Two people go through the exact same experience and end up in radically different places. Why? Because of their stories.
What happened to them before the experience? How did they view the experience while it was happening? What did they do with what they learned from the experience? The answers to these questions build out a person’s stories, the ones they tell themselves and the ones they tell others.
When you go out into the world, you are bound to have things happen. Some of them will be wonderful, and some will be awful. We can bear them all and make good use of each one by putting them into a story. Stories help us cope. They give us an outlet for celebration and for understanding. To write a story, we have to stand at the nexus of our experiences, past, present, and future. We have to be in the moment while also reflecting back and looking forward.
If we can tell a story that’s honest and helpful, then we have lived well.
“Beginnings are apt to be shadowy.” ~ Rachel Carson, American marine biologist, conservationist, and author of Silent Spring
We have such a strong desire to know what’s next before we leap. It’s understandable; the unknown is frightening. We don’t know what to expect and it’s difficult to prepare when we don’t know exactly what we’re facing. Panic sets it. We freeze and wait for more information.
Although I thought I knew what I was getting in to before I’ve taken any of my leaps, in my career and in my life, the truth is that what seemed to be sure wasn’t really sure at all. Sometimes things didn’t pan out as I expected, and sometimes that was a wonderful thing. Sometimes, it wasn’t. Sometimes, I faltered and lost my footing. Many times I fell, and then I got back up.
When I look back on those leaps that led me to land in a place that was entirely different from what I expected, I am grateful for my ignorance. I am grateful that I didn’t have all the answers. If I had, I may have never taken those leaps at all. And in the end, they were all worth it because they led me to where I am, a place I am so glad to be.
In the past, I worked very hard to collect what information I could and based my decision on that information. To be honest, the information I collected wasn’t all that valuable. All that time I spent waiting to make a decision didn’t yield much except lost time. In the end, my gut always new what to do when I would invariably get myself in a bind. It didn’t need all the answers; it just needed me to have faith in…me.
Now, I’m getting better at trusting my gut from the start. One thing I can always be certain of is my gut’s ability to do what is best for me. And I’ve learned to trust in my own abilities to handle any circumstance, predicted or otherwise, that arises. Hazy beginnings no longer phase me; every journey is apt to have surprise twists and turns. I embrace them; that’s where the fun is.
I read an article yesterday about the five questions that every company should ask itself. As I read through it, I found that the questions are helpful on a personal level as well. We hear the line that “we are the CEOs of our own careers” all the time but how many of us actually live that way? When was the last time you asked yourself these questions, answered them, and made any necessary changes to align your life with your values?
The questions are:
1.) “What is your purpose on this Earth?”
2.) “What should you stop doing?”
3.) “If you didn’t have an existing way of life, how could you best build one?”
4.) “Where is your petri dish?” – a.k.a. “How do you experiment and make plans for your future without feeling hampered by your current situation?”
5.) “How do you make a better experiment?”
The last 4 center around the process of experimentation in which success is not guaranteed, or even likely. Ultimately, they ask us to consider how we will learn from taking chances and possibly falling. They also lead us to consider how we will pick ourselves back up and try again, better and stronger than we were before. This kind of reflection is worthy of our consideration.
“No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.” ~ Voltaire, French writer, historian and philosopher
In the last few weeks, I’ve done a heavy dose of reflecting. I’m in prime planning mode for 2013. What direction will I take with my career? How will my personal life unfold? What do I want to learn? What do I want to do more often and what do I want to give up? Where do I hope to be at this time next year and how do I chart a course to get there? These are heavy questions.
Sometimes, I get frustrated. I see so many options that I get stuck and run the pros and cons through my mind over and over again. When this happens, I just stop. I close my laptop. I put down my pen. I take myself (and Phin) for a walk.
The break clears my head and I return to my challenges with fresh eyes. While on break, the wheels of my subconscious spin and ruminate without interference from the filters of my conscious mind. My subconscious goes free-wheeling to make connections between seemingly disparate bits of information. It combines information in all sorts of ways without attaching judgement. The key is that last bit: no judgement. When I let my conscious mind give up, my imagination can run wild and that is the best way to solve challenges.
Maybe this time of year invites reflection for you, too. Like me, you may be running through different scenarios for the year ahead. You will need to make choices on how to spend your time, energy, and effort. If it overwhelms you, I hope you’ll give up, too. Stop trying so hard to figure it all out. Let your mind sort it out and don’t get in its way.
This holiday, spend time with your family and friends. Let yourself laugh. Power down your devices (at least for a little while.) Be present. Reconnect with nature. Go for a walk, confident in the knowledge that the answer will rise up precisely when it is needed and that you will be both aware and relaxed enough to hear it.
On Friday, I gave my homemade pasta making another try. I made a triple batch a couple of weeks ago and pasta dough holds up well in the freezer when stored properly. For a moment, I thought about making a different shaped pasta. Then I considered that my last attempt at forming the orecchiette (little ear shaped pasta) needed improvement.
So I rolled out the dough and took my own feedback on how to improve my pasta shaping. The result of the second trial – vastly improved! There is so much to learn during the second turn at bat.
I have a bit of an addiction to the new. My greatest fear is being bored so I often charge off in the direction of the unknown. However, there is so much to be learned by trying something, considering how to do it better next time around, and then actually having a next time around.
I started to think about how this may apply to other areas of my life. I am often guilty of filing an activity under “been there, done that” if I have an experience that is less than stellar. Maybe all this time I’ve been missing an opportunity for incredible learning. It’s wonderful to acquire new skills and experiences – it’s my favorite way to pass the time. But there is also real value in trying something and trying it again to compare the results.
Slowly, I am beginning to see that there may be more second chances in my future.
“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.” ~ Pema Chodron
Comfort feels so good that we never want to leave. The trouble is that if we never set out for higher ground, if we never throw ourselves out of our comfort zone and into unfamiliar territory, we don’t grow. We don’t learn just how strong we are. We only build resilience, determination, and grit by remaining focused in the face of discomfort. Life is a continual adaptation to change.
Sometimes, I wish this weren’t the case. I wish we didn’t need a burning platform to truly change our ways. I wish we could learn how to be calm in the face of discomfort without ever having to actually be uncomfortable.
It doesn’t work that way. Life is a full contact sport. We actually have to live it – all its ups and downs and the ride in-between – in order to understand what it’s all about.
For this reason, I don’t get frustrated or angry when the going gets tough. I may briefly feel sad or unhappy that something I wanted didn’t go my way. As a general rule, I give myself about 10 minutes to feel as terrible as I want to feel without passing any kind of judgement. I can sit in the dust of disappointment, shake my fists at the sky, and ask “why, why, why?” as loudly as possible. And then I need to pick myself up, shake off the dust, and get on with my day, grateful for the tough times upon me that help me to wake up and feel truly alive.
So often we hope that the clouds hanging above our heads will magically part but what I’ve found is that the clouds part through our own volition. We decide that it is time to clear them away. We climb up and with our own two hands, we brush them out-of-the-way to let the light in. We are happy, free, empowered, and awake by choice, not chance. We restore comfort in our lives by creating it in every circumstance of our living.
My baked brie and apples in pastry dough – made from scratch!
Baking is an act of pure belief and stubborn patience. We sift together dry ingredients, add wet ingredients, form a dough of some sort that (we hope) looks nothing like the final product, and send it off to the oven to be transformed into something edible. We are not certain of our success until some brave soul takes a forkful.
With cooking, we can taste as we go. We can sample and adjust. We see the process as it happens and can pivot if and when needed to save the meal. Before anyone attempts to taste it, we already know the quality because we’ve tasted it all along.
By contrast, a sampling of dough is a terrible idea for many reasons. One, it (God willing) won’t taste the same as when it’s baked. Two, raw ingredients like eggs aren’t safe. Three, it makes no difference if you taste it along the way or not because it cannot be adjusted. Still, we press on fully aware that there is no saving a bad baking job. If it’s bad, all we can do is chuck it, chalk it up to experience, and begin again. Or not.
For these reasons, I have long lived in awe and loathing of the act of baking. (Please see my post from about this time last year regarding a failed attempt at baking a pumpkin pie that I continue to lovingly refer to as “the oven incident”.) Or at least I did until a few weeks ago. I was shopping in my local Whole Foods and navigated my wheel-y basket to the sandwich bread. $4 / loaf. Sounds like an awful lot of money for a loaf of relatively boring bread.
“I could bake bread,” I thought to myself, “for a heck of a lot less than $4 / loaf.”
“You can’t bake,” said a tiny voice that popped out unexpectedly from behind a corner of my mind.
“Oh, shut up,” I replied (thankfully using my inside voice as I was still in Whole Foods surrounded by other people.) “I could bake if I really wanted to.”
For the next week every time I opened up my kitchen cabinet where I keep my dry goods, I saw a barely used bag of flour just staring at me. I bought it when I fancied myself a pumpkin pie baker. This did not go well. I tossed the dough, sealed up the bag of flour, hid it in the back of the cabinet, and decided that I do not bake.
Nothing will get me to grow a new skill set faster than my thriftiness. $4 for a loaf of plain, commercially baked bread just seems ridiculous. So I set about learning to bake. Or at least learning about learning how to bake.
The other day my sister, Weez, posted a Pinterest picture of a gorgeous loaf of fresh-baked bread in a powder blue Le Creuset Dutch oven. I gasped out loud (I was home so no inside voice necessary. Phineas is quite used to my constant audible stream of consciousness.) It was gorgeous. I clicked through and found a remarkably easy recipe for making homemade bread. It actually seemed foolproof, which is exactly what I need.
In the meantime, Thanksgiving arrived. I spent it with friends. My lovely friend, Crystal, was kind enough to have my dear friend, Amy, and me over to her home. Crystal’s a top-notch chef who owned a restaurant prior to business school. I was in charge of the cheese plate and decided I wanted to bring a few of my favorite types along with Brie and apples baked in pastry dough. I took myself to the grocery store and they were all out of pastry dough. I thought about possible alternatives like biscuit or pizza dough and decided against them.
“I could make pastry dough,” I thought to myself. “I actually already have all of the ingredients at home.”
Tiny Voice returned. “Pastry dough is tough to make! Tougher than pumpkin pie and you remember how that went!”
“Oh, shut up,” I replied. (Are you sensing a pattern here?)
I went home and googled “pastry dough recipe.” This one popped up on allrecipes.com. Seemed foolproof. (Another pattern.)
So I set about sifting together flour and salt, adding water, rolling out butter to refrigerate, and then incorporating the butter into the dough – over the course of 2 hours. Yes, 2 hours. You have to roll in the butter, turn, refrigerate, roll in the butter, turn, refrigerate, roll in the butter, turn, refrigerate. My first turn (that’s a technical term in the world of us pastry dough makers) was in a word, awful. The butter broke through the dough, got all over my rolling pin and the counter. The dough was sticking to everything. The recipe predicted this may happen and it instructed to add more flour. I was skeptical but followed along. I added more flour, and more flour again, until it turned into some kind of unruly balled mess.
“I told you this was hard,” said Tiny Voice in that lilting know-it-all tone that all Tiny Voices use.
Not easily deterred, I turned down the volume on Tiny Voice, wrapped up my messy dough ball, and refrigerated it again as the recipe instructed. “I could save this,” I kept thinking. This thought was followed closely by, “I wonder if using pizza dough as a substitute really was such a bad idea.”
The timer went off. I marched over to the fridge to retrieve the dough ball and put it through its paces of roll, turn, refrigerate. To my shock and delight, it was actually much improved. It improved even further on the third turn. I could even see what would become the flaky layers once baked! My fridge is a magician! Following directions and having patience actually works in the world of baking. Every accomplished baker in the world was right and I was wrong. Go figure!
Buoyed by my dough success, I went to my kitchen cabinet to see what other food staples I might consider making rather than buying. The dried pasta stared back at me with a similar gaze as that recently re-employed bag of flour. In business school, friends of mine and I made gnocchi by-hand. That also looked destined for failure until somehow the dough came together as if by magic pixie dust. I always assumed it was the divine intervention of my Italian ancestors, but maybe it was baking patience at play.
I toddled over to the computer and found this recipe for fresh pasta dough. Again, allrecipes.com to the rescue. Again, seemingly fool-proof. I’m beginning to like this pattern. And what’s become of Tiny Voice? Well, it’s been silenced for the time being. I intend to keep it that way by stuffing it with homemade goodness.
Folks, against all odds, I may actually learn to bake.
“Every child begins the world again.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
On Thursday mornings at 10:30am, I teach a Chair Yoga for Seniors class. And these seniors aren’t the newly retired. Most of them are in their 80’s and 90’s and they are as spry as can be. I’m hoping that by teaching this class, a bit of their well-aged spunk will stick with me when I’m (God-willing) their age.
One of these students came up to me last week with a question.
“I’ve got a bit of a nagging injury,” Muriel said to me.
“Okay. What’s that?” I asked, assuming it was something that is common with arthritis or something similar.
“Well, my upper arm around my shoulder area has been hurting for the last few days.”
“Did you sleep on it funny or hit it on something recently.”
“Well, I started playing ping-pong at this place just down the street a little while ago and I’m really getting into it. I’ve played every afternoon for the last week and I think I may have overdone it.”
I had to laugh at myself. Here I was thinking she had some symptom of aging and it’s actually a sports-related injury. I should have known better with this group of active seniors. Muriel is especially effusive about my class. A few weeks ago, she let me know that the meditation portion of the class has been transformational for her.
“I cannot believe how easily peace settles into me now when I’m meditating. I’ve never felt this peaceful in my entire life, and I’ve been alive a long time. I wish I had known about this earlier!”
I was very proud of Muriel and her sore muscles. “Muriel, this is wonderful. This means you’re building strength in your arms, just like when you go to the gym!”
“I’m actually very excited about this ping-pong. It’s so good for me. Check this out,” she said as she flexed her biceps and asked me to feel them. There was a definitive muscle there. “Can you believe it? First time in my life I’ve ever had muscles in my arms. It took me this long to build them!”
I gave her the advice to alternate ice and heat and give herself a bit more rest to heal her shoulder.
“Do you play ping-pong, Christa?”
In truth the only version of ping-pong I’ve ever played is beer pong. “No, I’ve never played proper ping-pong before,” I replied.
“Well, we will have to play some time. I can teach you. When I come to class next week, we’ll set a date and time. This will be marvelous! But we’ll have to get there early in the afternoon when they open. Otherwise, there’s a crowd. And don’t worry, we can play downstairs where it’s less crowded so you won’t feel self-conscious as a newbie.”
And with that, Muriel got her coat and made her way outside into the big, bad world. I thought about Muriel all afternoon and the deep, beautiful lesson she taught me during our conversation.
At every age, there are new experiences waiting for us. Too often, we think old age equates with decline. For my seniors, this couldn’t be further from the truth. They’re bringing newness into their lives all the time – whether that’s through taking a yoga class or building biceps at 90-something years old.
Golden years can certainly be golden. It’s all a matter of perspective, attitude, and the courage it takes to try something new.
“We seek not rest, but transformation. We are dancing through each other as doorways.” ~Marge Piercy
A funny thing happens to me around 5pm every day. I can have a very tough day around the office, so tough that I feel like just curling up in a ball and hiding until tomorrow. And then I take the elevator down to the ground floor, push open the door, and suddenly the lightness returns, the fatigue lifts, and I’m ready for hours of working on my personal projects, seeing friends, and being out and about in this wild city. I don’t need rest after a tough day in cube-ville. I need a change of scene that inspires a transformation of self.
You might be looking at the screen right now and considering a pity party on my behalf. “Poor Christa. She really needs to quit her job and just work for herself.” Yes, eventually I will have to work for myself and those wheels are greased and in motion. These things take time and planning, particularly in this tricky economy. Every day I am taking one more step toward that big new beginning. I have a feeling it’s going to happen far sooner than my long-term plan suggests, though I am learning great lessons along the journey that I know will be invaluable down the line.
The people we meet, the places we go, and the experiences we have are doorways to something new – sometimes a whole new beginning, sometimes just a slight realization that causes us to take in the world with a different perspective. We do not immediately know the impact of these learnings. We wonder why we have to be put through firestorms and discomfort, why we have to wrestle with uncertainty and dissatisfaction and disappointment. And here’s why: it is the learning we need now.
It can all be valuable if we take the time to assign the value. And yes, we assign the value to our trials. We are responsible for our own learning; we are responsible for our own transformation.
If you look at my resume, you’ll see a wide variety of experiences. I’ve worked in 6 industries, companies both big and small, and become a purveyor of so many hats that it’s hard for anyone to put me into a traditional box. This is all by my own design. There are lots of interesting pieces in there, and a person recently asked me how all of this hangs together. (I think he really wanted to ask me what I’m up to!)
I actually do have a box, and it’s one I lovingly crafted myself that proudly carries the sign “puzzle solver”. I love puzzles of all kinds, literal and figurative. I like figuring out how all of the pieces fit to form the cohesive whole. I love the details as much as I love the big picture. I love science and art with equal fervor; sometimes I like to work independently and sometimes I like to work with others. Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How are close friends of mine. I use them in my every day conversations as much as possible. For me, pursuit and discovery equal joy.
Companies are made up of lots of little parts and because I like to be an orchestrator, I need to have an intimate understanding of those little parts. So I took different jobs in different industries to learn different skills and meet different kinds of people. This is why relationship-based jobs are so much fun to me; they give me the chance to figure out what makes people tick and that “thing” is different for everyone. I like to know what gets people jazzed and figure out how to give them more of it. People are endlessly fascinating and confounding to me because they are always changing. It’s impossible to be bored with studying them. Each one is so unique.
And I think that may just be the key to building a lifetime career you love – go try all different sorts of things. Don’t be so concerned about how it all fits together in the moment. I didn’t know this love of puzzles would begin to coalesce for me; I just hopped on opportunities that gave me a chance to learn something new. And with every experience, I took what I learned and applied it forward. All you really need is a sense of curiosity, and the insight will take care of itself.
Two people go through the exact same experience and end up in radically different places. Why? Because of their stories.
Christa Avampato 