Category: history

history, inspiration, Washington

This just in: History is alive and well at President Lincoln’s Cottage

Christa Avampato

“The past suggests what can be, not what must be. It shows some of what’s possible.” -Howard Zinn

This weekend I took a walking tour of President Lincoln’s Cottage. It’s located in the Petworth neighborhood of D.C., just north of where I live. My friend, Matt, told me about it. American history was one of my majors at Penn, and I’d never heard of this cottage even though President Lincoln spent 1/4 of his presidency living there with his family. He commuted to the White House every day during that time, often evading his cavalry (the Secret Service of the time) and passing Walt Whitman’s home. Whitman often emerged from his home to tip his hat to the President.

Visitors to the Cottage can stand in his bedroom where he wrote the Emancipation Proclamation. We gathered in his living room where he entertained guests and colleagues and on the lawn where he enjoyed a good game of checkers (he was a master of the game!) and read many books, comforted by the cool breezes there. From the porch, we saw the hills of Virginia where so much of the fighting of the Civil War happened. And if we peeked carefully through the trees, we saw the Capitol dome which is now being refurbished and was under construction during President Lincoln’s term. The ground there is sacred; the decisions and actions taken on that lawn drastically changed the course of history for our country.

The Cottage is off the beaten path, and well worth the visit. Throughout the house, visitors get a feel for the enormity of his task and times as well as a glimpse into what a complicated, conflicted, and thoughtful man he was. The accompanying museum is filled with interesting video footage, photos, and stories, many of which are little known to most of us. For example, President Lincoln took office with only 40% of the popular vote and his close friends such as Frederick Douglass kept him strong and on track during his many difficult moments of doubt. He was also nearly assassinated on his way to the White House once before the fateful day at Ford’s Theater. However, he firmly believed that no one would ever be so angry with his political decisions that they would actually kill him.

After leaving the cottage, I walked along Rock Creek Church Road, the dangerous route that President Lincoln traveled every day between the White House and the Cottage. I wondered what he would think of our country today with all of its challenges, many of which he faced and feared 150 years ago. I wonder how our nation would be different now had he lived to fulfill his second term, if somehow John Wilkes Booth had been stopped from firing that gun less than a week after the official end of the Civil War. Would our nation be in better shape? Worse shape? Maybe the same. That’s the funny thing about history—it’s full of chances and what if scenarios that can never be answered, it’s something that provides with so many more questions than solutions. And those questions are some of our very best teachers.

My picture gallery from the cottage:

books, choices, future, history, story

This Just In: Why history is so critical to our present and future

Christa Avampato
Everything has a history
Everything has a history

I have started to work on several longterm writing projects. I wouldn’t call them book ideas just yet, but rather historical events that I want to deeply explore and write about. One of my majors at Penn was history and my reasoning for choosing it was very simple—everything has a history so no matter what interests me, not matter what work I do, history will always be important. We have to know where we’ve been to understand where we are. And where we are now is the start of everything yet to come.

art, choices, history, theatre, writing

Inspired: Use the past to help you rise

Christa Avampato
From Pinterest
From Pinterest

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

I think about this line on my way to every rehearsal for Sing After Storms. A piece of my past is embedded in every character, every line. I wrote the play to make sense of things on the page that never made sense in my life. I suppose that’s why anyone ever writes anything—to be helpful, to be free, to be heard. We move forward though we can’t help but be informed by where we’ve been and what we’ve survived. It can dicey territory. We can be sucked into the past or use it to buoy us up and over it. I choose to let it help me rise, and intend to lift others in the process.

choices, future, history, learning, time

Inspired: Put the Past in its Place

Christa Avampato
From Pinterest

The past is a wonderful place to learn but I don’t recommend making it your home. It’s fun to remember, to be nostalgic, to pay tribute to what we’ve lived through – the good and the bad. However, we have to live it going forward. We have to take everything we learned in our past and carry it forward so that we make better, more informed choices today. We’ve got to learn to keep what serves us well and let go of everything else. In this way we can honor the past without repeating it or being hampered by it.

dreams, history, photographs, pictures, writing

Beautiful: I Dream About Recording History As It Happens

Christa Avampato
From Pinterest

Yesterday I sat up in bed before my early alarm, grabbed by iPad, and wrote down this post as it gushed into my brain:

“Snap your pictures. Get down these lines of text. Record history as it happens. Some day you’ll need this to see how far you’ve come, to bring you comfort when you feel like you still have so far to go, when you feel like everything is lost.

Time is a plastic surgeon. It does funny things to us, to our memory of yesterday. And all the yesterdays that came before. It covers the bumps and bruises and scrapes. It dulls the pain. It sands the rough edges and rounds out the sharp and jagged corners that were so hard to navigate. It makes everything soft. When we record our days as they happen, when we literally chart our experience, we get the real story.

And we need the real story. We need to remember what we’ve been through so we can fully appreciate where we are and all of the people who made the journey possible.”

I’m not sure where this came from, but I’m sure glad these words and the ideas they convey arrived.

future, history, learning

Leap: You Have Two Choices – Run From Your Past or Learn from It

Christa Avampato
From Pinterest

“This only is denied to God: the power to undo the past.” ~ Agathon

My sister, Weez, pinned this picture on one of her Pinterest boards last week. I love it because I love the story of The Lion King and I also love it because it is so damn true. I know you’ve had really crummy things happen to you. I have, too. Unless you have access to a time machine, you can’t undo what has been done. (And even if you do have access to a time machine, I wouldn’t recommend monkeying around with the past – history is a chancy business.)

What we can do is carry the lessons of our past, and the pasts of others, forward into our own future choices and decision-making. We can run from the past but we will never outrun it. It has a sneaky way of coming back to haunt us if we don’t honor its power to profoundly affect our future.

I know sitting with the past and accepting our own wrong-doing and the wrong-doing of others is unpleasant. But if we don’t do the work to excavate and understand what happened and why, then a) it was all for naught and b) we are bound to repeat those same mistakes again. What’s worse, repeat mistakes are more painful than they were the first time around.

None of us are alone in this process. Even the person with the perfect life on the outside has things in their past that made them crumble on the inside. We’re all scared to death to have our hearts broken, our dreams dashed, and our spirits crushed. That’s a journey we all take together every day. We all have a past. We all have baggage. And all of us wish it had been different, but it wasn’t. Our past went down the way it went down. The only story we can affect is the one moving forward.

Take those painful, heard-earned lessons and make them mean something. Take them into your own life and share your story so that other people can take these same lessons into their own lives. The only way any of us are going to advance and evolve is if we get together, share, and learn. Don’t let this learning go to waste. It all happened for one simple reason – we needed it.

family, future, history, peace, story, writing

Beginning: Writing Out and Learning from the Ugly Parts of My Experience

Christa Avampato

From http://kichigaikikyokagome.deviantart.com
“Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.” ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love

We run from the imperfect. We want everything to be flawless. We praise beauty; we seek it out; we convince ourselves that we can’t live without it. Ruin is something we have come to dread. To feel ruined it to feel busted up, disappointed, and taken advantage of. We desperately cling to the perfect – in ourselves, in others, in a moment of time. We try to rush through ruin as quickly as possible, and with closed eyes. By running from ruin we are missing so many opportunities for growth and personal evolution.

Dancing with our disappointment
I know this dance well. I have been running from ruin and toward perfection for many, many years. Brian calls this my intricate skill of “maximize this, minimize that.” In other words, I make the most of the good things and try very hard to ignore the bad things, hoping that those bad things will just magically go away. For the record, they don’t. They accumulate until their collective voice is so loud that they must be reckoned with in one way or another.

We can learn a lot from sadness if we’re willing to sit with it
I received a lot of positive feedback from my last two posts – the first about how my dad taught me that the only advice we can take is our own and the second about how a chance encounter with an ex taught me about feeling and transcending anger. So much so, that I’ve decided to take my writing in a very personal direction. I’m at a point in my story where some previously disjointed pieces are starting to fit together in a very powerful way. Steve Jobs said that, “We can’t expect to understand our lives living forward, but only by looking back.” That’s why reflection is so important, why writing it all down and sharing it is critical to our own understanding. All burdens can be borne if we can put them into a story.

Some of the pieces of my story are jagged and uncomfortable and some of them are smoothly crafted. Somehow, they’re all finding a way to come together and co-exist side-by-side, not stealing the limelight from one another, but sharing in it equally. It’s quite a surprise, even though I’ve been working on this very hope for such a long time. I never thought I’d realize it, and certainly not so early on in my life. And while this surprise is of tremendous benefit to me, I want it to benefit you, too, because I want you to have the same experience of holding up a mirror to the parts of you, of others, and of your experience to see that the good, the bad, and the ugly are all extraordinary teachers.

For a long time I vilified my dad, and many of those reasons were justifiable. What I shunned for too long were all of the lessons he taught me, albeit in a manner that I would never wish on anyone else. He was a cold, austere, sad man, and my family bore the brunt of that for a long time. What I didn’t know as a teenager, what there was no way for me to know, was that his behaviors and his personal history that caused those behaviors, would give me the tools I need to do the work I was meant to do with Compass Yoga.

This is about honoring our whole self, not about making lemonade
And this is not some pathetic attempt by a hopeful gal to make lemonade out of lemons, to make the most of what she’s got even if that isn’t much at all. It’s about honoring every part of our past; it’s about recognizing that in every moment, in every experience, there is a very deliberate, necessary teaching that sets us up to live our dharma, our path. We need the painful, sad parts of our past just as much as we need the joy and light. And I would argue that we need them in equal measure. The poetic Dolly Parton is famous for saying, “The way I see it, if you want rainbows then you gotta put up with the rain.” Truer words were never spoken.

So here in my promise to you: you will learn about my own personal story, layer by layer, piece by piece, even the ugly parts. Especially the ugly parts. It will be revealed in as thoughtful and sacred a manner as I can muster, and you will eventually see the complete picture. None of it will be gratuitous and all of it is intended so that you can benefit from these two learnings:

1.) where and what we come from has every bit to do with who we eventually become

and even more importantly,

2.) the depth of our roots does not determine the spread of our wings. We can fly as high as we choose to fly regardless of how far down we find ourselves at any point in time. It’s all based on our will to find our way. And I intend to find mine.

growth, happiness, history, nostalgia, work

Step 235: Insights from a Little Trip Through My Archives

Christa Avampato

This weekend I needed to put together a portfolio of sorts. I started digging through my archived files relating to different projects I’ve worked on since graduating from business school 3 years ago. A few ideas hit me as I sorted through the many documents I have saved, and all of the personalities that had a hand in crafting them:

1.) The breadth of work that came my way once I entered the innovation field still knocks me out and makes me feel incredibly lucky. From re-designing a toy store floor to developing a cost-neutral social media system to track credit card fraud practice, the ride has been anything but boring.

2.) I have had the great good fortune to work alongside some incredible talent. I owe them a big thank you for everything I’ve learned from them.

3.) How some less-than-talented people climb the ladder, particularly in competitive cultures during a massive recession, still astounds me. My friend, Wayne, always says that a chapter in his corporate autobiography will be entitled “Cruella De Ville and Other Crazies I’ve Survived”. I’ve also seen a lot of wonderful people let go during a time when companies should have been thanking their lucky stars to have such incredible talent among their ranks.

4.) The amount of personal and professional growth is evident when I view the spectrum of my work as a whole. From the data analysis to the strategic planning to the execution design, I could see my strengths growing and multiplying throughout the paper trail. I winced a little looking at my early work after b-school – it was a good reminder that we all start somewhere and we’re all capable of growth, many times in leaps and bounds!

5.) The projects that I felt the most passion for weren’t always the most successful or the ones that earned my paycheck. The pro-bono work and the projects we couldn’t get funded were the ones that really made me come alive. Funding within large companies is an odd thing – newness and risk are not things that large companies easily take on. And yet, those are the very ideas that have the greatest upside. Playing it safe carries its short-term rewards for sure, but it doesn’t hurt to take a peek over the horizon toward a tomorrow further down the line.

As I look back on my body of work, it’s always the things I did against all odds that brought me the greatest happiness.

choices, decision-making, dreams, history, television

Step 120: Forget the Odds

Christa Avampato

“All quests worth undertaking … require audacity. And willpower. (Of course.) And persistence. (Of course.) But frankly, a persistent misreading of the odds.” ~ Tom Peters

The History Channel is running a series called America: The Story of Us. In each episode, the series talks about a specific chapter of American History. VSL highlighted it last week in their daily listing and I added it to my calendar. I could always use a little more history in my life.

I saw the series premiere and thought about how unlikely it was that we’d ever become a nation. The odds of success at the beginning of the Revolution had to be near zero. We are the most unlikely story ever told, and lived. This week I’ve been thinking about that episode in the context of pursuing my most unlikely dreams. The quote above by Tom Peters showed up in my inbox, and it reminded me how much courage comes from consistently misreading the odds, or seeing them and paying them no mind. If the people who fought for our early nation got out some paper, drew up a business plan, and calculated the NPV of America, risk factors and all, we’d have British accents.

I’m not suggesting that we throw every caution and hesitation to the wind. I’m suggesting that we have this one life, this one opportunity to do something extraordinary. People may not understand where we’re going. They may not understand why we’re making certain choices or taking a chance on a dream. That’s okay. They don’t need to understand. They’re crunching numbers and drawing up pro-cons lists and calculating odds. You’re out there living the life that you want to live, the way you want to live it. And in that scenario, there’s so such things as odds. You either live fully, or you don’t.

failure, history, story

Step 33: Lessons from Scars

Christa Avampato

On Sunday, I found my way to In Over Your Head, Julien Smith’s blog, via a tweet from Tim O’Reilly. He recently wrote a post about the importance of scars. We spend a lot of time avoiding disaster, avoiding the eventuality of hurt and pain. I’m not suggesting that we head out into the world searching for trouble. I’m just saying that I think scars are under-rated and we should be less afraid.

I started to think of all the times I didn’t say something or do something or feel something because the prospects of failure and hurt were just too great. I insulated myself in an effort to protect my feelings, my heart, and my spirit. There are times when I wonder what would have happened if I refused to ever be afraid, or at the very least if I never, ever let fear stop me from doing what I want to do. What if I never worried about getting scars?

Julien artfully connected stories with scars; he frames up the need for scars as a way to track our personal histories. The idea is simple and powerful. Take a look at your hands and your heart. Take note of the scars and blemishes and the imperfections. Hang on to the lessons of heartbreak, failure, and disappointment, and let go of the sadness they brought along with them. We need those lessons because without them we’d forget where we’ve been.