Category: choices

choices, education, time

Step 43: Traveling a Path Takes Time

Christa Avampato

“Yes there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run there’s still time to change the road you’re on.” ~ Led Zeppelin, “Stairway to Heaven”

This week has been filled with ups and downs of very high and very low proportions. On the very high side, I was offered and accepted a new position at my company, an assignment so fantastic that I’m going to tempt fate a bit and say it’s a dream assignment. A blank sheet of paper and lots of opportunity with a fantastic team.

The very tough decision to make was to not conduct Innovation Station, my after-school program about product development, with Citizen Schools. With all this newness hitting of the job and the program at exactly the same time, I was feeling a little overwhlemed and pulled in too many directions. Usually I just allow myself to be overwhelmed and go with it. I’m trying to be better about this. Something had to give and that something couldn’t be my sanity or my time with my friends and family. So I will have to find another way forward for Innovation Station.

I’ve been feeling badly about this decision, recognizing that I couldn’t have it all, at least not right now. And then this quote made me feel a bit better. We can always change the road we’re on; we don’t always recognize that. We sometimes forget that almost everything that happens in our lives in something we choose. If we really want to make something happen, we can find a new avenue for it.

Yes, we can find the right path, but traveling the path takes time and we don’t always progress in the manner or in the time frame that we’d like to. Sometimes, we have to slow down, for our own sake and for the sake of our calling. It’s a tough, powerful lesson to learn and I’m trying.

The image above is not my own. It can be found here.

choices, journey

Step 42: The Hero’s Choice

Christa Avampato

This week Brian and I were talking through some personal choices I will need to make in the coming months. I’m having trouble deciding what to do – all of the options are fabulous. Poor, unfortunate me, right? Having to choose between fabulous and fabulous is a tough row to hoe.

Brian has a way of staring at me very directly as if to say, “seriously, this is what you’re worried about?” Then I start laughing, fall over to my side on the couch, and shake my head in wonder. If all else fails, I never have to worry about knowing how to entertain myself with my whirling, churning mind.

“Let me get a little Joseph Campbell on you,” Brian said. “The hero’s journey involves choices, and the nature of those choices must be difficult. Anyone can choose between a fantastic choice and a terrible choice. A hero, or heroine, has to make tough choices. That’s the nature of the hero’s journey.”

I sat with that thought for a while, turning it over and over in my mind. “I guess you’re right,” I conceded. “I can’t go wrong, can I?”

“No. May you always have a life where you have to choose between wonderful options,” Brian said.

“Let’s hope so, Brian,” I said.

“Forget hope. Let’s just make it happen.”

I laughed. “Yes. Let’s.”

The image above is not my own. It can be found here.

change, choices

Step 39: The 100th Monkey

Christa Avampato

I’m fascinated with tipping points, those magical pivots when there is a step-change in the way the world operates. Once we cross over them, we can’t ever go back. They assure that progress has been made and will continue. To illustrate some profound tipping points, Brian told me about the idea of the 100th monkey and trees slowly exposed to toxins.

If a tree is slowly exposed to a toxin, it develops an immunity to the toxin. In a strange turn of events that science cannot explain, all trees of that same species develop the immunity even though they haven’t been exposed to the toxin. Somehow the trees communicate – be it through the soil or the air or the water supply. They are all connected.

At some point, a monkey figured out that if he dipped a stick into an ant hill, he could capture more ants to eat. Eventually, enough monkeys learned this trick that it became something that monkeys just knew how to do, from birth, with no training. Again, science has no explanation for this. Monkeys, thousands of miles apart, even on different continents, somehow tap into the greater genius when a certain tipping point of intelligence is reached within the species. It is truly remarkable.

Think of the implications that this kind of uber-intelligence has for us. What kind of world could we have if we could reach a tipping point of kindness, concern, compassion, and love? If our generation could put aside violence and have a restored faith in humanity, what would that mean for the many generations yet to be born? Is saving the world possible simply by enough of us saving ourselves?

choices

Step 38: Your Jiminy Cricket

Christa Avampato

“The human voice can never reach the distance that is covered by the still small voice of conscience.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi

When I was little, Jiminy Cricket and his famous saying of “let your conscience be your guide” had a strong impact on me. I have always imagined our conscience, of consciences as the case may be, to be that little entity sitting on our shoulder, helping us navigate the world as good and honest people. Lately, I’ve also found that little voice serving the purpose of reminding me of my dreams and encouraging me to seek out new territory in many different areas of my life.

While our minds may riddle our thoughts with self-doubt, the conscience’s voice is clear and confident. In our hearts, we always know the right thing to do, the correct way to jump. We just second-guess our conscience and intuition, and this is caused by letting others put their expectations upon us. Who should we be? Where should we work? Who should we spend time with? If I do x, y, or z, what will others think of me? So rather than following our hearts and our conscience, we just turn down the dial on them, and focus on how others want us to live our lives.

My friend, Amanda, posted up a a quote by Michael Pollan, prolific author and healthy food advocate that really resonated with me this morning. My favorite line is, “without its daydreams, the self is apt to shrink down to the size and shape of the estimation of others.” He advocates for day dreaming as a tool in our lives that can guide us toward our best self. In day dreaming, the conscience’s voice is not only clear, but also strong. In day dreaming, we’re reminded that the voice of the conscience never goes away. We may put it on mute while running through our daily lives, but eventually, in the dead of night and the soft hush of morning, on our yoga mat, or during any time of silence, there it is, whispering our dreams back to us.

By silencing the conscience, we ensure a mid-life crisis, or a crisis of faith, that moment of “what the heck am I doing with my life?” And it can all come crashing down, this carefully constructed, “right way of doing things” sort of life. This crash isn’t inevitable. It just requires work to avoid it, strength and courage to live the lives that we want to live instead of ceding to the expectations of others. You can’t get rid of the conscience; in the long-term it’s going to win. So just listen. Now. It wants to be your guide, so just let it do its job.

The image above is not my own. It can be found here.

choices, happiness, yoga

Step 36: Following Hearts

Christa Avampato

My friend, Amanda, wrote a gorgeous post on her blog about following our hearts and living the lives we want to live. These sayings have been uttered so often that it’s easy to hear them and just roll out eyes in that “oh yeah, easy for you to say” way. Amanda, in her infinite writing wisdom, added two quotes to her post that greatly heightened the meaning of these sentiments for me.

“Trust your heart. You’re a deserving craftsman. It would never betray you.” ~ The character of Seymour, writing to his younger brother, Buddy, in Seymour, An Introduction by JD Salinger

“In my dream, the angel shrugged and said, ‘If we fail this time, it will be a failure of imagination,’ and then she placed the world gently in the palm of my hand.”~ Brian Andreas

I’ve never heard the quote from JD Salinger before. The quote from Brian Andreas is one of my favorites from his art work. They both share the beautiful sentiment that within our hearts is every answer we will ever need. Do we have enough confidence and faith in our heart’s judgment to follow these answers? Can we trust our imagination to the extent that we place the entirety of our future in its capable grasp?

Yesterday, I read Amanda’s post through misty eyes. I have been wrestling with some choices about where to take this one wild and precious life of mine. My mind loves weighing options, playing out the scenarios to make the best choice possible. This one choice that I’m currently considering is giving me pause. My heart and mind are not in agreement, and I’m not sure why.

But if I sit still long enough, just breathe and be, move through my asanas during my yoga practice, my heart sings. It knows which way to go. I just needed Amanda, JD Salinger, and Brian Andreas to remind me of its strength and competence.

The image above is a work by Brian Andreas.

choices, decision-making

Step 27: Non-negotiables

Christa Avampato

Yesterday, Brian and I had a discussion about anxiety and what causes it. Lately, I’ve been having some very vivid dreams about choices I’m making and how those choices will affect other areas of my life. I love to think about ripple effects, taking an idea as far down the road as I can to see how it may play out in the short-, medium-, and long-term. Of late, I’ve also been experimenting with working backwards, considering where I’d like to be and then working back to see what I should do now to get there.

I asked Brian for some other tools like the working backwards strategy that may help me with the current decisions on my plate. He suggested the idea of building a list of non-negotiables. I am a fan of pro-con lists, though the trouble with pro-con lists is that they are interminable. By contrast, a list of non-negotiables is finite and non-negotiables quickly help us get to our core values.

We can develop a list of non-negotiables for every area of our lives: career, relationships, where we live, our diet. And the genius of this type of list is that it prevents us from settling. There are certain things that are just unacceptable, and if we take each of the options before us and match it up against our non-negotiable list, we can more easily discern which options could work and which ones need to go to the trash.

I’m working away on my lists for different areas of my life. Here’s one for how I schedule my writing commitments:
1.) I must retain the rights to my work
2.) I receive credit for the work and am able to list my website’s URL at the beginning or end of the piece
3.) The piece must be about a topic that personally interests me
4.) The publication must broaden my reach to a new audience

That’s it. Now of course there are other things I’d like to have, though these 4 points are the must-haves. If an opportunity violates any of my non-negotiables, no matter how great the opportunity is, I know I will eventually be unhappy with it. Knowing our non-negotiables provides us with our greatest chance at happiness, ensures our authenticity, and presents the most efficient and fulfilling use of our time and effort. Who could argue with that?

choices, dreams

Step 1: If

Christa Avampato

“If”: proof that glorious things can come in very small packages. Think of all the wonder wrapped up in this tiny, two-letter word. Imagination takes flight, dreams come to be, and chances of a lifetime are taken by its mere utterance. On his blog, Chris Brogan asked his readers to consider the three words of 2010 that they would use to shape their 2010 plans. “If” is my selection because of the great possibility it invokes.

“If” describes the abilities that make us successful in the truest sense of the word, in terms of the deepest and dearest meaning it has. What abilities allow us to live a life of great virtue? What abilities will make every possibility an option for us? “If” is the gateway to the answers.

“If-” is the title of one of my favorite poems by Rudyard Kipling, and one of my favorite lines of the poem asks us to “start again at your beginnings”. Today begins a new decade, and so it’s only natural for us to look back and remember where we began the last one. A few days after January 1, 2000, I took off for my first theatre tour. Previously, I had been working in a tiny theatre box office, and I needed to break out of it. The contract for the tour was only for four months and the pay was less than I made at the box office. I didn’t care; I needed the adventure.

And so began a decade that would lead me to travel around the globe, fulfill my dream of managing Broadway shows, and then send me back to school to take on the complex world of hard-nosed business. I became a published writer, and through that writing found my truest voice. I found yoga as a balm for my old soul, fell in love countless times, and learned to trust my own instincts above all others. In the decade that began with the year 2000, I discovered how I could make a meaningful contribution to humanity that would live on long after I am gone.

At the end of the decade, I was getting a bit too comfortable. I had gotten set in my new ways and lost sight of the adventure that called to me so clearly at the start of 2000. I too often trusted the opinions and instincts of others. And so, the world decided that a cleansing was necessary, a cleansing that would make it impossible for me to rest on my laurels by taking away the laurels altogether. In Kipling’s audacious terms, I was forced to start again at my beginnings.
Today, in this hour, at this moment, I am choosing to begin again using a map of “If, then” statements. It is a long and winding road, filled with imagination and dreams, a tortuous tangle of stunning possibility and hope. Cheers to the beginning of a very good year, and a very good decade!

art, career, choices, education, literature, time, writing

My Year of Hopefulness – Your One Wild and Precious Life

Christa Avampato

Long a mainstay of college admissions processes and orientations, I recently heard about the poem The Summer Day by Mary Oliver. (I’ve pasted it at the bottom of this post.) My sister, Weez, tells me that it is my great hope in life to be employed as a professional student. She’s right.


I am a sucker for places that make us dream big, that push us beyond our limits, that stretch our imaginations and minds in ways that we never thought possible. I am a forever student, very much at home in the classroom wherever that classroom happens to be, whether I am up front teaching or happily seated in the front row soaking up all that glorious information like a sponge. So of course the big questions are my very favorites, and Mary Oliver hits on what may be my favorite question yet: “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Isn’t that gorgeous? Makes me want to print it out 1,000 times and plaster it all over my neighborhood.

This week I have had new options unfolding for me every day. Just when I think I am set upon a course of action, some other wonderful possibility falls into my path to consider. I think I’m being tested (which is fine by me since students love tests.) I think I’m being shown a way to focus on exactly what field in life gets me most excited, education, and then also being offered a myriad of distractions that are testing my passion for it. Mary Oliver’s question is like a beacon in the haze. What if we looked at every option that’s thrown our way, what if we considered every road before us with this lens. What if we made choices by asking “is this what you want to do with your one wild and precious life (knowing that our lives are so short)?”

The very thought of this takes my breathe away. Our lives are so short. We have such little time here, making every day a wild and precious thing. So here is my answer to Mary Oliver, no matter how many days I have left:

To write courageously and passionately so that it stirs the hearts and imaginations of others
To give children every where the chances that I had to improve my own lot in life through education, dedication, and very hard work
To lift others up as I rise
To generate more kindness, compassion, and generosity in the world
To take these two wild and precious hands and build things that have value and meaning, for me and for many others
To travel far and wide, to experience other cultures, to see new scenery, to meet as many citizens of the world as possible
And, yes, every day I want to be both a teacher and a student

The Summer Day
by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

The image above is not my own. It can be found here.
choices, creativity, decision-making, innovation

My Year of Hopefulness – Make Big Decisions Real

Christa Avampato

“A problem well defined is half solved.” ~ John Dewey

Just when you think you have it all figured out life does something very funny – it changes everything on us. We get thrown an option that we never even imagined as a possibility. This recently happened to me while I was in the middle of making a very big decision. I thought I just had to choose between A and B, A being far superior to B, so superior that it didn’t even seem like a choice at all. Enter choice C, a real choice. Houston, we now have a big decision to make and this one is not easy.

I’ve got several mechanisms for deciding between options. I’m a fan of the pro con lists. I like talking to lots of different people and getting their perspectives on what they’d do if they were me. I’ve also been known to just wait and see in silence until some helpful piece of info emerges. This latest decision is a bit more complicated. B and C are actually equally great options. I’d be lucky to have the opportunity to pursue either avenue. Now it looks like I’ll have the chance to choice, and they will lead me in wildly different, happy directions. This is the classic case of two roads diverged in a yellow wood.

For inspiration in my decision-making, I was reading through some of my books this weekend and came across a few books by ?WhatIf! Innovation. In How to Have Kick-Ass Ideas, Chris Baréz-Brown talks about the very personal decision-making he and his wife went through when they were deciding whether or not to have children. To make their choice, they decided to live their life for a week as if they had decided to not have kids. This helped them live their through the lens of that decision, sort of like a test-drive of a car. After that week they re-evaluated their choice to see if it felt right.

Chris’s method is vastly superior than my pro con lists and asking 100 different people what they would do. His method makes the choice more personal and lets us experience some of the consequences that hit us shortly after we make a choice. In truth, I’m a little scared of this process and I’m going for it anyway. I’ve recently noticed that one of my areas of personal improvement is to see the downside of a situation as clearly as I see the upside. Chris’s process will allow me to not only see the downside, but experience it. It brings a certain reality to the situation. If tough decisions need anything at all, it’s a healthy dose of reality. I’ll let you know what I find in a week!

If you’ve never read Chris’s book, I highly recommend it. It’s a perfect, inspiring read for anyone at a crossroads looking for guidance from one of the world’s leading creative minds. Get it here.

art, choices, future

My Year of Hopefulness – The future’s arrived

Christa Avampato

“The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.” ~ William Gibson, author of Neuromancer

The future is a funny thing. It can surprise us. It can frighten us and delight us. When it unfolds, we understand its logic though in the moment it seems to completely confuse us. It’s true of the larger world’s future and of our own personal futures, too.

As Weez, Lorelei, and I were heading to the Glass Garden at the Rusk Institute today, I was telling them about my plans for school and work and every other aspect of my life that I could think of for the foreseeable future. It all seemed to make so much sense, even though only several weeks ago nothing really seemed to make sense at all. It seems that so much is falling into place, as if I had these little pieces and the slots they fit into all along; I just wasn’t sure how to configure them until now.

When I think about the next year of my life, all of my projects seem to be falling into the time line in a startling beautiful pattern. It’s as if the future is already here, that it has been here for some time. It just took me a while to see it for myself. A few things in my life needed to be cleared away, things that were distracting me. At the time, I didn’t even know those things were distractions. I didn’t even know that they needed to go but the world knew. My future knew what I needed to keep moving forward.

Lately my body has gotten into the unfortunate habit of waking up at 4am on the nose every morning so I try to make that time useful. When this happens, I stare out the window at the water towers. I have a glass of milk. Some times I do some easy yoga poses and I think about my future. I try to think of an image that calms me down and lulls me back to sleep.

Recently, I’ve been imagining myself as a high diver in the form of a Maxfield Parrish painting. I face this beautiful forest as I stand at the very edge of a cliff. I raise my arms and face up to the sun, I bend my knees, and I jump. Rather than falling to the Earth, the wind catches me and I float under a sky of beautiful colors. I’ve been thinking of the forest as all of the experiences I’ve had to date and the beautiful colors of the sky as my future. Those colors have yet to fully take shape, though their very beginnings have certainly arrived.

The painting above depicts “Mountain Ecstasy” by Maxfield Parrish.