Category Archives: Deep Thoughts

I think…therefore I’m dangerous.

What Matters Most

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A life lesson in a video.

Yesterday was my birthday. It was a bittersweet day for me — a year ago on my birthday was the day my husband called and told me he wanted a divorce.

What kind of sick bastard asks his wife for a divorce on her birthday? After living with her for 29 years? The kind of bastard I was stupid enough to marry.

Anyway, my bank — yes, my bank — emailed me a birthday message with a link to a video. The message said:

Just a friendly little birthday wish from us to you. We can’t send you a double-tiered chocolate cake (it won’t fit through the mail slot — we tried), but hopefully this little video will help brighten your big day.

Have an awesome b-day filled with fun, happiness and, of course, saving.

Enjoy many more, Saver.

Normally, I’d trash it as spam, thinking it was some kind of marketing ploy. If so, it would be pretty tacky. But INGDirect (now CapitalOne 360) is not your average bank. So I clicked the link.

Here’s the video:

I cried when I watched it, of course. I already understood the message — what happiness is really all about. In fact, I blogged about it earlier this month. What made me cry is that it clearly showed the difference in philosophy between me and my ex-husband.

You see, I understand that happiness is making life what you want it to be so you can look around yourself and be happy about what you see. I do work I like to do in a place I like to do it. I have what I need and not much more. I’m not interested in impressing anyone with showy possessions. I’d rather spend time and money and energy seeing and learning new things to make me a more rounded person than to piss it away on crap. I save for my future and avoid unnecessary debt. This enables me to keep my time flexible and to really enjoy life. That’s what it’s all about.

My ex-husband, however, apparently believes that happiness is about keeping up with the Joneses, working at an unfulfilling job to pay for an empty lifestyle that revolves around eating out with the same four or five people, watching television, and buying showy things like a costly second home, airplane he never flies, and Mercedes to show off to friends. He made his obsession with financial wealth pretty clear to me when he went after my business assets and money in the divorce, refusing to settle unless I gave him my half of our our paid-for house plus $50,000 in cash and paid off his debt in the home equity line of credit. His greed would have left me nothing to reboot my life and keep my business afloat — but he didn’t seem to give a damn about that. He forced me to spend tens of thousands of dollars on legal fees to defend what was rightfully mine. (We’ll see how that worked out for him soon.)

I cried mostly because he wasn’t always that way — at least I didn’t think he was — and I pitied him, as I so often do these days, for wasting his life away. For missing the point.

My friends have been telling me lately how glad they are to see me so happy after such a difficult time. I’m glad, too. I’m happy and will stay happy — because I know what matters most: spending your time doing things you like to do with the people you like to be with.

Courage

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I never thought I’d quote Oprah, but here it is.

I was wasting time yesterday, surfing the web for interesting things, when I came upon an NPR piece about one-liners. In it was a one-liner from Oprah Winfrey:

Having the courage to stand up and pursue your dreams will give you life’s greatest reward and life’s greatest adventure.

And I truly believe this. To me, life is continuous quest to do and learn and see new things. To pursue my dreams.

The Status Quo Trap

It’s easy to sit back and settle in for the long haul in a comfortable home with a comfortable job, doing the same things every day with the same people around you. You know what every day will bring; there are no surprises. Easy, no?

But maybe you dream of doing other things. Maybe you’ve dreamed about some of these things for your entire life, things like starting a business based on one of your hobbies or interests, patenting the inventions of your creativity and imagination, or even just learning a new but difficult skill. Everyone has dreams.

But pursuing these dreams takes courage — the courage to work hard and smart, the courage to face difficult challenges, the courage to accept that the only alternative to success is failure.

So you sit back and relax in your comfy status quo, letting your life slip away with every day, month, and year, letting your dreams slip away with them.

That’s the way a lot of people think. I know — I was married to one of them.

Step Out of Your Comfort Zone and Live

But I don’t think that way.

To me, there’s nothing to life without challenges. There’s always something new to do, something new to learn, something new to see. I’m smart enough to understand that I can’t make these things part of my life without leaving my comfort zone to go after them. And I’m brave enough to do it.

The past year has been a challenge for me — one I did not choose and did not want to face. But I faced it and I got through it. And I’ve emerged on the other side, a better, stronger, and freer person with more self esteem and better health.

And now I face new challenges — some a result of my husband’s betrayal and others of my own choosing. I have the courage to face them. I have the strength to persevere.

As for the events of the past year, well, I look at them as a setback. I expect to be back on track for the semi-retired life with fun and travel that I’d planned (that was well within reach last summer) within a few years. Best of all, I won’t have to drag around the dead weight that was holding me back in recent years.

Oprah is right. I know from experience that pursuing and achieving my dreams is life’s greatest reward. And my life will be an adventure until the end.

How about yours?

In Defense of Text Messaging

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It does serve a real purpose.

The other day, one of my Twitter/Facebook friends linked to an article in the New York Times titled “How Not to Be Alone.” In his words, it was “highly recommended.” So I read it.

The piece started out with a story about seeing a 15-year-old girl crying into a cell phone during a discussion with her mother. The story went on for four paragraphs, with the author, Jonathan Safran Foer, using his fifth paragraph to discuss his moral dilemma: talk to this stranger to try to comfort her or “respect the boundaries” between them. He never does say what he chose to do.

From there, the article launches into a discussion of how modern day methods of communication are dividing us, weakening our relationships, reducing our ability to articulately communicate, and making it easier to “avoid the emotional work of being present” to communicate. He argues that by diminishing our communication with others, we diminish ourselves.

He says:

We often use technology to save time, but increasingly, it either takes the saved time along with it, or makes the saved time less present, intimate and rich. I worry that the closer the world gets to our fingertips, the further it gets from our hearts. It’s not an either/or — being “anti-technology” is perhaps the only thing more foolish than being unquestioningly “pro-technology” — but a question of balance that our lives hang upon.

I read through the article twice without coming away with a one-line summary of what he was trying to say. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one having trouble with it because another Twitter friend replied to me and someone else with the simple — thank you, Twitter! — summary:

Don’t write when you can call. Don’t call when you can visit.

Simple enough. And I can certainly agree.

But it got me thinking about text messaging and the way it seemed to be painted, in the Times piece, as something that’s destroying society. And that bugged me.

Because I just don’t think it’s true.

Text Messaging for Work

You see, I use text messaging extensively for work. It gives me the ability to communicate instantly with clients and colleagues about things that they might want to know about right now. The key word there is might. If they must know about it now, I call their cell phone. But why bother them with a call when they might or might not be interested with the information I have to share? Or if I need an answer to a question but I don’t need it immediately — and know I will likely forget to ask if I do make a call later?

Here’s an example. My summer work requires me to be on call to fly over cherry orchards after it rains. The other day, there was rain in the area. I watched it move through on radar on my iPad. I saw it approaching an area where one of my clients has an orchard. I know he doesn’t live near there. I wanted to make sure he knew I was monitoring the weather and had some concerns about his orchard. So I texted:

Do you have someone at Malaga?

That was at 4:30 PM. His response came at 5:34 PM, after the weather had moved through:

Yeah. We made it through another close afternoon.

Communication accomplished. I didn’t have to call him to pester him with my question. He’s been growing cherries a lot longer than I’ve been drying them with a helicopter. I’m sure he had a handle on it. But by sending that quick text message, I communicated that I was aware of the situation and would be ready if he needed me. The fact that he didn’t respond for over an hour was okay with me. For all I know, he might not have even looked at his phone for an hour. He might have been busy watching the weather.

Do I communicate by text with all of my clients? No. Only the ones who have shown that they use text messaging to communicate by texting me first. When a client texts me, he’s telling me that texting is an acceptable or maybe even preferred means of communication. I’m okay with that.

I’m Not Alone

The title of the piece suggests that modern communication is making us more alone. I disagree wholeheartedly. If anything, text messaging has brought me closer to friends.

This morning, for example, while I was still in bed at 4:15 AM, I texted a friend on the east coast — where it was 7:15 — with a question. If he saw it immediately, great. If not, that was okay, too. He’d eventually see it and respond. But he was there at his desk and we had a text “conversation” about a bunch of things.

You might argue that when I realized he was available I should have picked up the phone and called him. But my friend works from home and uses his phone extensively for work. Chances are, our conversation would have been interrupted one or more times by incoming phone calls. Was our texted conversation important enough to disrupt his work day? No.

Although texting suggests a sort of immediacy to the conversation, it also makes it possible to put down and resume a conversation over time. Indeed, I’ve had texted “conversations” with people that have gone on for hours or days or even weeks. Could I accomplish this with phone calls? No — not without becoming a nuisance.

I can’t tell you how many friendships — including very old friendships — I have been able to maintain via text messaging and email. Sometimes it’s the best option.

The Trouble with Phone Calls

The problem with using the phone is that when you call someone, you’re saying, in effect, that it’s okay for you to bother him/her when it’s convenient for you. After all, you don’t usually call someone when it isn’t convenient for you, do you?

Of course, you can always schedule a phone call. Some of my publishing contacts do that. It makes sense. Take a meeting, on the phone.

But calling out of the blue? When someone might be busy? Just to chat?

I guess it depends on the kind of relationship you have with that person. I have plenty of friends who I feel comfortable calling to chat — at certain times of the day or evening. But if I don’t know a person very well, I think it’s rude to bother him/her with a phone call just to say hello.

Is that making me more alone? Not when I can fire off a quick text that might lead to a phone call when it’s convenient for both of us. Indeed, sometimes I’ll send a text message that says,

Are you around? Okay if I call?

Even if I don’t get a response, I get an answer to those questions: No.

Of course, this is assuming the person I want to reach lives with his/her cellphone at arm’s length all day every day. But that’s the kind of people I’m most likely to text anyway.

I’m not texting my mother or sister or a friend who keeps his cell phone packed away in a little backpack he uses as a manly man purse. (You know who you are!) I’m just texting the same people who text me.

In Person Meetings

When I was a kid, I’d go to my Aunt’s house in a nearby town. It aways amazed me how we’d be sitting around in the kitchen — the focal point for any Italian-American household — and one of her neighbors would walk right in. Often without even knocking on the door!

I’d love to live somewhere with all my friends nearby and be able to keep my doors unlocked at all times so they could walk right in and visit me. But that’s not my reality these days. Is it yours?

My world is bigger — my friends can be found all over the globe. They’ve chosen to live where they live just as I’ve chosen to live where I live. That doesn’t mean I won’t have super friendly neighbors when I finally build my new home. But I don’t really expect anyone to just “drop in” like we did in the old days.

Does that make me alone? I don’t think so. It makes me more likely to get out and about to get the social interaction I need with a wider variety of people in a wider variety of places.

So rather than sit around the kitchen table and wait for the same handful of visitors my Aunt’s family got, I’m getting out and expanding my world.

In Defense of Text Messaging

I’m not a kid. I’m in my 50s.

When I was a kid, we had three options for communication: face to face, telephone (which could be expensive if calling out of your immediate area), and mail (which took 2-3 days each way).

Today, we still have all of these things. Telephone use has become cheaper, mail has become more expensive. But we also have several free (or arguably low-cost) means of communication: fax (which is now, thankfully, almost dead), email, text messaging, and video conferencing. (And don’t get me started on self-publishing options — like social networking, blogging, print on demand, and ebooks — that make communication to the masses amazingly easy and cost effective.)

I can now communicate instantly for next to nothing with my friends and colleagues all over the world. I couldn’t do that when I was a kid.

I don’t understand how someone can argue that having and using more methods of communication — especially instantaneous, real-time methods — makes us more alone. If anything, it helps us connect better.

And text messaging is just one tool for doing that.

Your thoughts? Put ’em in comments so we can discuss.

On Leaders, Followers, and Goals

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Some thoughts on how we reach goals and whose goals we reach.

One of my Facebook friends who, like me, is going through a breakup of his marriage, posted the following quote on his timeline recently:

Following someone else’s trail, simply because it was a trail would take me to their goal, not necessarily mine.

– Tom Trimbath, from “Walking, Thinking, Drinking Across Scotland”

I immediately thought of my soon-to-be ex-husband and one of the complaints he used to justify his infidelity: According to him, I had “prevented him from achieving his goals.”

I realized that one of the reasons he hadn’t achieved his goals was hinted at in the quote above. With that in mind, I commented on Facebook:

Yes, this is very true. Some people are leaders and always will be. Other people are followers and always will be. A follower can’t help but get to someone else’s goal. That’s the difference between leaders and followers: a leader is driven to her own goal; a follower is not.

And that pretty much sums up the difference between me and my husband when it comes to achieving goals. I was — and still am — driven. He apparently was not.

Jungle Path
It’s a lot easier to follow a trail than to blaze one. (I followed this path in Florida last winter.)

Let’s face it: it’s easier to follow someone else down a trail than to blaze your own: literally or figuratively. Imagine walking through a dense patch of woods with lots of undergrowth. If you’re leading the way without a trail to follow, it’ll be tough to move forward. Tough, but not impossible. If you want to get through badly enough, you’ll do it. Now imagine that a path through the woods already exists. It sure is easier to follow that path.

But what if the path leads to a different place than you want to go?

That’s the point of the quote above. When you follow someone else, you reach that person’s goals.

I am a driven person — that can’t be denied. I’m never satisfied with the status quo; I’m always moving, preferably forward, finding new things to try, new projects to explore, new goals to achieve.

Two months ago, for example, I bought a kayak and began paddling in local lakes. Before I began, I’d only been kayaking once and didn’t really enjoy it much. But with the right kayak, I discovered that it’s a great way to get outdoors, enjoy nature, and build some upper body strength.

Last month, I began learning about beekeeping. Since then, I bought my first hive and am preparing to set it up with bees. The short-term goal: to produce comb honey for sale in local wineries and farm stands. Long term? Pollination services, queen production, nuc production, pollen production. (This could turn out to be an excellent retirement career.)

These are just two recent examples. My whole life is full of them. That’s the way I am. That’s the way I like to be.

Don’t get me wrong: I’d love to follow someone else. I would have loved to follow my husband. The problem is, no one is leading in a direction I’m interested in going. My husband certainly wasn’t.

My husband wasn’t leading anyone anywhere. He followed me as I learned to ride motorcycles, as I took up horseback riding, as I began to fly. He was right behind me — not ahead of me — as I achieved some of my goals. My goals became his and they enriched his life. It was nice to have a partner for all of these things.

But his own goals? The few he shared with me were never reached.

He claimed he wanted to become a solar/wind consultant and wasted about six months floundering around at home, trying (and failing) to build a client base. I helped by starting a website for him and designing business cards. But I couldn’t lead him because it wasn’t my goal and I had no interest in making it my goal.

He claimed he wanted to open and operate a bicycle repair shop. I thought that was a great idea. When coupled with rentals, it would make a great summer business along the 11-mile bike trail in Wenatchee, near where I worked each summer. I was even ready to invest by obtaining a handful of Segways for guided tours. I could help him on sunny days when I didn’t have to fly; he could help me on rainy days when no one wanted to ride bikes. What could be better? But he never did anything to make this goal a reality. And I couldn’t lead him because I already had my hands full trying to build my summer flying business.

He claimed he wanted to enter retirement as a certified flight instructor (CFI) for airplanes, doing some training and conducting biennial flight reviews for pilots. I thought that was a great idea. I pointed out, on more than one occasion, that to achieve that goal, he needed to build more experience as a pilot. He needed to fly more often than the 20 to 30 hours a year he flew. He needed to get his commercial pilot certificate and his CFI certificate. I never stopped him from doing any of these things — indeed, I encouraged him every time the topic came up. But he did nothing to achieve any of these things. I couldn’t lead him because I was not an airplane pilot and didn’t want to be one. I’d already built my career as a helicopter pilot.

It hurt me when he accused me of preventing him from achieving his goals. He was blaming me for his failures.

I wonder sometimes how much his girlfriend/mommy will help him achieve these goals. Or whether he’ll simply start following her as she goes about her business — whatever that business might be. It’s far more likely that he’ll dig down deeper in the rut he’s in, comfortable with an older, less ambitious woman to hold his hand while they enter their “golden years” in front of the television, with occasional forays into the the world on week-long budget package tours to Europe and Hawaii.

Whatever.

As I’ve said before in this blog and I’ll likely say again, I feel so sorry for him. I thought he was a better man, a stronger man. I thought he could be a leader. I wish he could have been a leader for me, at least for a few goals.

Leading is hard work and it can be tiring. It would be nice to be a follower once in a while. The trick is to follow someone who’s going the way you want to go.

I’m looking for that leader now.

Remember what Memorial Day is All About

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It’s not about having the day off from work.

I just wanted to fire off a quick post to remind people what Memorial Day is all about. It seems that while some folks are confusing Memorial Day with Veterans Day, others just look at it as a day off and a three-day weekend. Both are wrong.

From Wikipedia:

Memorial Day is a day of remembering the men and women who died while serving in the United States Armed Forces. Formerly known as Decoration Day, it originated after the American Civil War to commemorate the Union and Confederate soldiers who died in the Civil War. By the 20th century, Memorial Day had been extended to honor all Americans who have died while in the military service.

I made the important parts of that passage bold above for a reason: Memorial Day is to honor the men and women of our military who have made the ultimate sacrifice — they died while serving their country. While Veterans Day honors all past service members, alive and dead, Memorial Day honors a special subset of those people — service members who didn’t come home to their families because they died while helping preserve American freedoms and other values.

This includes the 4,459 men and women killed in Iraq since 2003 and the 2,220 men and women killed in Afghanistan since 2001.

How do you think the parents, spouses, and children these service members left behind feel today? Do you think they’re having an outdoor barbecue? Getting drunk out on a boat with their friends? Do you think they’re celebrating the day off from work?

In a way, I wish Memorial Day wasn’t a work holiday on the last Monday of May. I wish it was a numbered date holiday, like Independence Day. Then, perhaps, it would be thought of more as a day to remember our fallen soldiers, airmen, and sailors than as the key component in a three-day weekend that marks the beginning of summer.