Happy Halloween!

On Career and Vocation

 If this is what I want to do then I have to do it in a way that keeps me healthy and happy. I need to take care of my body with nutrition and exercise. I need to take time off, even if I don’t want to, and actually appreciate and enjoy it.

If you want to have a forty-year career you’d better surround yourself with people who will take a bullet for you and for whom you’d do the same. If you choke you want to look around and see guys that you trust. You want guys you can fail with. And at the same time, if you do something triumphant, you want to be able to look around and see people you really want to share that with too.

Brett Dennen

Risk

There are times...

There are times when it is necessary to see yourself as someone else does. To forget the voices of doubt and criticism in your own head. You create a persona for yourself built on seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years and decades of actions and words, through which others can rightly perceive you. Believe in the relevance of your created place in the world.

There are also times when it is needed to shut everyone else out, and to see yourself as that light inside of you. That true voice that no one else has ever exactly heard. To remind yourself that this is the real you. The "you" that those outside actions and words are hopefully based alot upon, but the you that no action or word can ever fully capture. This is the real you, true to form.

And in either case, you are loved, excellent and unstoppable.

Thanks, MC, for reminding me of this today!

I love my job

That is all.

In time

"Time, patience, and perseverance will accomplish all things." -Unknown

What are you accomplishing, little by little?

What I learned

I cannot believe it is finally the weekend. Since I was traveling for work last week, I lost last my weekend time in my commute from Cartagena, Colombia, gorgeous place that it is, to Boston, and I entered this week thinking for some reason that full steam ahead was the way to go. How the majority of my colleagues do this - live without weekends and in a state of constant first impressions, I do not know. I am wiped.

But I wanted to at least post a few pictures and to talk about Cartagena. I'll be honest - I really don't think I got much of an authentic experience there. We stayed at the tourist hotel and went on the tourist tour, where our guide referred to my colleague and I not by our names, but as "Boston" and "Massachusetts" respectively.

I didn't really get a feel for what the people of Cartagena live like, but I did have some aha moments while there nonetheless. One was toward the end of the 5.5 hour tour, when we were outside of the Emerald Museum waiting for our open-air bus to swing back around and take us to the hotel. I asked our guide, who I started referring to as Cartagena toward the end of our time together, how he was doing, and he said, "I am just so stressed from giving this tour. It is horrible to have to herd people around. They never do what you want."

Oh, how I know this feeling. But how odd that a dude living in paradise and parading people around this beautiful place for fun would feel the same kind of stress I feel day-to-day. And come to think of it, odd that I would feel the same kind of stress that an air traffic controller, or surgeon, or prison warden, or - I don't know - anyone else employed on the planet would feel. How similar our plights are. I bet my buddy "Cartagena" is happy it's the weekend now too.

I also got a chance, while in Cartagena, to take a dip in the Caribbean Sea. It was abbreviated by a mosquito swarm, some sharp underwater rocks, but it was still warm, freeing, glorious. Maybe I am just a loner, or a primordial creature, but there's something about me, alone, starring out into a deep somewhere that helps make everything in life come together.

I really think travel is one of the very best ways in life to gain perspective.

I found this

...on my college blog.

Sunday, April 23, 2006

For the longest time I think I hoped to know someone who would make up for my father. Who would be everything he wasn't in encouraging and believing in me. I was sorely disappointed when I realized that no amount of good anyone could do could take away or counter-balance the harm he had done to my self-concept. Then I thought of something. I did need someone to compensate for the wrongdoing my Dad had done, and the hurt he caused me. But I myself needed to be that person. I needed to fix the damage all myself. No one else was responsible for those weaknesses or needs in me. Given this, who else was I to come to know in my life to be close to? Whoever. Someone I liked. Someone whose presence I enjoyed, and someone who I could confidently share myself with. Something like that.

I've been reading a lot of my old writing recently (blog stuff, old high school journals) and realizing that I have been quite perceptive over the years.

We come back around to the same things - who we are, who we want to be, and how to make those two ends meet.

It is oddly reassuring that as I grow, I revisit themes from my life and evolve them further.

It is not always easy to be older and deal with some of the same issues time and time again. But I am proud to admit that I am not perfect. I am happy to feel different from others and learn why that might be. I am confident that the person I am becoming is relating to a world where there's a place for her. And I really hope that other people can look at their lives and feel that same way.

Fight

Believe in and people who give you faith in the entirety of humanity. Stretch yourself by looking to people who never stop, never give up, never think enough is enough of the fight for something greater.

No matter who it is for you - a friend, an athlete, a teacher, a lover, a stranger - run into the light that others bring into the world and find yourself renewed.

For today, for me, that person is Aston Eaton. Thank you, Aston.