Communication Breakdown, Part II

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How could he not understand?

I wrote a a post back in September about a breakdown in communication between two people who had been living together for a long time and the breakup and heartbreak it caused. Obviously, the story was not as hypothetical as it was written. Twenty nine years is a long time. I still can’t understand how he could throw it all away — especially when things were finally getting good again.

I think he tried to communicate with me today. How? Well, we had to swap trucks. Despite the fact that he told me I could keep his truck in the divorce settlement — both verbally and in writing — he changed his mind. I fetched the truck from Washington a while back. Although my lawyer offered him the keys, he ignored that and took his demand to the court. (I did mention that he had a problem with communication, no?) The result was a truck swap this afternoon. He got his Chevy back and I got my Ford back. Whatever.

I didn’t notice his attempt at communication until I got home. I was taking my things out of the truck and noticed some papers folded up under the center console. I opened them up and found an odd collection of email messages from me, as well as a tweet I wrote to @MikeTRose yesterday in response to one of his replies to me:

The emails may have been his attempt to explain why he hated me. That’s the way I saw it. But when I read the emails, I could see no reason to hate. All I could see was my attempt to communicate the level of frustration I was feeling from his actions. I loved him but he was driving me nuts.

It seems that every time I pointed out a problem with our relationship, he took it personally and just sulked about it. He kept all those old emails and printed them out and left them in my truck when we swapped trucks today. Who keeps emails from four years ago? Why the hell didn’t he just talk it out with me then? This is what I don’t understand.

We had such a freaking good life together — an enviable life. He was — note the use of past tense — a great partner. What the hell happened to him? When did he forget that life is for living?

For example, back in 2008, when I was doing helicopter tours at Lake Powell (making really good money, I might add), he scheduled a trip back to New York to visit his family. Not only did we have a dog back home that needed to be cared for, but his aged horse had become seriously ill. He expected me to drop everything and return early to watch the dog and care for the horse. My email response summarized why I thought he was being unreasonable. After all, couldn’t he have scheduled that trip for another time? I’d be home in a week or two anyway.

Is that worth hating me for? I don’t think so.

(He wound up leaving anyway. Our neighbor was present when the vet put his horse down. I came back from Lake Powell for a few days to take care of things at home. But I don’t get any credit for any of that.)

In another message, which also showed part of what I was replying to, we both lamented about feeling alone while I was away, working in Washington. Yet for years, he’d spent a full week (or more) every single month in New Jersey, leaving me in Arizona to care for the house, dog, horses, and chickens. Add that up and you get three months a year — about the same amount of time I spent in Washington that year. Later, he spent four days every week living in his condo in Phoenix — that’s more than half of his time — when I was home in Wickenburg. Yet back in 2010, he apparently expected me to sacrifice the business I was building to keep him company. I complained that I wasn’t interested in staying home to watch the animals and cook his meals, just to be rewarded with an evening of television every night.

Is that worth hating me for? I don’t think so.

The rest of the messages were in the same vein. I was working hard away from home, building my business — a business he promised to join me in. I spent a ton of money buying an RV that was big enough to house him, me, and our dog when he turned 55 (last year) and hit the road with me for half the year. I built up my cherry drying contracts and brainstormed for ways we could work together to make money. He even got his helicopter rating so he could ferry the aircraft while I drove the trailer when we were in transit.

But when the time came, he made excuses not to join me. I waited, hoping he’d change his mind. Instead, he waited for me to leave this summer, got a membership on Chemistry.com, and was sleeping with another woman a month later.

Yes, I trusted a man who let me down, cheated on me, and then lied to me. Yes, I’m a chump. Hell, I trusted him. Wouldn’t you trust someone you’d lived with for 29 years?

Is that worth hating me for? I don’t think so.

But what I still don’t understand is why he thinks he should hate me for wanting a better life for both of us. For working hard to make it happen.

And I can’t understand how he could give up on us — especially after asking me to see a marriage counsellor to help patch things up — when we were on the verge of getting everything right again. He finally had his dream job with travel for two of us and a work-from-home schedule. I could see the light at the end of the tunnel he’d been in with a long string of unsatisfying jobs. I could see blue skies and smooth air ahead.

But I guess he didn’t want the woman he’d spent more than half of his life with. The woman who’d taken care of him and made a home for him all those years. The woman who had introduced him to motorcycling, horseback riding, flying. The woman who shared her things with him — horses, trailers, jet skis. I guess it was time to dump the woman who spoke out when she wasn’t happy in favor of the first new woman who slept with him and agreed with everything he said.

Yes, baby. Whatever you want.

That’s not me. And the man who wants that is not a man I want to live with.

I just wish he’d been more of a man when he ended our relationship. A real man would have done it in person, before he started sleeping around. This man is a lying, cheating coward who can’t even talk to me, face to face, when he’s alone with me in person. Instead, he leaves old email messages hidden away in my truck for me to find and read when he’s not around.

And who hates me for reasons I still don’t understand.

An(other) Apple Maps Fail

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This example was so outrageous, I had to share it.

I spent last weekend in California with friends. (Blog post to come, eventually.) On Friday, they needed to take care of business in the Folsom area. We decided to have lunch while we were out.

My friends are not smartphone people, although one of them does have an iPod Touch that she uses with various apps on WiFi. In an effort to show how useful a smartphone could be, I used Apple Maps and my preferred navigation app, MapQuest, to navigate to their primary destination. It worked like a charm.

Google AppAfterwards, I used the Google Search app to perform a voice search (on my iPhone 4; no Siri) for “restaurants serving breakfast in Folsom California.” The app understood me perfectly and displayed a list of results. We decided on the Sutter Street Grill. The entry for the restaurant included its address as a link, as you can see in the screenshot. I tapped the link to view the location in Apple Maps.

Apple Maps ExampleAnd that’s where things got weird. It showed me the location on the map, but no matter how far I zoomed out, I could not see the dot representing our current location. And then I realized that the body of water on the map was a lot bigger than the lake we’d driven by.

Apple Maps ExampleI tapped the arrow beside the location on the map. And that’s when I discovered that the map was showing us a location in New Zealand.

Here’s where I see a problem. I’m in California. The phone knows I’m in California. Yet when I tapped the address, it displayed a location on the other side of the planet.

And no, the location wasn’t incorrect in the link — although the street name does not include the word “historic.” For some reason that I can’t understand, Apple Maps decided to display 811 Sutter Street in Canterbury Seaview, New Zealand, 7,111 miles away, instead of the 811 Sutter Street that was less than 5 miles away.

Come on, Apple. Firing people isn’t going to fix the problem. Let’s get down to business and make this app work right.

By the way…the restaurant was great!

A Bit More about the Republican Party

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It’s the science, stupid.

The 2012 Presidential campaign — and its aftermath — continues to weigh heavily on my mind. The other day, I finally got around to blogging my thoughts on the Republican Party, aided, in part, by yet another excellent blog post by Jim Wright on Stonekettle Station. I thought that would be enough to get it off my mind. But no, I still had some more mulling over to do.

You see, it bothered me that I really didn’t clearly indicate why I have such bad feelings about the GOP. I mentioned that I thought certain elected representatives and senators were “batshit crazy” and gave some examples. But I didn’t really connect the dots to explain exactly what bothered me personally about these people.

Thinking a little harder about Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s comments about the age of the earth helped me better understand what was going on in my subconscious about this. From the GQ interview, “All Eyez On Him,” where they were first made:

GQ: How old do you think the Earth is?

Marco Rubio: I’m not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that’s a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I’m not a scientist. I don’t think I’m qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to answer that. It’s one of the great mysteries.

This is, of course, outrageous. Scientists have accumulated enough evidence to estimate the earth’s age at 4.54 million billion years old. There are not “multiple theories” that dispute this. There’s only science and religion. Science is based on research, facts, and analysis. Religion does not have “theories” about anything. All it has are sacred texts written hundreds or thousands of years ago. Sacred text that believers, by definition, must believe.

So when I read about this, I used it as an example in my post of the craziness of certain Republicans.

And then an article by Daniel Engber in Slate Magazine, “Rubio and Obama and the age of Earth: Politicians hedge about whether universe was created,” suggested that Obama had made a similar statement in an interview back in 2008, when he was running for president. The quote:

Q: Senator, if one of your daughters asked you—and maybe they already have—“Daddy, did god really create the world in 6 days?,” what would you say?

A: What I’ve said to them is that I believe that God created the universe and that the six days in the Bible may not be six days as we understand it … it may not be 24-hour days, and that’s what I believe. I know there’s always a debate between those who read the Bible literally and those who don’t, and I think it’s a legitimate debate within the Christian community of which I’m a part. My belief is that the story that the Bible tells about God creating this magnificent Earth on which we live—that is essentially true, that is fundamentally true. Now, whether it happened exactly as we might understand it reading the text of the Bible: That, I don’t presume to know.

The article goes on to compare the quotes from these two men, claiming that they’re not very different. The argument is compelling — at first. But bloggers at the Maddow Blog had no trouble picking it apart and zeroing in on what made the comparison fail. In “Those Who Celebrate Science (and Those Who Don’t),” Steve Benen says:

Rubio was asked a scientific question in a secular setting, offered an ambiguous response as to whether he believes the planet is billions or thousands of years old, and suggested an objective, scientific truth may be unknowable, though reality shows otherwise.

On the other hand, Obama was asked a theological question in a religious setting, offered a response that rejected young-earth pseudo-science, and suggested spiritual, philosophical truths may be unknowable.

That blog post then went on to give good examples of how Obama embraces science.

Paul Krugman’s article in The New York Times, “Grand Old Planet,” takes this news tidbit to the next level:

By the way, that question didn’t come out of the blue. As speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, Mr. Rubio provided powerful aid to creationists trying to water down science education. In one interview, he compared the teaching of evolution to Communist indoctrination tactics — although he graciously added that “I’m not equating the evolution people with Fidel Castro.” Gee, thanks.

What was Mr. Rubio’s complaint about science teaching? That it might undermine children’s faith in what their parents told them to believe. And right there you have the modern G.O.P.’s attitude, not just toward biology, but toward everything: If evidence seems to contradict faith, suppress the evidence. (emphasis added)

Mr. Krugman goes on to point out several other examples where Republicans have suppressed hard facts that challenge their faith-based preconceptions. I won’t repeat them all here; go read the article. It’s short and very worthwhile.

Republican War on Science(By the way, Mr. Krugman also mentions Chris Mooney’s book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science–and Reality. He doesn’t mention Mr. Mooney’s earlier book, The Republican War on Science, “the New York Times bestseller that exposes the conservative agenda to put politics ahead of scientific truth.” I think both are worth a read if you care about science and how politics can affect our future.)

And this is why I’m so opposed to the Republican way of thinking. These people are, for the most part, putting their religion before science and everything else. They’re trying to force a faith-based educational and political agenda on everyone in this country — no matter what everyone else believes. They seem to forget the doctrine of separation of church and state. They’re willing to sacrifice our ability to lead the world in science and technology so as not to offend a god that their fellow Americans may or may not believe in.

Personally, I’m horrified at the suggestion that creation (or “intelligent design”) be taught in public schools alongside evolution. I think it’s tragic that people are still trying to deny that climate change is real and likely caused by man. And it pisses me off to no end that public proceedings such as Town Council meetings often begin with a prayer and that I’m asked to “swear to God” in court. As if nothing can be done in the legal world without acknowledging a supreme being that has the power to guide or punish us.

(Let’s not forget that the original Pledge of Allegiance did not include the phrase “under God” until 1954.)

And don’t get me started on the hypocrisy of a political party that’s constantly whining about how our freedoms are being compromised wanting to regulate what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own homes.

Anyway, I think this post finishes the thought I started in my previous blog post. I think it connects the dots to clearly state what bothers me most about the Republican way of thinking.

I’m willing to bet that this way of thinking is turning off a lot of otherwise conservative people. I think that if the GOP would stop its faith-based crazy-talk and get back to reality, it will likely attract a lot more voters in the future.

Again, I’ll leave comments open until moderation becomes a chore. If you want your comment to appear, keep it civil.

The Problem with the Republican Party

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Jim Wright at Stonekettle Station said it best.

This post is a bit late…it should have been written and posted at least a week ago when we were still pumped up by post-election euphoria or misery. But I don’t want to skip the topic — it needs to be addressed in this blog so I have a record of it in years to come.

Although I might be considered a fiscal conservative, I cannot wear a “conservative” label. I lean more to the left in social policies and I’m libertarian as far as government involvement in our private lives goes. Without going into detail about my specific beliefs — because they just don’t matter as far as this post is concerned — it’s pretty safe to say that I identify more with the Democrats than the Republicans in this country.

As a thinking person who values true freedom and wants very badly to love her country, I have a serious problem with the way this country has become divided along party lines. To be fair, there’s always been a certain split, but it’s only recently — perhaps since Clinton’s presidency? — that the split has become wide with a lot of hate on both sides. The result: a governing body that spends more time obstructing the other side than getting anything done for the country as a whole.

“Freedom,” by the way, isn’t some idealistic concept that means flag waving and invokes images of Revolutionary War battles and heroes. Freedom means the ability to do as you please, within certain widely accepted social limitations. You might be free to stand on a street corner and lecture passers by about your religious beliefs, but you can’t grab people and take them, against their will, to church with you. You might be free to carry a gun, but you’re not free to shoot your next door neighbor with it because his dog barked all night. You might be free to have sex with a consenting adult, but you can’t have sex with a child (consenting or otherwise). Silly that we need laws to limit our freedoms, but some people don’t quite understand what’s socially or morally acceptable.

No matter which side you’re on, it’s easy to find fault with the other side. Maybe because I lean left, I find a lot of problems with the right. They claim they want small government, yet they want laws to prohibit many too many things that affect our private lives — abortion and same-sex marriage come to mind. And although this country was founded by deists who were in favor of religious freedom, the right wing has somehow twisted that to mean that Christians should have preferential treatment and be able to push their beliefs on the rest of us. They’re pushing hard to include non-scientific, faith-based information — such as creationism (often poorly disguised as something called “intelligent design”) in public school curriculums.

And to me, some of the things elected Republican politicians are saying in public are just plain batshit crazy. Want some examples? Try these from just the past few months:

And that’s what really hits home with me. These people don’t just have a different point of view. I think they’re off-the-wall crazy, showing an amazing amount of ignorance or simple denial of what science has already told us. And for what reason? Do they really believe this stuff or are they pandering to an ultra-conservative base?

And what has happened to the Republican Party? They weren’t always this crazy, were they?

Jim Wright of Stonekettle Station blogs regularly about politics. His November 7, 2012 post titled “Hemlock With A Small Side of Schadenfreude” is typically long and rambling, but he brings my point home near the end. I’ve gotten his permission to reproduce the key paragraphs here:

Once upon a time the faces of the Republican Party were Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Ulysses S. Grant, and, hell, Ronald Reagan. 

Today the public face of the GOP is Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, the Koch Brothers, Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, Karl Rove, and a silly old man shouting at an empty chair. 

Once upon a time, the Republican Party stood for freedom, the end of slavery, the extension of rights to all Americans, the reasonable  regulation of business and monopolies and the protection of the little man from the same.  The first president to call for pluralism, i.e. multiculturalism, was a Republican, William McKinley.  The republican who followed, one of the greatest presidents this country has ever seen, Teddy Roosevelt, believed in science, in reason, in the conservation of nature and the husbanding of our natural resources, the protection of our lands, in equality for all, and in peace. Republicans once upon a time believed In freedom of religion and freedom from religion.

Today the GOP would make businesses into citizens and make citizens into property. They squint suspiciously at any non-Christian and seem hell bent on denying others their just and due rights as Americans based on those self-same religious beliefs. Science, natural resources, and the environment seem to share equal contempt among conservatives nowadays. They are the party of drill, Baby, drill and legitimate rape. They’ve got abortion on the brain and are obsessively concerned with what other people might be doing in the privacy of their own bedrooms. The GOP has become the very military-industrial complex  another great Republican once warned us about. The GOP has given up science and become the party of Birthers and creationists and conspiracy nuts – and rather than distance themselves from such crazies, the modern Republican Party embraced them. One has only to look at the 2012 GOP Platform to see just how far they’ve drifted from the once great party of Lincoln.

Once upon a time, there was room in the Republican party. Room for competing ideas, room for reasoned debate and differences of opinion, room for all Americans.

Today, the Republican Party has grown very small – small in mind, small in ideas, small in tolerance.  They’ve become the party of loyalty oaths, purity balls, and secret handshakes.

Once upon a time, the Grand Old Party faced the world with the courage of Roosevelt, of Eisenhower, of Lincoln.

Today, this morning, these last four years, the Republican Party is shrouded in the rank stench of hysteria and fear. They face the future with the false bravado of the coward and the blustering shallow patriotism epitomized by the likes of Ted Nugent.  They cower under their beds, clutching their guns and their bibles, deathly afraid of the future.

And this is exactly what I see.

Jim finishes up by adding:

The GOP is dying a slow death, poisoned by their own bitter tea. They are now firmly on the wrong side of history and unless something changes, they’ll wear that confused expression into oblivion without ever understanding why.

I don’t hate Republicans. I think they’re misguided. I think they’re missing the point. I think they’re not being open-minded and understanding enough to realize that not everyone thinks exactly the way they do.

If they want to move forward into the 21st century with the rest of us, the party needs to change. It needs to get smart and get real. Its pundits need to stop pushing hatred of anything different. It needs to become a bigger party, embracing a wider range of beliefs.

And it needs to remember that we’re all in the same boat — we need to work together to stay afloat, plot a course, move in a direction that’ll help all of us.

June 30, 2014 Update
I’ve finally gotten around to writing up the site comment policy on a regular page (rather than post) on this site. You can find it here: Comment Policy.

I’ll leave comments open on this post — at least for a while. Remember our comment policy — no personal attacks on me or other commenters will be tolerated. If moderation becomes a chore for this post, I’ll simply shut the comments down.

Life Lessons

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How many have you learned?

The other day, one of my Twitter or Facebook friends linked to a blog post titled “10 Life Lessons People Learn Too Late.” I clicked over to it and gave it a quick read. And I realized two things:

  • I had already learned many of these life lessons.
  • The lessons I’d learned defined who I am and how I conduct my life.

(I also realized that while I’d already learned most of these lessons, my soon-to-be ex-husband had not. In thinking this over, I realize that this was part of the reason we’d grown apart over the past few years. I was motivated by many of the the lessons I’d learned in life; he was not. (Actually, I’m not sure if he was motivated by anything.) But since there’s nothing to be done to help him, enough said.)

In this post, I’d like to explore these ten life lessons, how I learned them, and how they affect my life. Maybe it can provide some insight for people who still need to learn. I won’t duplicate that blog post here; you should read the original either before or after you read what follows here to fully understand what the author was talking about. I’ll just list the first line of each bullet point as a discussion heading.

1. This moment is your life.

Carpe diem. This reminds me that I really need to re-watch The Dead Poets Society. Seeing that movie might have been when I first became familiar with the concept of “seizing the day” and making every moment count.

What does this mean to me? It means not wasting time with meaningless crap when you can be doing something better. The opening lines of one of my favorite Pink Floyd songs, Time, comes to mind:

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an off-hand way

Don’t get me wrong — I don’t make the most of every moment of my life. I don’t think anyone can. Life is too full of the piddly bullshit that we need to do just to get by. Not every moment can be perfect, something worth remembering forever.

But understanding that each moment of your life is your life is the first step to having a better life. And if you approach each moment with that in mind, each moment will be better.

2. A lifetime isn’t very long.

Time
Ticking away the moments
That make up a dull day
Fritter and waste the hours
In an off-hand way

Kicking around on a piece of ground
In your home town
Waiting for someone or something
To show you the way

Tired of lying in the sunshine
Staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long
And there is time to kill today

And then the one day you find
Ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run
You missed the starting gun

And you run and you run
To catch up with the sun
But it’s sinking

Racing around
To come up behind you again
The sun is the same
In a relative way
But you’re older

Shorter of breath
And one day closer to death

Every year is getting shorter
Never seem to find the time

Plans that either come to naught
Or half a page of scribbled lines

Hanging on in quiet desperation
Is the English way

The time is gone
The song is over
Thought I’d something more to say

Time lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group, Kobalt Music Publishing Ltd., EMI Music Publishing, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Warner/Chappell Music, Inc., T.R.O. INC.

I always knew this, but the knowledge of it didn’t become a driving force in my life until 2008. That’s when my friend Erik, at age 56, was diagnosed with cancer. Erik had everything going for him — a family, financial security, and a helicopter business he really enjoyed. But a year later, Erik was dead.

What did this teach me — in no uncertain terms? Not only is life short, but it can be taken from you at any time. Why would anyone put off life goals to some later date — or retirement? Erik never had the opportunity to retire. If he’d put off any life goals until then, they were goals he’d never achieve.

If I had to make a list of the top 10 things that affected my life, Erik’s illness and death would be on it. That’s how profound it was to me. From that point forward, I began thinking about how I wanted to enjoy the rest of my life instead of working my ass off to save money for a future I might never see. I turned down book projects that I didn’t want to work on. I got my spending under control so I wouldn’t need to work so hard. And I started planning a future that included plenty of leisure time to travel and just have fun.

As for “bucket lists” — well, I don’t believe in them. Although it’s nice to have an idea of the things you want to do, building a long list of “things to do/see before you die” so they’re stored for some vague time in the future is pretty silly. Want to go skydiving? Do it this weekend. Want to see the pyramids? Plan your trip for your next vacation. Keep your list short by crossing off things on it as soon as you can.

3. The sacrifices you make today will pay dividends in the future.

Wow. Does this one ever hit home. I learned pretty early on that in order to move forward, you had to pay dues — or make sacrifices. Just coasting along wasn’t going to help you get ahead in life.

Sacrifices come in many forms, but for me they usually come in the form of time or money. I’ve made many investments in my personal life that have paid off for me.

I bought my first decent computer in 1989 for a whopping $8K and spent hour after hour teaching myself to use it. That, combined communication skills I already had (through time spent reading and writing) made it possible for me to make a good living teaching others to use computers — in classrooms and in books and even in video training material.

I spent thousands of dollars and many, many weeks of my life learning to fly helicopters. I took a low-paying tour job in 2004 to build experience — when I could have stayed home and worked on various book projects that paid out fast. The experience I built made me a better, more confident pilot and helped me get the skills I needed to build my own charter business.

And over the past five summers, I lived in a trailer, parked on the dirt so I could be close to my cherry drying clients and their orchards — when I could have stayed in a more comfortable condo or even stayed home, satisfied with the occasional hot summer charter. The good service I provided to my clients earned me their respect — and more business.

These are just three examples. I think my life is full of sacrifices — along with their eventual benefits.

4. When you procrastinate, you become a slave to yesterday.

Although I’m often guilty of procrastination, I understand how completely idiotic it is. If you have something to do, do it. As soon as possible. You’ll be glad you did when it’s done.

Maybe I’m being dense, but I don’t exactly get the “slave to yesterday” concept. When you procrastinate, you simply add more things to your to-do list. It’s only by doing things — not procrastinating — that you get things done. So my lesson in procrastination is that you can get a lot more done when you don’t procrastinate.

5. Failures are only lessons.

This is another really good lesson that a lot of people just don’t get.

Too many people — and I can name a few that have touched my life — are too afraid of failure to attempt some things that can take them forward in life. I am not like that. In fact, I’m the opposite — sometimes I simply try to do too many things.

My record speaks for itself. I’ve succeeded at many of the things I’ve tried to do: building three successful careers, getting published (back when that actually meant something), investing in real estate, building a helicopter charter business, learning to ride motorcycles and ride horses and fly helicopters. I can list dozens of things I’ve tried and succeeded at.

But I can also list plenty of things I tried and did not succeed at. Being a landlord is one example — it was probably the most grueling and unrewarding thing I ever tried. Failing to do as well as I wanted to was quite a learning experience. I learned that residential real estate is a bitch to rent, that good tenants are few and far between, and that certain tenants need you looking over their shoulder all the time just to make sure they don’t trash your place. I also learned that it simply wasn’t worth the headaches to me.

There’s no reward without risk. In other words, if you don’t try to do something, you can’t succeed. I live by this creed. And I’ve learned that sometimes success has all kinds of great rewards.

But the main point is this: even when you fail, you learn something that you can use to guide you in the future. Failures are lessons.

6. You are your most important relationship.

This particular point refers to feeling good about yourself and not needing anyone else’s approval. I learned part of this lesson — I’ve been my own person for a long time and don’t really care too much what my peers think of me. I have a lot of confidence in my capabilities and, with confidence, comes self-esteem.

Unfortunately, however, I did care what my spouse thought. And since he apparently didn’t think very highly of me in the final days of our relationship, my personal self-esteem took a bit of a beating which, in turn, began to affect my health. Once I was away from him at my summer job, I was able to recover. (And now I obviously don’t give a damn what he thinks of me.)

Still, this is a lesson I need to remember on a go-forward basis. Living a relatively isolated existence — as I am now, waiting for my life “reboot” to finish so I can start the next chapter — makes it easy to forget my self worth.

7. A person’s actions speak the truth.

Sad to say, this isn’t something I learned until recently. I can thank my soon-to-be ex-husband for teaching me this one.

For most of my life, I’m afraid I was very trusting. No — I was too trusting. Silly me — I thought that when someone told me something, it was the truth or that they actually meant it. And when it was someone I’d been living with for 29 years — well, how could I possibly not believe that what he was telling me was true?

But the actions did speak the truth. When I discovered the betrayals, I learned the real truth. Needless to say, this was a valuable — although painful — lesson. I’m a lot more careful about who I trust now. And there’s one person I will never trust again.

8. Small acts of kindness can make the world a better place.

How can someone not know this lesson?

You’re walking up to the post office door, arms laden with packages to be mailed. Someone walking by — not even walking into or out of the post office! — changes course to open the door for you. A small act of kindness. Doesn’t it make you feel good? And don’t you think it makes the other person feel good when you say thanks?

Or you’re in the supermarket and a vertically challenged woman is having trouble reaching something on the top shelf of the aisle you’re walking down. You offer to get it down for her, she accepts, and you hand it to her. A small act of kindness. Don’t you think it makes both of you feel good?

These are tiny things. But they really make a difference. Do ten of these things a day and you’ll feel great — while making others feel good, too. The world can be a better place.

9. Behind every beautiful life, there has been some kind of pain.

Until recently, I felt “blessed.” Mind you, I don’t mean that in the religious sense. I just mean that throughout most of my life, things have gone very well for me. It wasn’t luck — I worked at it and made a lot of good decisions. But it mostly worked out and things were good. You could argue that I had (and still have, for that matter) a beautiful life.

I guess I shouldn’t have expected the run of good fortune to last forever. Things are different now. Losing the man I loved was a huge heartbreak for me, one that I’m still struggling (with professional help) to deal with. There’s a lot of pain in my life right now.

There’s also been some pain in the past. Losing loved ones, including cherished pets, leaving behind parts of my life that I wished I could retain.

But pain is part of life. If you’re fortunate, the good times far outweigh the bad.

10. Time and experience heals pain.

This is something else I’m just learning now. My grief counselor would argue this point — she’s given me a “workbook” full of exercises to help me deal with my loss and resulting pain. But I do believe that time and experience are the primary healers — as long as you’re open to be healed. I’m getting there.

What Do You Think?

Which of these lessons have you already learned? How did you learn them? How do they affect your life? Share your thoughts in the comments for this post. It would be interesting to get a good discussion started.