Milestone Musings on Mission/Purpose

I am sure that a lot of the soul-searching I've been doing recently is because I am approaching a milestone birthday. I find myself looking back on the choices I've made in my life, taking inventory, thinking about the things I am proud of and the opportunities I still have. I am looking forward to the next part of my life and in typical fashion I'm worried that I may not have time to complete everything on my list of things to do and see. I'm not a big worrier, but I do I love life and don't want to waste a minute of what's left of mine.

I have been reading a book about the stories we tell ourselves about our lives and how we can write new stories for ourselves that will take us where we want to go. Our destinies do follow our lives, not the other way around. The story we tell ourselves and others about ourselves is what creates our life. It's a book that discusses the power of story.

And it's a book that is causing a personal crisis for me.

Here's the thing. The author says that once you define your purpose - what really matters - that everything else can fall into place. And he says that whatever it is, it should be able to motivate you to walk across a plank 175 feet in the air, wind gusts or no gusts, seven days a week, no questions asked. It's the wind in your sails, the yeast in your bread. And I am having a crisis because I am not sure I can identify that thing in myself.

What's wrong with me?

The author of the book, Jim Loehr, suggests that you imagine what you'd like to hear at your eulogy or to have carved on your tombstone. For some people it's to make their parents proud, for others it's to be the most successful earner in their social circle, for others to seek out adventure and risk. He uses purpose interchangeably with "ultimate mission" and describes it as the thing that constantly renews your spirit, that motivates you when nothing else can. I don't seem to be able to land on one thing.

I think it was Steven Covey who suggested you make a statement about something you want to do and then ask why and keep asking why until you get down to that underlying purpose. When I try to do that, I end up with a bunch of whys. It doesn't strike me as having the focus I'm supposed to have with this ultimate mission. A tiny little voice in my head suggested "maybe I'm over-thinking this." I quashed it and began looking around the internet for ways to find my life's purpose. Mary Jaksch suggested that I answer 15 questions such as what would you do if money were no barrier? and what would you do if you knew you couldn't fail? Another blogger suggested that I write "what is my life's purpose" at the top of a blank piece of paper and then keep answering it over and over until something resonated. All of this seemed like a waste of time.

Then I found Dr. Susan Biali.

A couple of years ago Biali wrote a blog for Psychology Today (check it out) and her confession in it sounded so familiar that I couldn't believe it. When she says "[i]f you're blessed with tons of different ideas or talents, celebrate them rather than bending to pressure to 'just pick one'" I can feel it resonate through my entire being. It's exactly the problem I am having with this book. I am like a kid in a candy store when it comes to life. There are so many choices I can't seem to settle down on just one. How can I possibly reconcile things like writing songs/screenplays/fiction/blogs, helping my son grow into a good man, playing guitar, cave conservation and exploration, being a good partner, motivating sales people, world travel and natural farming (I'm currently thinking bees....)?

Biali suggests that you should embrace all the different things you know. Give yourself room to try on the different interests and ideas you have. Some will stick and some will naturally fall away. For her, living her way into her passion and purpose has been the process, not honing in on one thing.

And that helps me answer the question for now because I think I am starting to have an understanding of what matters to me in this moment: to continually learn and grow. I have always been a curious person who takes things apart in my mind. It's one reason I was such a good interviewer when I did radio. I like learning how things and people tick, and then placing that in the context of my own life to make me a better person and hopefully more able to share it with others. I do really want to do my part to make this a better world. I have done a lot of things in my life. I have had so many blessings so far and I don't see that ending anytime soon. I am so thankful for everything that I've experienced in my life, good and bad. (You bet, I'll take them both!)

Maybe it's no wonder that a Charles Schultz cartoon I read years ago has continued to stick in my mind and always brings a smile to my face. In it, Charlie Brown is talking to Linus and mentions someone being 21 years old. Linus replies "don't be ridiculous, no one lives to be that old!" Or does that many things.

And yet, here I am.

Close Friends

I've been thinking about building close friendships again today. My partner Lynxter is my closest friend and I'm thankful for that. But I also believe it's heathy to have close friends outside of your primary relationship. And that's where things seem to be difficult for me.

I think most people who know me would describe me as a friendly, affectionate, yet somewhat reserved, person. I am not necessarily that easy to get to know and people probably think I'm more serious than I really am. I have not been a person prone to asking for help in my life, a trait that my son has unfortunately picked up from me. I think being "the smart kid" in school led to me missing out on some of the social skills that everyone else picked up. I have often felt like I don't fit in anywhere, and I still feel that way. It doesn't stop me from wanting or trying to connect, but it's often a lonely place of my own making.

Throughout my life, my closest friends have been women. I have had very close male friends in my life too, but it has been primarily women for a host of reasons that would derail this topic, so I won't get into that today. Reaching out to build friendships with women when your romantic partners tend to be women can be tricky, because there's always the possibility that someone is going to mistake your reaching out as interest in intimacy that goes beyond the platonic.

Let me just say here that I am in a monogamous relationship. In the past, I tried a non-monogamous relationship. I have some pretty strong opinions about it, but I'll only say that in the long run, it didn't work for me. I don't judge others. I have also been in relationships where my partner cheated on me. Those worked for me even less. I know that I am a monogamous person. It is what works best for me and it is a boundary that I won't cross, even if I meet someone I find attractive, which doesn't happen very often, maybe because I'm not looking for it. I have a really strong sense of "treat others as you wish to be treated" and I won't do that to anyone, especially not someone I love.

I had a friend once tell me that in all friendships there is an element of attraction. I think my friend is absolutely right, but I differ with him on the meaning of attraction. He meant sexual interest but I think that instead it can mean intellectual interest or emotional interest or spiritual interest. The hard part is juggling all of that along with the insecurities of everyone involved.

And I have had people mistake my interest in them for sexual attraction. It's a very uncomfortable situation to be in. How do you explain to someone that you like them, but not that way, without bruising the fragile ego of someone you really do like? It's happened to me more than once, so I wonder if I am somehow giving off the wrong impression. I was not a person who dated a lot when I was single, so that thought has occurred to me.

Then there's that whole business of sharing intimate thoughts and feelings. I don't make a habit of ever saying anything negative about my partner to a friend. I worry that they might take something I say when I'm temporarily angry or frustrated as something more meaningful and long-lasting, especially since some of them have the context of a partner I once had, who was pretty universally disliked by my friends. And I don't want anyone to think badly of Lynxter because she's someone I cherish.

I suppose I should trust my friends more and then something deeper might build from there. Maybe that's the crux of it. My oldest friends (and my partners) have seen the best and the worst of me, as I have them. They easily separate the wheat from the chaff and they still love me anyway. They reach out to me as often as I reach out to them, our relationships are equal. There is an ebb and flow to them, to be sure, especially since my closest friends outside of Lynxter now live out of town. What makes them so magical, and what makes me miss having close friends in town, is that when we get together it doesn't matter if ten minutes or ten years have passed, at their core they are still the same friend I have always loved.

Don't misunderstand me. I do have friends who would come if I called at 3am and I would come if they called me at 3am. But they don't feel the same as some of these old friendships and I think that's what I am missing in my life right now.

People Traveling Through Our Lives

Many years ago I read a book that discussed six different types of friendships. And while the book wasn't about friendships per se, that is what stuck with me over the years. The author said there are six different kinds of friends, from convenience friends to friends who come when you call at three in the morning. We all have them and each serves an important purpose in our lives.

Social networking, as I mentioned a couple of blogs ago, has enabled me to get back in touch with a lot of friends and acquaintances I've known over the years. I'm a curious person, and I like knowing where people's lives have taken them so I have been enthralled with social networking sites. At first I was insufferable, now I think I'm only moderately annoying about it since the novelty has begun to wear off. slightly.

I think about the friends in my life - neighbors and office mates, people who belong to the same organizations I do, childhood friends, older friends who shared their wisdom with me and younger friends for whom I've done the same. I have been blessed with having a lot of people in my life.

And yet, when I really think about it, I don't think I have been that successful in cultivating close friends. The truly close friends in my life would still come if I called at three in the morning, but most of them are no longer living in the same city with me. Rather than developing new close friends, I have relied on lovers to fill the void. I don't know if that's particularly unusual in a transient society like ours but I don't know.

What do you think?

Ebb and Flow

Death has always made sense to me as an inevitable part of life. When I say that, I mean death by natural causes. For example, I miss the two great-grandmothers I was lucky enough to know in my childhood, my father's grandmothers, but when they died, I understood that was just part of life and I remember thinking, they're old, that's what happens. It's supposed to. Of course, as I get older, their advanced ages (86 and 87) no longer seem that old to me.

I had a cat that lived into his twenties and even though he's been gone several years, I still miss him. His name was Ralph. In later years I took to calling him Ralph the Reiki Master. He knew when you were upset or unsettled and would come to calm you down, literally putting his paws on you. He was also a welcome cat, bounding out to meet any person who entered our home, and he never exhibited fear.

When he was younger, Ralph loved to leap from the floor to the top of an open door and then perch on his back paws and reach down the front of the door with his front paws. I wondered what on earth he was doing until one day I saw him doing the same thing to my aquarium and realized he'd been in training.

Ralph loved to ride on people's shoulders like a live mink stole, down to the shiny black fur. I remember once he startled a tall friend of mine by leaping unannounced to his shoulders from the floor. I always wondered whether Ralph was a cat who wished he could fly.

As he got older, he started getting thin and bony and then one day, lay down and said he was done. My partner called me and said I should come home from work because he wasn't going to last long. I came right home and Ralph died shortly after I came into the room, as though he'd been waiting for me to say one last goodbye and to ease my transition into a life without him. Oh, I cried. I missed him then and there are times today when I miss him so. I don't ever seem to wish that he were still alive, but rather that I could go back and revisit those days. And of course I do that in my memory, which ebbs and flows.

Several years have passed and we again have a really old cat. He's feral, so we don't know exactly how old he is, but he's been around our family almost 20 years and he's starting to get that old man cat look that Ralph had - bony and skinny. He's heading towards that point of ebb we all will hopefully reach in our lives. For now, Sky still has a lot of flow - he has a great and insistent appetite so I'm hopeful that he won't go soon, but when he's ready, I will be too. Perhaps Sky will join Ralph in the afterlife, he certainly will join him in the ebb and flow of my memory.

Well, Hello Betty!

I love that social networking enables me to get in contact with people I've lost contact with over the years. Recently a young woman who is now somewhere around 30, and who I lost contact with just as she was graduating from high school, contacted me to say that she was coming into town from L.A. and wanted to get together. I'll call her Betty since I want to protect my friend's identity because she is an actress and I'd hate for a tabloid to ever pull out my blog and use it against her, plus I love the phrase "Hello, Betty!" (in the archaic sense, not the urban dictionary sense); so there you have a little walk inside my train of thought.


One of my exes is a middle-school teacher and Betty was a student who used to come hang out around our house. My ex seemed to attract kids who would find our address, show up on our doorstep, and become somewhat of a fixture. We didn't mind. We remembered what it was like to be in middle school and think your teachers were cool but your parents were not; plus they were a great source of reliable babysitters for our own small children who always "adopted" them into the family as pseudo-siblings. That, and we were keeping them off the streets since they would sometimes show up very late at night (and we'd quietly call their parents so no one was worried).


The kids we tended to attract were a little on the wild side (at age 15, Betty showed up with a tattoo that her parents had not authorized, but that's another story). We allowed these errant kids to try out whatever personalities they wanted to try out, without the judgement a family can vocalize. After high school, Betty ran off with a boyfriend to another state and I thought I wouldn't hear from her again; I certainly didn't expect to see her again and thought that I hadn't really had much of an impact on her.


She found me on social media through my son, who is now about the age she was when I last saw her. We electronically traded the basic events of our lives and then one day she sent me a message that she was coming to town and wanted to catch up in person, so we made arrangements to meet at a wine bar not too far from my house. It was kind of a trip to think about sitting down to have a couple glasses of wine with Betty. She was still a teenager in my mind, even though the math proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that she is old enough to drink.


Over the years she'd gone from being a gawky, hyperactive, pretty teenager to a poised and beautiful woman. That same kid was still lurking in there, but I was so proud of who she had turned into. She said that after I last saw her, she had gone to college to study theatre and had been living in Los Angeles for almost 10 years finding work acting and print modeling. She dumped the boyfriend (one of those toxic relationships we all seem to get into when we're that age) and finally had one that she thought was a "keeper". She talked about how much she loved her work but also shared her frustration with 'casting couch come-ons' and the craziness of L.A. She explained how agents and managers worked and shared that people said she was good but that she sometimes seemed to hold back in her auditions. She had developed a pretty thick skin, realizing that not being cast isn't usually personal but was fiercely determined to deal with that block. I shared my experience working with actors and some observations that seemed to ring true for her.


As the afternoon was turning to evening, my partner showed up and we continued to talk about actors and acting and an indy project that Betty was really excited about. She didn't want to hold back emotionally and not give the role everything it deserved. She also said that because the role was someone who had been a real person, people on the project were being very secretive about sharing information about the woman, who had died from some pretty destructive behavior.


I said that from my limited experience as a director, I've seen that actors can get sidetracked looking at what a person does rather than who they are, but that the key is to really look at what is going on with a person that can lead her to make the choices she makes. That's what makes a character multi-faceted, that's what will give the actor interesting choices, and that what makes an actor's performance riveting to an audience.


My partner suggested that Betty talk with the people on the project who knew the person she would be portraying, and explain that she was asking to know about the person because she wanted to honor her. I thought that was fantastic and diplomatic advice.


I told Betty that she had to be fearless and to give up worrying that someone would see a really great performance and decide that she, outside of the character, was crazy. She was a little afraid she might lose herself in the emotion of a role because she knew she could be a little high-strung. I said that it's about the training, because we are creatures of habit and routine (did I attend that recent workshop so I could give this advice?) and she's had a lot of training, so I knew that she could do it. She needed to trust her training. I said that she could protect herself and know going in that when the clock stops, it stops, and you shut Pandora's play box and go back to your life. I said it was important she remember that because I knew so many actors who didn't learn it (usually demonstrated when they fell in love with co-stars) to disastrous ends. And I also knew that Meryl Streep gets up in the morning and puts her trousers on like the rest of us and that she can shut that box, and if she can shut that box, so can Betty.


I described some of the ideas I'd been hearing and reading lately around fear and the difference between the fear when something is truly life-threatening and the fear when you've worked yourself up about something, and probably magnified it to be way larger than it really is. We talked about the power of the mind. Betty told me she knew that was true and that she'd quit smoking based on something I'd shared years ago when she was a teenager - how I'd quit smoking in my early twenties by responding to my cravings by telling myself over and over "you're a non-smoker and a non-smoker wouldn't want a cigarette" until I really didn't want another cigarette.

I was surprised. I had forgotten that I'd given her that advice. In fact, I'd forgotten that she had ever smoked, but when I think back on it, I think all of those kids did. I asked "did it work?" and she said "you don't see me smoking do you? Of course it did!" She said that she'd always appreciated my advice, something another of those wayward kids I have kept in contact with has told me on more than one occasion.

Five hours went by like five minutes. She gave me a great big hug and said we'd get together the next time she came to town and insisted my partner and I come to L.A. so she could show us around.

We hear so many things in life. What sticks, what slides off, what sinks in and what surfaces later? None of us can know. That's why it's important to be as honest as we can be and to usher into our lives those ideas and people who help us grow.

What We Feed Will Surely Grow

I recently attended a workshop that explored managing the four dimensions of energy to become fully engaged in our lives. The related (but distinct!) dimensions discussed were physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. The premise was that we are creatures of habit and routine and that if we train ourselves in all four areas, that we can effectively manage our energy to realize our "mission" in life. None of this seemed entirely new to me but there was one thing he said that keeps replaying in my head:

What you feed in yourself will grow.


I thought about the times in my life I have proven that statement true in every dimension to successful and detrimental ends. Inactivity breeding inactivity. Rest leading to better recovery. Emotional distance causing more distance. Optimism building more optimism. Creativity leading to more creativity.

Since that workshop I have begun making small changes and trying to ask myself whether an activity I am doing or a thought or an emotion I am having is something I want to see grow in myself. I have often in the past said that I want people in my life who move me closer to my goals. When I have said that, I have always been referring to the goals I have about making myself a better person in this world. I want people around me who challenge me to be my best self, not people who bring me down ethically or emotionally. That hasn't changed. Since attending this workshop, I am now adding this consideration: are the things I am doing in all of the dimensions of my own life things that I want to grow in myself.

The good news is that we're creatures of habit and routine. I am working to slowly move the needle on my huge list of things I want to do in life by trying to look at small changes in habit and routine that I can make to keep me pointed in the right direction.