Month: August 2009

change, friendship, good fortune, grateful, gratitude, home, moving

My Year of Hopefulness – New Home, Sweet Home

Christa Avampato

Moving day! Once again, I had a stellar experience with Flat Rate Moving and got some much needed, much appreciated help with my own bags from the past weeks. When arriving at the apartment this morning to see the new renovations, I had the impulse to skip from one end to the other. I actually hugged the new kitchen countertop. This apartment is such a huge improvement over my last place that I can hardly believe it’s mine!

While packing and unpacking are tough chores, I do relish the feeling of a fresh start, a new beginning filled with possibilities. My home isn’t just where I get some sleep and store my belongings. I do most of writing here. I practice my yoga which in akin to a religion for me. It’s a place where I laugh and cry and dream with my friends, where I have multiple out-of-town guests. The rest of my life springs from these walls, and with new walls, in some sense, I get a new life.
Once the movers collected my last signature and quietly closed the door on their way out, I did do a run through the maze of brown boxes that now lined my new place, and at the end made sure to do a little dance of gratitude: to my friends, Rob and Linda, who took me in for two weeks when I really needed a place to stay, for the movers who took such good care of my belongings from beginning to end, to the wonders of Craig’s list that made finding this apartment possible. I was so happy that I wanted to give the world one great big hug, and I wanted to make sure that I took a moment to remind myself how good this world and our experience in it can be.
Now I’m collapsing into bed with a wide smile. My feet haven’t been this tired in years and my legs aren’t used to the three flights of stairs just yet. And yet none of that matters. I’m home again.
change, economy, home, moving, New York City, recession

My Year of Hopefulness – While You Were Out

Christa Avampato

Today I went to pick up all of the keys for my new apartment. At 9am tomorrow, I’ll be happily skipping around my new, renovated, larger, cheaper apartment a mere four blocks from my old one – a very positive, unintended consequence of the recession.

I was too excited sleep this morning, so I was up and out the door early. I missed my old neighborhood, even though I’ve only been gone two weeks. I wanted to take some time to walk around before meeting my new landlord.

When I hopped off the train and walked a few blocks, I was surprised to see how much has changed. More store fronts have closed up, and a few formerly vacant ones are now occupied. A 10-story condo building is going up a few doors down from my new digs. The 96th Street subway construction looks like it may actually be finished some time relatively soon. And two blocks away, I’m not just getting a Whole Foods (which has me smiling widely) but an entire retail complex called Columbus Square (get it?) that includes a Crumbs (gasp)! I may never have to leave my new little haven of hope.
I’m one of those folks who’s always surprised that any place I’ve been changes while I’m away. The way it is in my mind at last sight, is the way it remains frozen, captured in time. Like my friend, Brandi, I should be walking around with a camera at every moment so that I can quickly snap images of our ever-changing world. Tomorrow everything could be different.
My experience today makes me realize why exhibits like Camilo Jose Vergara’s beautiful tribute to Harlem are so powerful, poignant, and necessary. Just as we are always in a process of becoming, so are the communities where we live. Just as we want to tell our own stories, so do our cities.
The image above was taken by Ruby Washington/The New York Times.
experience, good fortune, happiness, luck, mood, movie, outlook

My Year of Hopefulness – Prepare Yourself

Christa Avampato

“Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.” ~ George Bernard Shaw

For the past few months, I’ve been thinking about preparedness. For whatever reason, my life has taken some unexpected, wonderful turns that I didn’t expect during this time. And for some other reasons that I don’t fully I understand, I have been prepared for them. Ready to raise my hand, ready to make time in my life to pursue these new opportunities, ready to be surprised.

We owe it to ourselves to be able to accept and relish happy circumstances. And I have found more often than not that happiness largely depends on our desire to be happy. My friend, Kelly, and I love to quote the movie Say Anything when John Cusack says, “how hard is it to just decide to be in a good mood and then be in a good mood?” If we keep ourselves always looking up, aiming high, and seeking good fortune, then we at least have a decent shot at living a life that’s good, honest, and worthwhile.

This life requires that we be prepared for things to go our way. We spend so much time preparing for disaster, disappointment, and hardship. I’ve spent a lot of my life hoping for the best and expecting the worst. But what if I spent even a small amount of time at least anticipating if not expecting the best outcome? These last few months have taught me that the best of times can be upon us now, even when many world circumstances look so bleak. While the world may not be clean and bright, our attitude and outlook can be, and perhaps that intention is enough to change not only our own circumstances, but the circumstances of those whose lives we touch.

The image above can be found at: http://lh4.ggpht.com/_wZoiN6j9b2k/R0s8rN24ETI/AAAAAAAAALc/57869_Jfv9E/100_3377.JPG

choices, decision-making, dreams, future

My Year of Hopefulness – Make Your Own Path

Christa Avampato

“Travelers, there is no path. Paths are made by walking.” ~ Antonio Machado, Spanish poet

A few years ago, my friend, Amy, and I were talking about the lives that were stretched out before us, that were laying in wait for our arrival. We were at a place called The Little Grill, a co-op restaurant in Harrisonburg, Virginia. We were both graduate students; Amy was getting her Master’s in Conflict Resolution at EMU and I was getting my MBA just down the road at UVA in Charlottesville. I asked Amy how she saw all of her work playing out. Would she go overseas? Did she have a specific issue or population she wanted to work with? What did she think the universe held for her? Her response was that she didn’t know; the only thing she was sure of at that time was that she wanted to build her own road and not wait for it to find her.

I remember that conversation so clearly. Amy’s passion for her work was so evident. Now here we are, close pals, building our respective roads. Our paths have been shaped by many unexpected events, some good and some not-so-good. Those paths weren’t laying in wait for us as I originally thought. We’ve had to build them, one tiny piece at a time, by trying something, and trying again and again and again. Maybe our fate isn’t set by the Universe at all. Maybe we find our groove by moving.

While it can be a little disappointing to know that our perfect life isn’t out there waiting for us to show up, it’s also very freeing. Maybe our life’s work isn’t pre-determined. Maybe there’s nothing to discover, as if it’s been there all along. Maybe it’s all more dynamic than that. Maybe our life’s work can be whatever we want it to be, and if after a period of time we want to change it up, then that’s A-OK. After all, it’s our path, and it’s only going to be built by us moving forward. And sometimes moving forward means moving on.

Someone I know is very passionate politics right now. He’s researching all kinds of election methods and voting systems because he’s become deeply interested in how our government operates. I told him yesterday that I can’t wait to see how this all plays out for him, where it takes him. He said, “well, for now this is my interest. Tomorrow it might be the clarinet, and then that’s all you’ll hear about from me.” Little did I know that he was saying exactly the same thing as Machado. His path, Amy’s path, all of our paths are ours to build. Take whatever turns you want.

The photo above can be found at: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2304/1557274926_a7c2569175_b.jpg

insomnia, science, sleep, The Journal of Cultural Conversation

The Journal of Cultural Conversation – Take a Nap, or Don’t

Christa Avampato

My latest post on The Journal of Cultural Conversation (TJCC) is up: Take a Nap, or Don’t, an update of my continued research on insomnia. Does sleep help creativity? Does insomnia help creativity? Science weighs in…

My writing partner and collaborator, Laura Cococcia, is the creative genius behind TJCC and has asked me to write for the site every Monday. I will repost all links to my TJCC articles on this blog and on my Twitter account.

choices, decision-making, future, stress, success, worry

My Year of Hopefulness – Just Get to What’s Next

Christa Avampato

“Wisdom consists not so much in knowing what to do in the ultimate as knowing what to do next.” ~ Herbert Hoover, 31st U.S. president

Today I met with an old friend from college that I haven’t seen in 11 years. She and I worked on a theatre production together at Penn, and she has a new theatre project that she wanted to get my advice on. At one point in our conversation she said she just felt so overwhelmed by the enormity of the task of getting the project off the ground. As much as she believes in the idea, the shear amount of work that it takes will be intense, regardless of whether it is a runaway hit, a flop, or somewhere in-between. She is afraid of the outcome of her efforts before she’s even begun.

Like all of us with ideas that get our blood pumping, we get ahead of ourselves. We haven’t even put a proposal on paper, and already we are off and running making contingency plans for every challenge and triumph imaginable. Long-term planning is important; to paralyze ourselves with fear in the short-run makes all of our worrying inconsequential. If we can’t even get started, our long-term contingency plans don’t make a bit of difference.

A crystal ball would be a handy tool to have in our back pocket, particularly if we could play out different scenarios before making choices. Unfortunately, no one has invented one of those yet, and so we’re left with only our gut, experience, and conscience to help us make decisions. While we might do our best chess playing game, anticipating how the world around us will change, it never goes exactly according to plan. There’s always some surprise we didn’t account for. And if you’re doing A just to get to B, then my experience has demonstrated that surely C, D, and E will show up to throw a wrench in the works.

The best we can do is to just do what’s next. Keep a lofty goal as your guide, and remember that there are many routes to it. Don’t shut down your ability to move forward by standing at the fork in the road and burying your head in your hands. Self-imposed grief, and the indecision that comes along with it, doesn’t serve anyone well. And your dreams are too important. You have too much to offer this world. There is no time for indecision. The only choice you need to make right now is the next one. Leave the future where it belongs, out ahead of you.

The image above can be found at: http://toughsledding.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/fork.jpg

dreams, legacy, memory

My Year of Hopefulness – Legacy Building through Others

Christa Avampato

“When something comes to life in others because of you, then you have made an approach to immortality.” ~ Norman Cousins

Donna, a friend of mine from Owning Pink, sent me this quote when I put up a post about the after-school program I hope to pilot in January. It made me re-consider my earlier post on legacy and my post on dreaming big, drawing a through-line that connects them. Is our best chance at legacy not through something we build, but through our efforts to helps others build something?

All night I’ve been considering people who have built great public legacies in the not-so-distant past and put Norman Cousin’s spin on their contributions. The one I kept coming back to was Walter Cronkite. He was a great journalist, perhaps the greatest journalist, who kept the country calm during tumultuous events. And while his own career is impressive, the great majority of the coverage of his death was linked back to the fact that he inspired an entire generations of journalists, including all of the household names we turn to every day to help us understand what’s happening in our world. They are his legacy.

Walter Cronkite is a perfect examples of what Wes Jackson meant when he said that we should dream so big that our life’s work can’t be accomplished in our lifetime. It should continue on long after our time has come to pass. There seems to be no better way to do that than to let our legacy live on within the work of others, in their accomplishments, in what they do with the lessons they learn from us.

Last week, I had another discussion about legacy. Someone told me that he didn’t have any idea how to build a legacy, that he wanted to explore things that interested him in the hopes that somewhere down the line his pursuits would help someone else in some way.

At the time, I must admit that I was a little confused because this is the person who got me thinking about legacy to begin with. If he is so interested in legacy, then how could he not know how to build one? Now his comment makes sense – he’s doing what all great legacy builders have done. They didn’t set out to build a legacy, to make people remember them. They set out to do something interesting and helpful with their lives, and do that as best they could. When that becomes the focus – doing your best, pursuing something interesting and helpful – the legacy building will take care of itself. With that focus we have the hope of living long after we’ve passed through this world.

dreams, environment, nonprofit, success

My Year of Hopefulness – Freedom to Think Bigger

Christa Avampato

“If your life’s work can be accomplished in your lifetime, then you aren’t thinking big enough.”
~ Wes Jackson

My errands today took longer to accomplish than I had planned. By the time I finished them all, without having had coffee, breakfast, or lunch, I was ready to eat just about anything edible that came into my line of vision. I popped in to Chipotle, wolfed down my burrito bowl, and saw on my drink cup that the restaurant is running a multi-part series entitled “People We’re Pleased to Know”. Part 5 features Wes Jackson, the founder and President of The Land Institute and a leader in the sustainable agriculture movement.

Wes’s quote above lifted a huge weight off my shoulders. I’ve been thinking a lot about accomplishment lately. In my writing, at work, with my multiple side projects that I’ve been working on. Secretly I’ve been a little frustrated with myself – why are these things taking so long? Why am I not checking them off the list in rapid succession? His quote reminded me that ideas with passion and heart take time to develop and even more time to execute. The bigger the dream, the longer the time horizon.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t smaller dreams embedded into the larger vision we have for our lives. There are triumphs, and inevitably defeats, along the way that contribute to a lifetime of work. His life’s work was not to start The Land Institute. The Land Institute is a vehicle to help him realize a vision of our world developing a robust, healthy system to feed itself in perpetuity without destroying our planet.

Think of how Wes’s perspective frees up our creative energy and encourages us to include others in the process of building our dreams. He is shaping his vision and bringing it to life alongside many others who share his same aspirations, and those aspirations take constant care, concern, and commitment. His vision is bigger than the span of his own lifetime – it actually continues on indefinitely. Failure and success are taken out of the equation with a mission that big – all it requires is that we contribute to steady, forward progress.

change, choices, decision-making, failure, fate, success, time

My Year of Hopefulness – Stepping up and out

Christa Avampato

This week I got approval and funding for a project that I’ve been pitching for a year. A solid year of effort, and beating a drum that most had no interest in hearing. For the past year, I’ve felt alternately foolish and hopeful. One minute I thought I just didn’t get it, couldn’t see past my own stubbornness. The next minute I’d think, no, it’s everyone else who doesn’t get it.

I now realize that it wasn’t a matter of people getting it; it was entirely a matter of timing and circumstances. I wanted an idea to flourish ahead of its time. Had I gotten approval a year ago for it, the idea would have crashed and burned, no doubt about it. And then I would not have only felt foolish – I would have looked foolish, too.

The universe tries to protect us from ourselves. It throws down roadblocks to test our passion and perseverance, and also to give the rest of the world time to catch up with us. At the time that I first developed the idea, I didn’t see it that way. I was so willing to toot my own horn, thinking that I knew something others around me didn’t. In reality, the universe was saving me from me. It’s a difficult, necessary lesson to learn; when the path is cluttered with resistance, it really is best to wait it out with quiet strength.

This is not to say that we should all zip it and go stand in line waiting for our turn. I still maintain that it takes the ability to step up and out for an idea we believe in that really creates progress. However, the next time a project is not going exactly according to plan, I’ll have more patience with myself and with those around me. If the idea’s a good one, it’s time will come. Perhaps not on the schedule I’d like, though at the time when it has the greatest chance to not only survive but thrive.

books, change, family, growth

My Year of Hopefulness – Unaccustomed Earth

Christa Avampato

I’m reading the book Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri, a book I’ve been interested for over a year because I was so touched by her last book, The Namesake. Lahiri has a beautiful way of weaving stories between generations and across cultures, identifying and then eloquently writing about her characters thoughts and their often mismatched actions. Her characters are flawed in serious ways, making them so real that after a few pages, we think they are our neighbors, our family members, our friends.

The title “Unaccustomed Earth” intrigues me. Before picking up the book, I thought Lahiri was talking about new and uncharted waters that her characters would take on. This true, with the added twist that the uncharted waters are new challenges taken on by new generations while their hearts, minds, traditions, and families remain firmly rooted in the past. Her main focus in this book is the conflict that arises in a family as the world, physical and emotional, quickly transforms and changes from one generation to the next.

In my home town, people rarely leave. 99% of families are Italian and Catholic, like mine. There are roads named after prominent families in town who have made their homes there for generations. Generations of families live side-by-side, childhood friends remain friends forever, having the same conversations day in and day out. There, time stands still.

My family is a transplant there – neither my mom nor my dad grew up there. My brother is there thought my sister, Weez, and I left as soon as we headed off for college and never looked back. This was an unfamiliar practice – most people who went to college went locally or at least within the state. My sister and I never even considered sticking around. We were off for greener pastures, the same way my mom and dad were when they were young. Maybe finding our own way in the world, away from everything and everyone we knew as kids, is somehow rooted in our genes.

While my mom always wanted us to make our own way, it’s fair to say that she wishes we were all always around, all the time. It must be a hard process to watch someone you brought into the world head out into the unknown to see what they can find. Lahiri’s stories boil down to a common theme: the unknown is frightening, and it’s especially frightening for older generations who watch younger ones take flight in foreign spaces. I imagine it’s the same for my mom – while she wants so much for us to have adventures, she also worries about Weez and I being safe and happy and healthy in a way that she doesn’t worry about my brother.

Lahiri begins her book with a quote that puts her stories in perspective. “Human nature will not flourish…for too long a series of generations in the same worn-out soil. My children…shall strike their roots in unaccustomed earth. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne.” While the stories mostly talk about conflict between generations, with Hawthorne’s quote she acknowledges that future generations must put down their roots in foreign soil in order for us to move forward, evolve, and lead productive lives. It’s that process of making the unfamiliar familiar that is so critical to our development, and the development of humanity. Adapt and change are the only two things we ever really have to do.