemed would be an unattainable dream. My learning and growing process has been erratic and full of stops/starts and highs and lows. Like most everyone, I figure

Our minds and hearts are often kinder to us in retrospect than we are to ourselves. I look back now on those dream jobs I had and give thanks that they happened at all. Even situations that went south taught me lessons I needed to learn.

We all occasionally say: “I wish I’d known then, what I know now.” But we didn’t and we couldn’t and now here we are. So, like loving parents, we must applaud and love ourselves for what we’ve learned and how far we’ve actually come in life.

As a wife in a happy marriage with a daily blog I get to write, I’d say this is about as close to a dream job as I ever wanted. A far greater purpose than I could have imagined when I was young.

At the end of the day, no matter how wonderful your work is, and how much satisfaction you get from your career, a job can’t love you back.

That was the greatest learning and takeaway from all the jobs I got to do.

And I’m good with that.

New Year, Old Me

Hope is a wondrous thing. I’d even go so far as to say it is lifesaving.

In the face of all challenges and heartbreak, hope can rise. Bidden sometimes. At other times, it just seems to pop up. The proverbial beacon of light and direction sitting off in the distance that appears to us, seemingly out of nowhere.

I sometimes wonder how often that very scenario played out for mariners of old. In the middle of being mercilessly tossed about on savage seas with death but a rogue wave away, off in the distance, the lookout spots a lighthouse.

Hope rises. Life continues. The sailors get to live another day.

As we mark this first day of a new year in our calendar, we are similarly touched by hope for the year to come. Hope for renewal. Hope for freedom from pain – emotional and/or physical. Hope for better news. Hope for sanity and peace of mind.

It is, of course, a false construct. Today is no different than yesterday in reality. We are not Cinderella who transforms into a princess and steps into a radically altered lifestyle. Of course, at her midnight, she reverted to her previous state. But altered.

The prince she had met and dazzled set out to find her again. That particular “New Year’s Eve” did not make the changes in her life that night. They foretold them.

Change happens like that for most of us, too. Whatever deficiencies we want to address in our life often have to be faced full-on in an instant. Then the slow process of change gets underway. The outcome we want may take weeks, months or years to accomplish. Then, one day, if we’re lucky and have worked hard enough, we are there.

I had this experience with both drinking and smoking. There was a time when I could not imagine my lifestyle would ever be other than what it was. I took some sense of satisfaction in cultivating the image of a hard-working, hard-living journalist for whom alcohol and nicotine were mandatory kit in the trade. An Ernest Hemingway-compatible type of broad.

Confirmation of a pregnancy stopped smoking in its tracks. I inherited my father’s Dutch will of iron. Ditching drink took a little longer. But with almost 24 years of sobriety behind me now, I can hardly remember how or why alcohol was ever part of my life at all.

Yet through it all, I am still me. For better or worse.

I have certainly changed from my younger self. But the essence of who I am is still there. I believe it is that way for most of us. Change does not always present with glaring neon signs in our day-to-day lives. I still have laundry to fold, beds to make, meals to make and dear friends to connect with. Life goes on.

This eventuality can be a hard learning during the egocentricity of youth phase. For some that phase lasts a lifetime. When I learned the phrase “hissy fit,” I recall how mortified and impressed I was by its’ resonance. “Boo.” “Hiss.” “I don’t wanna.” Ya. That sounded pretty similar to me having a temper tantrum.

I am beginning to find some solace in the immutable fact of my own humanity. That is allowing me to ease up on myself. The big ambitions I had for my life as a youth have been abandoned or pretty much dissipated.

And oddly, I find myself these days in the exact situation I always secretly craved. A happy home life. A wonderful and satisfying marriage to a man I think is the coolest dude on Planet Earth. I had similar feelings about my beloved Yorkie, Bailey. Not that I am drawing comparisons between the two, I only mean to say that when I love someone or something, I am all in.

So I did not create a long and unwieldy and unrealistic list of New Year’s resolutions meant to kick in today. There are a few things and unhelpful habits I want to discard. There are a few things I want to do more of. Others I want to do less of.

Like watching TV news as I said recently. That activity is like voluntarily setting yourself up to develop brain fungus. Ptooey. Don’t need it. Don’t want it.

I find myself drifting back to the homely arts and wishing to strengthen my connection to nature. I want to do more of nothing and less constant of the constant unending to-do lists and busywork. It is high time.

You see life goes on with or without us. That is a hard and fundamental learning we all must get eventually. In the face of that truism, we discover the parameters of own life and what we can realistically achieve for our own happiness and that of others around us.

Peggy Lee, the legendary lounge singer from the last century, sang a song called: “Is That All There Is?”

Is that all there is?
Is that all there is?
If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all there is

I know what you must be saying to yourselves
“If that’s the way she feels about it, why doesn’t she just end it all?”
Oh, no. Not me
I’m not ready for that final disappointment
Cause I know just as well as I’m standing here talking to you
When that final moment comes and I’m breathing my last breath,
I’ll be saying to myself … is that all there is?

https://genius.com/Peggy-lee-is-that-all-there-is-lyrics

I’m going to follow Peggy Lee’s advice. One day, you may discover all of your hopes and dreams and expectations may sit shattered on the sidewalk outside your house.

You may be left to wonder why you lived this life at all and what it was all about. That realization has finally hit me. I’m a grain of sand on a beach. A single star in the heavens.

No matter. I have friends and some family members who love me. I love them back. I plan to keep writing and, as Peggy advises, “hope to keep dancing and having a ball.”

Minus the booze, of course.

No

no

is a necessary magic

no

draws a circle around you with chalk and says

i have given enough

— boundaries

McKayla Robbins

If we are lucky we learn this early. Most don’t. Life mostly makes it impossible to learn this early. We want and need too much. There is little way of knowing early in life that we are the most important audience we are ever going to have.

In youth, we are still searching and experimenting. There is too much competition for our time and love and enthusiasm and strength. There are too many people who want to take advantage of those precious qualities. And do.

I sometimes believe there is nothing new under the sun. The trouble is we are unlikely to learn that until we have invested a great number of years and a great amount of energy in coming to that realization.

Life for the most part is an endless cycle of learning and changing. If we’re lucky. Life’s bits are doled out in manageable portions in accordance with our age and stage and ability to handle what is thrown at us and what comes up in our path. Again, if we’re lucky.

I have learned that saying “no” can be the profoundest statement of self-respect and respect for others. I once read of an author after a book reading who was offered a fan’s manuscript.

The fan wanted feedback on her writing and jumped on the chance to take advantage of the opportunity. The author politely and firmly declined: “Honey, I will never have time to read your manuscript. You’ll have to find someone else.”

That anecdote resonated with respect for me. Did she hurt the fan’s feelings? Probably. Maybe she even shocked her a little. Shocked her because the automatic knee jerk response in society from most people is to feign interest and accept such an offering without objection.

The manuscript might be heaved in the waste bin minutes later but they have greased the wheels of polite social discourse. And diminished their own integrity and self-respect in the process.

I love that story. I could only hope I could hold myself to such a high standard in a similar setting. I am sick of people who pander and strive to protect “someone else’s feelings.”

I am not suggesting we go out of our way to gratuitously hurt or insult people. But this anecdote is different. The author was asked directly to do something she did not want to do. So she said “no”.

It injected a necessary dose of reality in that aspiring-fan-cum-author. Not a pleasant experience but also not devastating. Just real. A win for everyone from where I sit.

There are no shortcuts in life really. If you circumvent the apprenticeship and required stages of trying and failing and learning from your mistakes and trying again and again until something begins working with greater frequency, you give yourself short shrift.

I sometimes think of kids born to money who make nothing of themselves or their lives because they never really had to work all that hard for anything. What comes easily is never appreciated as much as what we have fought for and worked hard for.

It has to do with investment of time, energy and love. It is the pursuit of what is inside you that really matters to you. The happiest people have listened and followed the dictates of that still, small voice within. It is still an elusive goal for most people. There is often way too much noise and distraction that drowns out the nudging of our own inner direction.

It a distressingly common tragedy.

I am getting better at “no.” I am getting better at saying “no” with love and kindness. I am getting better at recognizing what is worth pursuing and what is worth turning down. For me. The paths I do pick usually reflect some inner urging or passion or preoccupation. Those pursuits usually work out better than pursuits I have taken on half-heartedly.

So thank you for dropping by and checking in here today. Thank you for saying “yes” to what I put out there in the world. There is no expectation from any of you to do so. Just gratitude.

If it should happen one day up the road at a reading I have just given, you wish to gift me with your book length manuscript for my review and comments, remember this post. I will be honest enough to tell you (I hope) that I likely won’t read what you have written and you are best to try another tactic.

I hope I am kind and polite but firm. I hope you will recognize it is an expression of honesty and respect – both for you and for me.