Ask any self-help guru and they’ll tell you straight up: getting there is equal parts thinking and doing: thinking, to figure things out and doing, to—well, to do the damned things.

Of course, if it was easy, we’d all be there, right? Happy, graceful and accomplished, speaking five or six languages as we waved to our two perfectly behaved children while playing a mean game of tennis in the same shorts we wore back in high school. Or rather, the same-sized shorts: we’d be so rich, we’d own a few shorts factories.

What usually happens is more like a variation on the spinning-plates scenario—children and waistline going to ruin while we apply proboscis to grindstone—or worse, a Rip Van Winkle approach to change: we fall asleep for 40 years while plate detritus builds up in scary towers around us. It’s not that our intentions aren’t honorable; it’s just that it’s such a pain in the ass, dealing with all those fucking plates. The idea of real change is enough to make anyone run screaming into the night, and isn’t that what falling asleep really is? A really quiet way to run screaming into the night?

I’ve been piling up plates for what feels like forever. There’s always some great plan to help me keep them spinning: an electronic whojamawhatsit, a new system, a new book. None of them work—or at least, they don’t until you close the gap between thinking and doing. And lo, there is the rub that will keep the self-help industry thriving forever.

So how am I closing the gap? Uh…slowly? Painfully? One heinous, long-put-off task at a time.

And for me, there are two things that keep me going.

The first is a dream: me and a laptop and an ocean view. The clearer I get about what I really want to be doing and where I really want to be doing it, the more my precious stuff looks like what it is: a bunch of crap I’m holding onto in lieu of doing the hard work I must to get myself there.

The second is support. I’m a loner and an introvert and kind of a crabapple, besides. I like to do stuff by myself because that way, I get all the credit. There—I’ve said it.

Only the more I really looked at things, the more I realized that nothing I did—not one single thing—did I truly do all by myself. Someone’s always got some kind of damned hand in there, even if it’s not in an immediately obvious, collaborative kind of way.

If that’s true—that I’m not really getting it done all by myself—why not outright ask for support to get there? For…everything? If one of the keys to getting to the next place is acting “as if” one is already there, why not solicit help from people on the other side of the divide, who don’t have to act “as if” because they already are that, exactly? The fittest I have ever been is when I hired a personal trainer to help me get there. The best headshots I have ever taken were when I employed the specific help of my agent as well as many-minds (for a referral) and the photographer (for…well, duh.)

Support can also come from people with a like-minded goal, even if they’re still in the “as if” stage. Alcoholics Anonymous? Built on that. Accountability, accountability, accountability.

This humble slice of the web has been a bit of that for me, and I thank you for it. Toastmasters, similarly, has been a huge help: when people expect you to show up, you show up. Or at least, there’s a better chance you’ll show up.

I’m ramping it up a bit now, with a few accountability partners for getting my shit together and putting it out there. I have a lot of shit, as it turns out, and shoveling shit is no one’s idea of a good time. Neither, for that matter, is putting it out there. It’s about as much fun as not eating ice cream or saying “no” to a trip to Disneyland.

It’s “no” for now, though, so that it can be a resounding “YES!” to other things—that laptop, that ocean view—soon.

Not soon enough, of course. But soon…

xxx
c

Image by robertvoors via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

TOPICS: change, decluttering, fear, procrastination.

This is dark days, my friends.

Not an hour goes by where some cold chill of a fear doesn’t pass over my heart and threaten to bring me down. This election. This war. This economy, and what it’s doing to people. The never-ending, always-on stream of bad news and…well, what it’s not doing to people.

I read a good book over my 10 days away in Chicago by a crazy young hardcore punk zen monk. It gave me odd comfort, along with some perspective. Perspective, because things have always been crazy: they were crazy when Gautama Buddha set out on his quest; they’re crazy now.

Comfort, because one really persuasive answer, while not exactly easy, seems pretty straightforward: accept responsibility.

For yourself.

For the things under your control, that help shape the world—your anger, your fear, your not-niceness. Your living-in-smallness. (Oh, and by “you”? I totally mean “me.” So we’re clear.)

While a Twitter-friend assures me we’re not technically in a recession, the fact is almost beside the point: our fears, my fears, are telling us we are. And, as another new nerd-friend says, the answer lies in addressing the fears head on, and with grace and compassion. Be here now. Love thy neighbor…actively. Ground yourself in the truth of you.

I thought about all this stuff over and over these past several days. It was hard not to. Between the overwhelming generosity of all my friends, old and new—who lent me their homes and spare bedrooms, who took time out to meet with me, who bought me meals and drinks, who showered me with love—and the long, long walks I took all over my beautiful native city, one thing got hammered home time and time again: enjoy this moment, right now. This soft bed, this slice of pizza, this drizzle of rain, this “L” train that showed up at exactly the right time, this hug, this laugh.

I have a mission statement that I’ve had for a while, which I mentioned recently—”To be a joyful conduit of truth, beauty and love.” But it is also nice to have a platform: some slightly more actionable ideals to root your ass in the here and now, and the way you’d like the next here-and-now to be. When I was Chief Nerd of my Nerdmasters club, my platform was thusly:

1. Have fun.
2. Leave things better than we found them.
3. Start and end the meetings on time.

I chose them because, for whatever reasons, we’d let these things slide during the administrations before mine, and…well, it kind of chapped my hide. But the exercise of addressing these things week after week—of plotting a path that would make the platform real—both helped me realize it and why things slip away to begin with: because we are focused on other things. My presidency was far from perfect, but dammit, we had fun, that room and the people in it were better off when we left each Thursday night, and we got to the bar in time to get the drinking underway at a reasonable hour. Plus we learned what needed to happen next time. What still needed to be worked on.

What projects lay before us.

For the next few months, I’m committing to my own platform. I want to honor (and, god willin’ and the creek don’t rise) wrap up my previous commitments. I want to revisit my Best Year Yet plan I so earnestly began in January. I have new projects, including one promise I made with a lovely lady in Chicago, that I intend to see through.

And beyond that, I am going to adopt and adapt my Nerdmasters platform from last year as my personal platform for the rest of this one:

1. I will have fun.
2. I will leave things—myself, my people, my projects—better than I found them.
3. And I will start and end my days on time. (Uh…after this one.)

I have some other ideas for how to tell Mr. Fear to take a hike which I’ll share as time goes on and I actually start putting them into practice. In the meantime, I’d love to hear what’s going on with you: what are you doing to grab your life by the horns, and what can the rest of us learn from it?

xxx
c

Image by tcd123usa via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

TOPICS: change, fear, life.

For once, I’m with Anil: April Fool’s Day sucks.

It’s rare that people get it right, coming up with a clever, playful joke that startles and teases, and then, with the reveal, delights. Most either fall flat, offend or have an effort-to-results ratio that reminds me of why I ran screaming in the night from the world of consumer advertising. It’s not bad enough that you commit to doing the stupid and bad; you must also commit precious resources towards the effort out of all reasonable proportion.

Plus, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool patsy—hopelessly earnest, relentlessly optimistic, easily hoodwinked. I was the one who gobbled up the four squares of Ex-Lax my cabin-mates told me was chocolate; a year or two earlier, I was the one who, when greeted at the bottom of the stairs leading to my friend’s family rec room by eight other friends yelling “Surprise!”—on my birthday—actually asked, “What?” (The answer: “It’s your birthday…Stupid.”)

For years, I hated my seemingly inborn earnestness. Haaaaaaated it. I wanted to be cool and sophisticated, smooth and worldly. Unfortunately for me, the raw material just wasn’t there. I was puny and inelegant and, let’s face it, built like a pound puppy: big eyes, tiny body, funny face, gigantic paws. But I was also blessed…or cursed…or blessed…with a medium-sized brain and a will of iron, and over the years (and far too often) I used them in service of my own nefarious and silly desires. If I couldn’t be elegant, I could be sarcastic. Oh, could I be sarcastic! I made a particular study of Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker, two profoundly funny-looking people who Made It Work, in the parlance of modern-day can-do maven, Tim Gunn, and honed my wit to a razor’s edge. I was even mean, sometimes. Okay…a lot. Okay—more than it’s comfortable to admit.

Somewhere along the line, it just got tiring, carrying all that crap around. To be organically funny is one thing; to work at it all the time is exhausting. It is also to live in fear: that you will fall flat on your face this next time, that you will be outed as a fraud, that you will fail and fall and be abandoned by all who said they loved you while you were entertaining them. Oy. Too, too much.

The setting down of my heavy load didn’t come all at once. It was more of a gradual denuding. Like when you flee the old country with all your silverware and rugs and paintings on your overladen cart, and you’re pulling it up that hill, and pulling it up that hill, and heaving things off so you can pull it up that damned hill, and finally you pluck one representative item from the heap—the scrap of cloth that didn’t make it onto the quilt but that has a story, or your beloved grandmother’s comb which is more missing than teeth—and let the rest of the rattletrap heap slide back down the hill for the Cossacks or gypsies to plunder. That amazing, liberating moment when you get that it’s really love that’s the thing, not things.

Of course, I still like words. And I still really like stringing words together to make people laugh. I’m starting to realize, though, that I really, really like stringing the words together to make people laugh so they’ll relax, or laugh so they’ll let down their guard, or laugh so they’ll take a second look at an idea or a thought or a really good cause. Laughter disarms people, yes, but I don’t want to disarm anyone so they’re unprotected and squashable, but rather, to temporarily jam the force field and get some interesting interaction happening.

To get the do-gooders hooked up with the want-to-fund-do-gooder-ers. To get the do-gooders doing different kinds of good to lighten up and find more ways each other is alike than different. To keep the do-gooders doing good, or, if they’d do it anyway, to throw a little happy their way to make the job more pleasant. We each of us have our place.

My place might be on the ground, butt up in the air, a “Kick Me, Hard” sign affixed to the soft and fleshy part. So be it.

Some of us are born elegant; some of us are born clowns. You can fight it or you can work with it. Do the former, and while you may climb the ladder of fortune and fame, you’ll also be resigned to a life of struggle and worry and looking over your shoulder.

Do the latter and you’re nobody’s fool.

Even if you will suffer a sore ass from time to time…

xxx
c

Image by phitar via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

TOPICS: change, fear, humor, sarcasm.

About two years ago, I went nuts.

Well, some people might call it that. I called it A Certain Longing: for peace…for quiet…for a little patch of green that I might call my own. And I started my strange, Saturday-morning p0rn routine:

• Wake up at The BF’s
• Make tea (and no, that’s not code for anything)
• Pad into office and get online
• Surf for real estate offerings in Small, Midwestern College Town

A little weird? Perhaps. But you try living in Los Angeles as a middle-aged, middle-class person for 16 years and see how you react. I’ve “been there, done that” with the U.S. Majors (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles) and while I love urban life as least as much as I loathe suburban life, I remain somewhat in the dark about the in-between. Color me Small Town-curious, I guess.

Anyway, upon ascertaining that I could basically buy myself a phat pad in said Undisclosed Small Town for cash in hand, my fantasies grew more vivid and active. What, I thought, about a job? Perhaps I could throw away this freewheeling life of self-(sometimes-)employment, given the right opportunity. Could there be any opportunities worth throwing it away for?

It was a quick hop/skip/jump to the university’s website. I mean, hell, here was the major employer, right? Why not give ‘er a look-see?

Lo & behold, there was a job with all but my actual name on it.

And yet…

And yet, I was a kinda/sorta retired actor. Who was…who had seen many winters.

Who’d been living a semi-dissolute life off the company payroll since 1992. Translation: a woefully inadequate, almost 100% irrelevant résumé.

At least I still had one, I thought. And passion. I had shitloads of passion. Plus, that sense of humor. I mean, it had to be worth something.

Still, I was unemployable…right? Who would even look at me? A 45-year-old broad, who’d been off the market for years, tilting at crazy windmills like acting and TV writing?

Naturally, I did the only sane thing: I applied.

I drafted a crazy letter, and included a strange, not-especially-applicable, certainly-not-asked-for bio/one-sheet of my own devising. (And yes, I threw in an outdated résumé. Why? Who knows. Old habits die hard, I guess. Plus there’s that Cornell thing, that impresses some people sometimes. Might as well use what Dad paid so dearly for.)

I sent off the Kit-’n'-Caboodle, expecting nothing.

A couple of weeks later, when I’d all but forgotten the escapade, I received a reply: “Missive received; continue communication.” Okay, I’m paraphrasing, but there’s a point to all this.

Never. Assume.

Never assume, as many foolish applicants to a dream job with Seth Godin did, that the Ordinary Route will serve. It will not. It may kill the deal.

Never mistake, as so many of us do, the un-thought-of for the impossible. They are not the same. People invent crazy stuff out of nothing every damned day. This country was founded on people inventing crazy stuff out of nothing. Embrace the wacko tradition. Let go of the bullshit notions that lash you to the mast of mundanity. They are not your friends. You are your friend. Innovation is your friend. Change is your friend, as scary as she may look from across the dimly-lit pavilion.

Sometimes, the trying does not work. Usually, the trying involves a bit of a leap. In the words of my beloved poet, soprano Beverly Sills, “There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.”

You’ll fall. You’ll fail. You’ll fumble.

I didn’t get the job, you see. Bowed out too early in the process to know if it would have been offered. Boyfriend not ready to move. Me, not ready to move. Bottom line: while I flatter myself that the interview went well, I’ll never really know. And I’m still in L.A., in the same, small (but beautiful! and rent-controlled!) one-bedroom apartment, two years later. Still muddling along with my own crazy, dream-fueled, solopreneur cocktail of endeavors.

No matter. It’s the reaching out that makes the woman. Going out of your comfort zone, sniffing out something not quite in your reach, dipping a toe in the waters well outside your purview that matters.

This, I have done.

This, you can do.

Draft a crazy proposal. Reach out to other people and express, share, offload your crazy dream.

Crazy dreamers and crazy trying are the components of change.

And change, while scary—and yes, a little crazy-making—is the currency of growth.

Grow this world. Do the nutso thing.

Change the world—change your world.

Or die for crazy trying…

xxx
c

Image by LeiLeiPao via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

TOPICS: change, fear.

I’ve been thinking a lot about aging lately.

Part of it is closing in on the halfway mark to my birthday. (It’s September the 13th, in case you want to mark your calendar now).

But a lot of it is all these metaphoric Post-It Notes that have been popping up on the metaphoric mirrors of my life lately.

Delightful reminders like the sponge cake around my middle (which, on the bright side, has qualified me as a blood donor for the first time ever—free OJ & cookies!!).

Or the ten minutes I spent in my Toastmasters meeting a couple of weeks back trying desperately to pull the word “malapropism” from my ganky-ass RAM after hearing “exacerbate” get swapped out for “exasperate” for the third time.

Or the fact that my college roommate has a son who is going to be a third-generation legacy when he enters college…next year.

And a lot of clothes that I swear to you were perfectly fine even six months ago?

Hooba-dooba.

There’s a window of about 20 years where you look like a total tool if you wear ironic tees, and I seem to have been defenestrated in my sleep. Which concerns me, because I will not be 70 for another 23 years, and SXSW is next week. What am I supposed to do, go to the UX panels naked? My sponge cake will show!

It is weird, having this age thing happen seemingly overnight. I realize that everyone has this moment in front of the mirror (except the lucky few who have a portrait stashed in the closet—let me know how that plays out for you). I just got to put mine off for an unreasonably long time.

I never had kids, for one. I live in the land of No Seasons with Which to Mark One’s Death March to Invisibility. Hell, I live in L.A. and I’m not hot or rich—I’ve been invisible since I got here, 16 years ago.

And mostly, I don’t mind being old any more than I mind being invisible (although I’d quite like to be rich, as I’ve heard it affords one a great deal of freedom.) Like my pal, precocious codger Jim Garner, I kind of enjoy being an elder, or, in codger-speak, an old coot. I have always rounded up, claiming the next birthday’s age shortly after the new calendar year begins. It makes things incredibly confusing on my actual birthday, as I am bad at math and my parents, bad at planning. I mean, would it have been that hard to meet a year earlier and have me in 1960?

No, I don’t exactly mind the idea of being old—I am just not crazy about the getting there.

I would like to skip ahead to the part where I have a full head of snowy white hair like Mom. To the part where I’ve already done 20 years of yoga and am this lithe, inspiring, elder-model type who takes a lover 15 years her junior. And maybe female. You know—just because.

Basically, to the part where the young part of me is long gone rather than slipping away by degrees, and the old me is this fabulous, rock-’em-sock-’em me unimaginable to me now, much less actualizable.

I am not young anymore, except to old people. I am not old yet, except to young people. Just like being born into this crazy non-Boomer, not-quite-Gen-X cohort, I cannot quite parse myself yet, and I gotta tell you, it’s a little irksome. Like that deep, phantom itch I get in the library that won’t disappear no matter how hard I rub my shoulderblades across a corner of the stacks.

On the other hand, this is a perfect frame of mind in which to sail into the aforementioned SXSW: not quite sure, a little on the wobbly side, with lots of cracks for old stuff to leak out of and new stuff to sneak into. Last time I went, I was wobbly because it was new to me and I was new to the internets and on top of everything else, as it turned out, I was sliding into a Crohn’s flare. This time, it will just be wacky, wobbly me, seeing a few familiar faces, meeting a few People Behind the Handles, sucking down some of that SCD-legal Tito’s, having my head cracked open.

As long as I remember my vitamins, I think it should be fine.

Provided I can get my hands on a few plain t-shirts…

xxx
c

Image by master of felix via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

TOPICS: change, fear, life.