Christa in New York: Curating a Creative Life

I've Moved to a New On-line Home

2010-01-17T09:31:00.002-05:00

After almost 3 wonderful years of blogging on Blogger, I made the move over to WordPress. Same content for the blog, highlights on other projects I'm working on, and a new design. I've ported over all of the posts and comments from here onto the new site so none of the content has been lost. It's a party - come on over and see me at http://www.christainnewyork.com.

Step 16: Little Black Book

2010-01-16T00:23:00.000-05:00

On Friday I organized an innovation session at work to get a broad cross-section of my business partners to consider new product ideas that we should explore in 2010. Each exercise we did had a prize associated with it, and for one of those exercises I won a black moleskin appointment book. I keep all of my appointments in my calendar in my phone, so I wasn't quite sure what to do with this appointment book. It's much too sleek to let it go to waste.

I decided to record my daily "big thoughts" - inspirations for these blog posts, things I did especially well each day, and great opportunities for learnings. For the past two days, I've found myself recording new ideas and resources that I should tap for my various projects. This tiny black book has become a book of intentions.

For some time now I've been searching for and crafting the perfect filing system - a single place to keep all of my links, magazine articles, references grouped by project. I haven't been able to find that place just yet. I've tried my own excel spreadsheets, my Google inbox, Evernote, a number of online resources, an intricate paper filing system, etc. It seems I've tried just about every option and each falls short a bit. With the entry of this little black book, I realized that maybe that perfect filing system doesn't exist, and maybe it doesn't have to. Perhaps items of interest can, and should, be stored separately.

I started to image this little black book a year from now, pages and pages filled with inspirations, or at least pieces of inspirations. I imagined myself flipping back through its pages and being inspired all over again by the notes and messages scrawled across its pages in my own handwriting. Perhaps to build an extraordinary life we all need a place to record our wildest learnings and dreams. Perhaps in our commitment to write down these dreams, we have the greatest chance of bringing them to life.

Step 15: Lugh

2010-01-15T00:27:00.003-05:00

"Are you more like your mom or dad?" people ask me. I'd like to believe that I can choose the best of both.

Today I heard a bit about Lugh, one of the gods of the Celtic Pantheon. He is the son of Cian and Ethniu, half god, half monster. He was able to become successful because he had the good traits of each of his parents: the heart and morals of his father's side (the gods), and the courage and self-defense abilities of his mother's side (the monsters). With the gods being oppressed by the monsters, he joins the gods, teaches them to defend themselves, and helps them gain their freedom from the monsters. While greatly simplified, this basic outline provides a powerful example of how to choose our better history and future.

Every experience and example has the potential to be a help or a hindrance to us. Cian's family, had good, patient hearts that lead others to dominate them. Ethniu's family was wild and ill-willed, though exceptional warriors. Lugh could have easily adopted either example. Instead, Lugh was able to combine the warrior instincts of his mother and the good heart of his father to restore peace.

The important lesson here is Lugh's decision to pick and choose among his historical examples and inherited traits to create something all original that allowed him to do the most good in the world. When I consider my own history and my own way forward, I've been thinking a lot about my parents, my earliest examples of how to be an adult in the world.

It would be easy to vilify one of my parents and deify the other. Instead, I am trying to appreciate and nurture the very best of them both as a base to build my own life from. From my mother, there is so much goodness to choose from, though not enough personal confidence. From my father, there is so much intellect and confidence to choose from, though not enough compassion and love for others.

My history is the inverse of Lugh's, though my journey has been and will continue to be similar. In order for me to really do some good in the world, I will need the very best traits of both my parents combined. I wonder if that's true for all of us.

The image above is not my own. It can be found here.

Step 14: How to Help in Haiti

2010-01-14T12:20:00.004-05:00

I’ve been watching the news unfold around the tragic earthquake that shook Haiti to the core on Tuesday afternoon. My friend, Ellie, just returned on Sunday from a mission trip to Port-au-Prince and to hear about the news of the Earthquake only 48 hours before the earthquake struck was an eye-opening experience. I could very easily have lost my friend if her trip was just a day or two longer.

CNN and NBC have done a tremendous job getting the word out, showing the images and telling the stories of the people in Haiti, encouraging the much-needed generosity of the world to pour into this tiny country. In 24 hours, a cell phone text campaign raised millions of dollars. Thanks for social media, it takes so little effort on our part to lend a hand, and in this situation every little bit helps.

I’m finding it difficult to go about my usual business in light of the disaster. I just don’t feel like I’m doing enough. The images are haunting me and are never far from my mind. I keep visiting internet news sites to get the latest updates. In an effort to do more, I wanted to post today’s step on this blog to list four ways that we can all get involved in the relief efforts right now:

1.) Twitter users can quickly get word of the latest updates and relief efforts, particularly from people on the ground in Haiti, by searching #Haiti, #haitiquake, #RedCross, #CARE, #ONE.

2.) Give much needed funding to the efforts of organizations like the American Red Cross, HealingHaiti.org, and CARE. While there is a desire to give goods in these types of situations, monetary donations are more efficient because relief agencies can use the funds to buy the most-needed items in bulk. Cash is the best way to give during disasters of this magnitude.

Anybody with a cell phone account with a major carrier can donate $10 to the Red Cross by texting "Haiti" to the number 90999. The donation appears on the giver's bill. Online fundraising company mGive launched the campaign yesterday together with the State Department and the Red Cross.

3.) Does your organization offer a charitable contribution match? If so, donate through your organization to make your gift go even further in Haiti. Better yet, contact the head of philanthropic giving at your company to see if a communication can be sent to employees. The company will likely not request donations, though the communication could just serve as a reminder that in these types of situations, company matching of charitable dollars is a wonderful employee benefit.

4.) This will be a LONG TERM relief effort in Haiti. While it is tough for anyone aside from military, media, and search and rescue teams to get to Haiti, many organizations will be organizing volunteers in the coming months, perhaps years. HealingHaiti.org and the American Red Cross are great places to start if you’re interested in lending a hand on the ground with any vacation or personal time you may have.

The situation in Haiti prior to the earthquake was dire. Now it’s reached catastrophic proportions. Extraordinary circumstances can lead us to help others in extraordinary ways. We have the opportunity to do something extraordinary today, right now. The people of Haiti need our love and support now more than ever.

The image above is not my own. It depicts the tragic devastation of Port-au-Prince. Photo Credit: AFP

Examiner.com: My Interview with Erica Heinz, Founder of Yogoer.com

2010-01-14T11:41:00.002-05:00

For busy New York yogis, Yogoer.com is a dream service. In a couple of clicks, the site provides every nearby yoga, pilates, fitness, and dance studio based on an address. It’s Mapquest for your source of well-being. The site also provides job postings for yoga instructors, profiles of studios and instructors, and a blog. To make it even easier to utilize the service, Yogoer.com is available as an iPhone app. You can also follow Yogoer on Twitter.

Last week I had the pleasure to interview Erica Heinz, a graphic designer, Huffington Post columnist, yoga instructor, and founder of Yogoer.com. I’m also excited to announce that I’m recording my yoga teacher training diary on Yogoer.com’s blog. My thanks to Erica for the opportunity to connect with the community she’s building on Yogoer.com.
Christa - What was your inspiration to start Yogoer?

For the full interview, click here.

Step 13: Off the Screen, Into the World

2010-01-13T21:32:00.004-05:00

My involvement of social media has led to some amazing friendships in my life. I'm certainly better off for them because they inspire me, support me, and keep me going in pursuit of my dreams. My friends, Col, Laura, Phyllis, Amanda, and the lovely ladies of Owning Pink are examples of this phenomenon. There are amazing people across the globe who are my kindred spirits, and social media has allowed me to connect with them.

One of my favorite outcomes of this process is getting to meet these amazing virtual people in person, when I get to read their witticisms online, and then realize they are even more fantastic in person. Tonight I got to meet up with Amanda, one of my favorite social media friendship success stories. Long-considering a move to New York City, Amanda began looking for creativity focused blogs by New York City authors. Amanda found my blog via random search, and then we discovered that we went to the same college, graduated the same year, loved yoga, performed, and were writers. Tonight we got to meet in-person for the first time, and 2.5 hours later, we still had loads to say. What a great feeling!

There's been a lot of criticism of social media because some consider it so impersonal. "It's replacing real-world interaction," some people say. "People spend too much time in front of a computer and not enough time living their lives," others say. Both valid arguments, though I've found such a rich, contrary existence in social media. It's allowed me to connect with people whom I may never have met otherwise, people who enrich my life and share my sensibilities and dreams. Social media's brought me friendships I never expected, and for that I am incredibly grateful!

Step 12: Old Friends

2010-01-12T16:30:00.000-05:00

Last night, I stopped over at my friend Ben’s house for his annual Winter Party. It’s been about three years since I’ve seen him. We are friends from my way-back days in theatre and he’s been successfully touring around the country ever since. He’s back in town now and so the Winter Party resumed this year. At the party, I saw two other friends, August and Jessica, from the same tour that Ben and I worked on. It had been many more years since I’d seen them. I laughed out loud so many times that I lost count. I was reminded at how much I love rekindling old friendships. It feels good to know they’ve been out in the world, active and happy, and that we can pick up where we left off.

On my way home, I thought about other people I’ve lost touch with over the years, despite our best efforts. It’s to be expected as people’s lives move forward, and I’ve also changed jobs and cities quite a bit. With the advent of social media it’s now so much easier to be in touch and keep track of people we love having in our lives. I’m so grateful for that. In the past year I’ve been fortunate to find so many people again, and am always amazed how similar the tracks of our lives are, despite the distance. It’s been a true gift to reconnect.

I can’t help but think that some of these connections are coming back into my life at just the right time: that we’ll be working on projects together, supporting one another in our dreams and ambitions, or even just providing one another with a good laugh and a thoughtful ear. It’s so much easier to build an extraordinary life when we connect with and surround ourselves with extraordinary people.

Yogoer.com: A Rested Mind

2010-01-12T15:50:00.002-05:00

My latest post on Yogoer.com is up! Below is a little intro. Click here for the full post.

“For those just coming back from vacation, think carefully about what you are going to put your fresh, valuable mind to in your first few days. Value this resource highly. It may be your only chance to see the mountain you are on, to decide if you’re taking the right path up, or even if it’s the right mountain to be climbing at all.” ~ David Rock in Psychology Today

For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on clearing my mind more often during the day. The natural tendency for a busy mind is to work ever-harder to crack a problem or find an innovative solution. The yogic belief is that a clear, unburdened, relaxed mind is actually a more creative, efficient problem solver. And now that belief has a boost from hardcore science.

Examiner.com: Interview with Sasha Abramsky, author of Inside Obama's Brain

2010-01-11T18:11:00.003-05:00

Over the Christmas holiday I read the book Inside Obama’s Brain by Sasha Abramsky, journalist and Senior Fellow at Demos. The book is a beautifully crafted work that examines the charismatic draw of President Obama by exploring the experiences and insights from dozens of people who have worked alongside the President throughout his career. Abramsky masterfully articulates what qualities draw us to Obama, and how Obama honed those qualities in preparation for his ascent to the Presidency. The book intertwines President Obama’s personal history with his professional accomplishments in a way that makes the book impossible to put down until readers have absorbed every last word of Abramsky’s prose. I never wanted this book to end.

I had the great fortune to speak with Sasha Abramsky last week. To read the interview, click here.

Step 11: It's the Little Things

2010-01-11T18:07:00.002-05:00

“Let's not forget that the little emotions are the great captains of our lives and we obey them without realizing it.” ~ Vincent Van Gogh

It’s easy to pay attention to the big emotions of our lives: Falling in love, grief from losing a loved one, pride for a hard-won accomplishment, or disappointment caused by betrayal. There’s no way to avoid those huge swells, positive or negative, because they take over our lives. Reading this Van Gogh quote made me think about all those tiny emotions that we feel at every moment, and that often pass by unconsciously: frustration at getting on a crowded subway car, wincing at the sting of the cold weather, gratitude when someone holds the door open for us, and joy from an encouraging message from a friend. These smaller emotions, while less significant in size, can add up to a great deal of our happiness quotient.

How do we feel about lives in the empty moments, when nothing particularly emotional is happening, when our lives are just humming along without any type of massive shift? In those quiet moments, we get a sense of our base emotions and attitude. The trick is to recognize and appreciate that empty moment. With all of the opportunities to fill up empty space, it’s easy to avoid ever having an empty moment. The empty moments are important because they allow us to take stock of the little emotions; they let us get a sense of where we are on the happiness curve.

On the way to work this morning, I was thinking about how we handle the constant tweaks of the little emotions that every day circumstances cause. Because I just interviewed Sasha Abramsky, author of Inside Obama’s Brain, I’ve been considering Obama as a role model for how to conduct our daily lives. Whenever Obama is thrown a curve ball, and isn’t quite sure how to react, he smiles. We can observe this behavior in his debates, during his press conferences, and during one-on-one media interviews.

The smile lets him pause, gather his thoughts, and remain outwardly composed in the process.

This tactic gives him the opportunity to work through his small emotions, rather than having to obey them. And he looks good all the way through the process: he looks as if nothing ever phases him and provides a thoughtful, articulate response. A wonderful example to manage the little emotions we all experience.

Step 10: A Place to Go

2010-01-10T12:43:00.004-05:00

"I learn by going where I have to go." ~ Theodore Roethke in the Poet's Corner at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine

I keep a wipe board in my apartment that tracks my to-do's for my projects. This confined space helps me to sort out where and how I'm spending my time and energy. It's a helpful, simple tool that keeps me on track by giving me a very concrete visual of my priorities. It tells me where I have to go to create the kind of life I want.

In 2010, this chart has been heavily influenced by Innovation Station, my after-school project with Citizen Schools. With Citizen Schools, citizen teachers build the curriculum backwards, starting with the construction of the final project, called a "WOW", and working the lessons backwards with the final project always in mind. Rather than using the forward-working paradigm of "what comes next?", I have to start with "what needs to happen right before the WOW?" I decided to try this approach with my wipe board, too. On the far right side I wrote down the goal, and then only included the projects in my life right now that work toward that goal.

This exercise helped in a number of ways:
1.) I have some projects in my life that aren't serving that goal, and they didn't make it to the wipe board. These projects have value; they just aren't the right projects for me given my goals and in comparison to the other projects I have. I also noticed some very clear holes - things I needed to be doing, places I needed to be going, that I didn't realize before this process.

2.) I breathed a great big sigh of happiness to see how the projects all fit together and support one another. A cohesive plan breeds confidence and conviction.

3.) Having the plan laid out gave me a lot of energy. I spent a lot of time carefully thinking through options and allowing them to play themselves out in my mind while I made some key decisions. With this plan laid out, I freed up the energy that I was using in the decision-making process.

4.) The plan provides me with more down time to be with people. These projects lay out the main interests of my life, and by knowing those interests, I can strengthen relationships I already have and start new ones based on commonalities. I am always inspired by feats that people can accomplish through collaboration. Having a very clear sense of what we want to accomplish helps us to meet others who have those same goals - our kindred spirits.

5.) The wipe board gives me a place to go. There will always be new opportunities and new projects that will appear. It can be hard to say no. With a clear sense of what I want, I can go to the board and see where the new opportunity fits. If it doesn't fit, then the decision process is made that much easier. It's an effective sorting method.

Clarity of mind gives us a wonderful sense of freedom, a radiance that we can feel and that others can see. By working toward clarity, decisions become easier. The tough work of getting to clarity is well-worth the reward of simplicity.

Step 9: Perseverance

2010-01-09T09:22:00.006-05:00

"With ordinary talent and extraordinary perseverance, all things are attainable." ~ Thomas Foxwell Buxton

I've known some people in my life who are so brilliant, so capable, and yet they never seem to reach heights that are well within their grasp. They toil away in jobs that aren't quite right. They miss the opportunity for love, for community impact, for profound influence because they weren't willing to put in just a bit more effort. My father was one of these people. He had a truly brilliant mind and could have been the leading clinical psychologist of his day. Unfortunately, he thought the world should reward him specifically because he was brilliant. He didn't realize the world doesn't work that way.

And then I've known people of fairly modest talent who were just relentless in their efforts, and achieved not only what was within their natural reach, but also successes that no one else thought possible. It's the people in this latter group who have been my greatest teachers. They showed me that the world rewards those who work as hard as they can and give the best they've got everyday. The world rewards commitment, particularly commitment that perseveres in the face of great adversity.

I thought about this ideal this morning when I found out that my after-school education program with Citizen Schools starts the week of February 8th, not the week of February 25th as I had originally planned. This accelerates the time line I now have to work under. I'm going to have to shuffle around some other commitments so that my first few lessons plans are created and edited in time for the class. I've been collecting resources for several months and now is the time to just sit down and plow through the work.

And then I paused as I looked at all of these resources, most from designers of incredible talent. I appreciate design and use the tools of a designer in my profession as a product developer, though I am not a traditionally trained designer. I didn't go to art school and I'm not an engineer. My product development skills have been self-taught. I'm a volunteer teacher, though I don't have a degree from an education school and I don't have a teacher certification. My teaching skills have also been self-taught. To top it off, I'll be teaching in a school in East Harlem with more than its fair share of challenges: it is the lowest performing school in the Citizen Schools portfolio. 87% of the students receive free or reduced-price lunch (this is an indicator that 87% fall at or below the poverty line), 86% read below grade level, and 78% have math skills below grade level.

I leaned back in my chair, and asked myself, "What exactly are you doing, Christa?" But I didn't ask this question with an air of despair or fear. I asked myself the question to mean, "What is the heart of the matter here? What gifts do you have to give these children who need you so much?" With that motivation in mind, any trace of trepidation disappeared.

I have modest design talents with extraordinary passion, empathy, and determination to back them up. I grew up below the poverty line, and still many adults believed in my talents and abilities. Now its my turn to manifest that same belief in these children. I'm paying forward the great and good gifts that so many people gave me when I was in school.

My idea to use design as the backbone to engage students in the learning process is not revolutionary; many people have thought of this idea, and many of them are far better designers than I am. No matter. There are so many children who need help, so many children who need an adult to show up for them and take a vested interest in their lives and education, that it is impossible for me to not have a profound impact in this field. My own individual commitment and perseverance is the only limitation on the amount of good I can do with this program, and I've got both of those in spades.

Step 8: Yogoer.com

2010-01-08T10:57:00.004-05:00

With my yoga teacher training starting on February 27th, I've been thinking about how to document that journey. I've been practicing yoga for 10 years and in 2004 I took a 30-hour weekend course that gave me a very basic certification. I used that certification to teach free yoga classes to my stressed out classmates at Darden Business School. I've been wanting to build on that training for several years in the hopes of opening a studio, running a yoga retreat, or using yoga for medicinal purposes and athletic training.

When I moved back to New York in 2007, I started looking around for a studio program that was Yoga Alliance Certified. I found them to be very expensive - far beyond my means - so I had to put that dream on hold for a bit. About a year ago, I stumbled upon Sonic Yoga in Hell's Kitchen, which runs an affordable program expressly because they feel that many of the current programs are too expensive for most people. They are also incredibly flexible with the timing of the class and off a night and weekend program for people who work full-time. After attending classes and meeting with one of the instructors, I knew the program was the right fit for me.

Now that I am registered for the training, I wanted to share my experience of becoming a Yoga Alliance certified teacher and was struggling a bit with where to do that. On this blog, I really want to focus on my 365 steps toward an extraordinary life. Some of those will absolutely be linked to the yoga teacher training, though I didn't feel that this was the best venue to record the full process of getting certified. So I went hunting for a better place.

It didn't take long before I found Yogoer.com, a site run by Erica Heinz, a freelance graphic artist, wellness blogger, and Huffington Post columnist. I will be featuring Erica and Yogoer.com in an upcoming Examiner.com piece. With all of its incredible information about yoga in New York City, Yogoer.com seemed like an ideal place for me to record my training process and connect with other yogis.

My first piece is up on Yogoer.com today and talks about some of the preparation work I'm doing for the training. You will be able to view a full set of my posts here. I will post on this blog each time I have a new post on Yogoer.com. I hope you'll join me over there as I start this new journey and check out everything that the site and its iPhone app have to offer! Ommmmm.....

Step 7: Nothing Left to Lose

2010-01-07T21:40:00.004-05:00

A friend of mine is making his final pitch tomorrow. In a job that he's grown tired of, and quite frankly is far too talented for, he's going to the powers-that-be (and I use the word powers very lightly) to see if he can get funding for a project that interests him. The chance to work on this project is the only reason he would stay at the job. Otherwise, he's leaving to get his own business going. His bravery inspires me.

My friend has been looking to make this move for a while, though like so many he wanted to do the reasonable, responsible thing in a difficult economy. At a time when so many are out of work, he was nervous about voluntarily leaving his job. As much as some economists will tout that the recession is over, there are many dissenting voices who say it will be a long, slow climb out of this hole. So what changed for my friend? How did he make a change within his own mind when little around him has changed? Where did his boldness come from?

"Well, Christa, I have nothing left to lose now," he told me today. "This is the only project on the table that interests me and if I can't work on it, then I've got to make myself useful somewhere else. I just can't stay where I am anymore."

On the phone today, I was bursting with pride for my friend. He flipped that switch, recognized and embraced his own talents, and recognized how they could be used in his current situation. More importantly, he realized that if his gifts couldn't be utilized where he is then he has to make use of them somewhere else. Leaving them unused is no longer an option in his own heart.

To be sure, in the last few weeks leading up to this decision he has at times felt completely terrified. I'd argue that this means he's really on to something here. It's amazing what we can accomplish when we realize that the direction of our lives really is up to us.

Step 6: The Roots of Ideas

2010-01-06T14:06:00.003-05:00

I double majored in Economics and American History and got a minor in Psychology at Penn because I was interested in the energy of money, its influence on major world events, and its effect on the human psyche. Through the lens of History and Psychology, I found that Economics was much more a moral discipline than a disinterested field. Early on, we learned the name John Maynard Keynes and the underlying theories of Keynesian economics: a system of checks and balances, a fervent acceptance of the role of uncertainty, and a logical, predictable linking of specific actions to specific consequences. Because of my interest in the human impact of money, I was made to be his student.

He was an economist who loathed an over-reliance on data. Data can say anything we want it to say; it can be twisted and turned and reinterpreted to suit any hypothesis. To really understand a situation, we’ve got to pick our heads up, knowledgeable of the current data, though able to correlate it to easily expressed principles and moral values.

This morning I started reading Keynes: The Return of the Master by Robert Skidelsky. From the very first words, I re-discovered how important it is to read original theories and primary source material, not just interpretation of that material. As I got out of the subway, I thought about the other books I’m currently reading. I’ve started to gravitate toward these primary sources: books of Yogic scripture to prepare for my yoga teacher training class, works by John Dewey to understand the underpinning of our education system, autobiographical accounts of world events, and original documentation that established our government.

While it’s one thing to observe, practice, and read the works of experts and influencers, it’s only in reading the original grounding work of a philosophy, of a movement, that we can develop our own views and deep observations. If all we do is interpret and translate someone else’s interpretations of primary material, eventually we enter into a game of telephone, and the original beliefs are likely distorted beyond recognition.

To truly understand an idea, we have to go to the source, to the seed that gave that idea to the word. As Keynes so brilliantly stated and Skidelsky rightly echos, “ideas matter profoundly…indeed the world is ruled by little else.” The roots of those ideas matter profoundly, too. Get to the root.

Step 5: Your Sentence

2010-01-05T19:50:00.006-05:00

My friend, Richard, just sent me this clip with Dan Pink's advice on how to transform our lives in 2010 with two simple questions: "What's your sentence?" and "Were you better today than you were yesterday?" The people I admire most can sum up their contributions to humanity in one succinct sentence stating a very specific contribution. This is also true of my favorite books, blogs, artists, writers, activists, and cause-based organizations. They all have a singular focus and purpose. Is a succinct reason for being the secret ingredient to every extraordinary life?

It's amazing that this paradigm of a single sentence describing an extraordinary life holds true no matter what great personality I consider. Thomas Jefferson penned his own epitaph with a single sentence. No copywriter, no editor. "Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, of The Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia." This is the summation of his life in his terms. These are the things that mattered most to him. Nelson Mandela's book, Long Walk to Freedom, remains one of the greatest influence on my life. I could only read a few pages of his story at a time because each word is packed with such emotion and power. His unwavering confidence in and passion for his beliefs is overwhelming. Very simply, his sentence is "I am the Father of a free South Africa."

So maybe that's it. Maybe we can all get to extraordinary if we can find our sentence and manage our lives in support of it. By the end of 2010, I want to write my one sentence. I've written some blog posts about how I want to be remembered when my time has come and gone, what lasting impact I'd like to have on the world. After 364 days of living a life trying to make each day better than the day before, I think I can get it down to one brief sentence. This is the initial sentence that comes to mind, in rough long form:

"Christa was someone who created a global education system that used creativity as the backbone for all learning, gave 1 million children a second chance at a better life, and offered an entire generation the opportunity to be job creators instead of job seekers."

It needs some polish, but it's a start.

The image above is not my own. It can be found here.

Guest Post on World's Strongest Librarian

2010-01-05T07:17:00.005-05:00

I'm thrilled that today I have a guest post on World's Strongest Librarian. I compared WSL's author, Josh, to four Muppets. Here is a peek at the intro. Click here to read the full post.

"Some of my fondest childhood memories involve sitting around the TV with my family watching the Muppet Show. That show spurred my interest in theatre, a career I pursued for five and half years right after I graduated from college.

I write about the characters of the Muppet Show, Sesame Street, and all of their spin-offs with great regularity on my blog and have read numerous books, blogs, and websites about these fabulously funny and furry creatures and their creators."

Step 4: The Gift of a Fallen Branch

2010-01-04T21:10:00.005-05:00

"Use the talents you possess - for the woods would be a very silent place if no birds sang except for the best." ~ Henry Van Dyke

In that tangled tree diagram of life options, I had assumed that my life would unfold a certain way this week. Instead, the option I considered least likely came to be. The trouble, or perhaps the beauty, is that this unlikely branch is entirely under-developed. Beginning today, I get to imagine a future I didn't think I'd have just yet.

Brian and I talked tonight about the idea of prana, the intelligent undercurrent of energy that makes itself at home beneath of the narrative of our lives. In times of authenticity, that current supports our actions. When we're acting against our nature, living our lives to a lesser extent than what's possible, our prana breaks through, making room in the world for our true selves to emerge. Try as we might to suppress it, our prana will not be kept down for long. Eventually, we will have no choice but to live our lives to the fullest. We have to show up in the world and be everything we are capable of being.

I was willing to take the other branch, to remain in a holding pattern that would delay where I really want my life to go. Today the universe took that option away. No more delays allowed. Sometimes not getting what we wish for is the best gift we can receive.

The photo above is not my own. It can be found here.

Owning Pink Feature

2010-01-04T21:02:00.004-05:00

I am thrilled and humbled that Lissa and Joy over at Owning Pink made one of my recent posts the Mojo Monday exercise. The post was inspired by World's Strongest Librarian. Much thanks to Josh for inspiring my writing. Here is a short intro and a link to the post:

"This Mojo Monday, let’s put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard, heart to mind, and consider what memories made us who we are today, right now, in this moment. Profound or silly, happy or sad, painful or joyful, what are the “when” moments that created and crafted beautiful, gorgeous you and what truths did they reveal?"

Snapshots of When

Step 3: Things I Don't Know

2010-01-03T01:20:00.008-05:00

Last night I was settling back in to my New York apartment while the wind whistled through my windows. It was so loud at one point that I couldn't sleep so I flipped on the TV to CNN. Chistiane Amanpour was reporting about Muslim radical extremists in the U.K. Though I watch the news regularly and read several newspapers, there are some topics that still confuse me. The complex network of Muslim radical extremist groups is one of them. I know all the vocabulary though I don't know how it all hangs together. And this bothers me.

I started thinking about all of the things that I know just a little about, and how much it bothers me to have holes in my knowledge. I don't like the phrase "I know enough just to be dangerous." I'd much prefer to know enough so as not be dangerous but be able to speak intelligently on a topic.

In this new year, there are a few topics that I'd really like to dig into and understand in depth. Here are a few of them:

1.) WHAT - I know little to nothing about Islam and its many factions. I'd like to take a small step toward piecing together the popular vocabulary that surrounds this religion. It's influence is growing in leaps and bounds, dominating our news waves. I should understand it more clearly if I'm to have a greater understanding of our own foreign policy.

HOW - My friend, Amy, is very well-versed in the topic so I'm going to ask her to give me a little crash course during one of our catch-ups. I'll also ask her for some primer books, blogs, and news services that would be a good reference for me.

2.) WHAT - I've been practicing yoga for a decade though have not read some of the sacred texts that serve as its base. I also don't know the Sanskrit names for all of the asanas (poses).

HOW - At the end of February I am going to begin a very intense yoga teacher training program to master this material. Every other weekend, I'll be practicing 9 hours on Saturday and 9 hours on Sunday, for 14 weeks. In addition, the program also requires meeting 3 times per week after work, independent reading and writing assignments, and class attendance at the studio once per week. It is a rigorous program that will require a great deal of focus, though my passion for the art and science of yoga will make the rigor a welcome circumstance.

3.) WHAT - The news stories I love most are those that showcase the Power of One. I'd love to read more of these stories in 2010 to understand the psychology of this personality type, and there are a few people that particularly intrigue me. There are several sources that catalog the journeys of these kind of people. Two I particularly like are NBC's Making a Difference segment and Dafna Michaelson's 50 in 52 Journey.

HOW - I've ordered a few books that share the stories of Geoffrey Canada, the Founder of Harlem Children's Zone, and William Kamkwamba, the 14 year old in Malawi who built a windmill for his family armed only with a local library book. These are incredible stories of people who saw a need in their communities and set to work to meet that need with little or no resources except their own ingenuity and passion. Could anything be more inspiring?

Step 2: Working with Friends

2010-01-02T00:08:00.000-05:00

Today I had lunch with Trevin and Blair, two of my friends whom I worked with a number of years ago. During our lunch, I was reminded of how good it feels to work with friends, to be such an integral part of their lives. I've heard some people say that it's best to keep our personal and professional lives separate. I disagree. I'd always prefer to work with friends - it makes work feel like play.

Last year I wrote a blog post that referenced an article in Fast Company about David Kelley, the Founder of IDEO. He left a mediocre management job at an engineering firm to get his MBA at Stanford. Though he had job offers after graduation, he declined them to start his own company with his friends. That company became IDEO. In the article he describes that his one strong inclination for employment was to work with friends. Had he not taken the leap and followed his instinct, he probably would be toiling away in a grey cubicle doing less-than-inspiring work. Instead, he founded a company that is arguably the finest product design firm in the world. And he has fun everyday. Bet well-played, David.

What if we could all follow our gut with David Kelley's creative confidence? What if we could turn down opportunities, as great as they seem, because they just don't jive with how we'd like to live our lives? Perhaps there's an IDEO for each of us, or at the very least a bit more happiness to be had in our careers. In 2010, I'd like to get back to a career of working with friends.

The photo above is not my own. It appears courtesy of IDEO.

Step 1: If

2010-01-01T22:30:00.003-05:00

"If": proof that glorious things can come in very small packages. Think of all the wonder wrapped up in this tiny, two-letter word. Imagination takes flight, dreams come to be, and chances of a lifetime are taken by its mere utterance. On his blog, Chris Brogan asked his readers to consider the three words of 2010 that they would use to shape their 2010 plans. “If” is my selection because of the great possibility it invokes.

"If" describes the abilities that make us successful in the truest sense of the word, in terms of the deepest and dearest meaning it has. What abilities allow us to live a life of great virtue? What abilities will make every possibility an option for us? "If" is the gateway to the answers.

"If-" is the title of one of my favorite poems by Rudyard Kipling, and one of my favorite lines of the poem asks us to “start again at your beginnings”. Today begins a new decade, and so it’s only natural for us to look back and remember where we began the last one. A few days after January 1, 2000, I took off for my first theatre tour. Previously, I had been working in a tiny theatre box office, and I needed to break out of it. The contract for the tour was only for four months and the pay was less than I made at the box office. I didn’t care; I needed the adventure.

And so began a decade that would lead me to travel around the globe, fulfill my dream of managing Broadway shows, and then send me back to school to take on the complex world of hard-nosed business. I became a published writer, and through that writing found my truest voice. I found yoga as a balm for my old soul, fell in love countless times, and learned to trust my own instincts above all others. In the decade that began with the year 2000, I discovered how I could make a meaningful contribution to humanity that would live on long after I am gone.

At the end of the decade, I was getting a bit too comfortable. I had gotten set in my new ways and lost sight of the adventure that called to me so clearly at the start of 2000. I too often trusted the opinions and instincts of others. And so, the world decided that a cleansing was necessary, a cleansing that would make it impossible for me to rest on my laurels by taking away the laurels altogether. In Kipling’s audacious terms, I was forced to start again at my beginnings.
Today, in this hour, at this moment, I am choosing to begin again using a map of “If, then” statements. It is a long and winding road, filled with imagination and dreams, a tortuous tangle of stunning possibility and hope. Cheers to the beginning of a very good year, and a very good decade!

My Year of Hopefulness - Castles in the Air

2009-12-31T09:00:00.000-05:00

"Do not worry if you have built your castles in the air. They are where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." ~ Henry David Thoreau

This is my 365th day of actively seeking out and writing about hope. This was my one New Year's Resolution for 2009: to feel more hopeful and record what I found here on this blog to help others feel more hopeful, too.

On this day last year, I had no idea that my life would look as it does today, in any respect. I can say with great confidence that this has been a year filled with more change than any other year I have had. Part of me wonders if that is actually my doing: did I precipitate all of this change or did the change just happen to me? I suspect it’s a mix of the two. I can also say with great confidence that today I feel exponentially more hopeful than I did one year ago. And I hope that these 365 blog posts have made others a little more hopeful, too. If so, then I achieved what I set out to do in my writing in 2009.

There are so many reflections I have on this year of writing about hope, so many things I’ve learned about myself, about others, about my community, and about the world as a whole. However, one revelation stands far above the others: when I actively, passionately search for something, I will inevitably find it because I will not give up until my task is done. And the truly remarkable thing is that yes, if I span the globe I can find millions of pieces of hope “out there”, though the pieces of hope that mean the most to me are with me all the time. I carry them inside of me.

Now what will I do next? I’ve got overflowing buckets of hope; how can they be put to the best use? My pal, Laura, asked me this question about two months ago while we were at dinner. Without missing a beat, I told her that for the next year I’d do one thing every day that used all that hope to build an extraordinary life. The answer just sprang from my mouth, no thought required. It was a wish my heart made.

So here we go: beginning tomorrow, I will write a post every day in 2010 that will describe the one thing I did that day that put me one tiny step (or one great leap) closer to living an extraordinary life. The wheels of change are well greased from the events of 2009, so I expect more big changes in 2010. My friend, Kelly, has had a mantra all year of “begin again in 2010.” She’s a wise woman, someone who is both a friend and a mentor, and I’m taking her advice.

The final thought I have as I close out this year relates to nature, a topic from which I’ve drawn a lot of hopeful examples. It’s a butterfly analogy, though not the stereotypical one of beautiful re-birth. When a tiny catepillar wraps itself up in a cocoon, it purposely constructs the cocoon to be very tight so that the butterfly has to struggle to emerge. It has to wiggle and turn and twist, completing exhausting itself inside the too-tight casing. There are oils on the inside of the cocoon and when the butterfly struggles the oils are distributed over its wings. It will not be able to free itself until the oils are distributed evenly over its wings. Those oils build a layer over the butterfly’s wings that keep the wings from breaking apart when it flies. Without the oil coating on its wings, the butterfly would break apart the moment it tried to fly.

I think about my own struggles, and the struggles of the world, through the lens of the butterfly. The twisting and turning is a painful process. It wears me out, and yet that struggle is so necessary to my development and success. I would never be able to fly without the distribution of its lessons throughout my life. I have struggled long enough and my struggles have done an excellent job of building up the foundation of my life. So let the flight begin toward my castles in the air.

My Year of Hopefulness - Journeys We Don't Plan

2009-12-30T22:22:00.001-05:00

I recently saw the movie, Up!, an animated feature about Mr. Fredrickson, a grumpy old man remarkably similar in appearance and demeanor to Mr. Cunningham from Happy Days. All their lives, he and his wife dreamed of an adventure to South America, and she passed away before they had the chance to go. Wanting to fulfill the dream to honor her, he uses the asset of being a balloon salesman to sail south of the border, house in tow. That’s the adventure he planned.

He didn’t count on one of his neighbors being on the deck of his house when it took off. He didn’t think that he’d ever meet a rare bird named Kevin who would need his help so desperately or his greatest idol who would turn out to lack integrity. This was the part of the adventure he never imagined. Along the way, he lets goes of old heartaches and material possessions, makes new friends, and discovers how much courage his old soul can muster. These are the parts of the adventure that make his trip unforgettable.

My Christmas trip was a bit like Mr. Fredrickson’s. I had planned to stay home to study and write for the week between Christmas and the New Year; I hadn’t planned on going to Alabama at all. The opportunity presented itself, and I took it. On the banks of the Tennessee River in a small town named Tuscumbia, I learned how the term “Southern hospitality” came to be.

My brother-in-law’s family welcomed me with open arms, literally. His mom, Trish, had an extra chair at the table, an extra room where I could sleep and study, and extra gifts under the tree just for me. She taught me to make chicken and dressing, proved that any food can be whipped into a delicious casserole, and exhibited all of the love and graciousness that you’d expect from a woman whose greatest joy is her family. I learned about their complex family history, and was included in their family photos. In truth, an outsider looking in might never know that I was a guest who’d never spent a Christmas with that family. They took every opportunity to make me one of them.

Having grown up in small town, I appreciate the warm, cozy feeling of having memories in every nook and cranny. Kyle, my brother-in-law, showed me where he went to high school, where all his childhood friends lived and hung out as teenagers, and where his dad’s artwork (and therefore his spirit) still exists even though he’s no longer with us. I saw their old family photos and then understood the resemblance my niece, Lorelei, has to that side of the family. So much of their history and culture exists in their food and the memories of togetherness that their meals invoke, and I got to be a part of it. It was easy to see why Tuscumbia is a special kind of place.

On the long drive back to Florida, I thought of Kyle’s family a lot: how lucky I feel to have met them all and how much I appreciated being able to spend a holiday with them. I’ve always found that the experiences I love most in my life are the ones I don’t plan for – the job that came my way quite by accident, the friend I never planned to meet, the spur-of-the-moment trip that I never imagined I’d take. My trip to Alabama showed me how much joy we can find in the unexpected and unplanned, and I’d like to figure out how to make that kind of joy and the circumstances that create it a little more common in my life in 2010.

My Year of Hopefulness - The Center

2009-12-29T09:00:00.001-05:00

"The artists' role is to do what's honest for them. So if you're in New York and everyone is looking at the floor, you can look up. It's not your role to follow the others. It's your role to go to your center and then reflect that, not just to be a mirror to what's happening." ~ James Hubbell

Here is a tricky balance to keep: how can we be mindful of what's happening around us and also learn to follow our own hearts? It's easy to get swept up in the moment, in the emotions and circumstances of others. In its best form, we know this as empathy. In its worst form, we know this as distraction. How can we see the whole picture, and also our own role in it? How can we see both the forest and the trees? The role of the artist, in any medium, demands this balance, and that balance is our Center.

Our Center is an elusive thing. We clearly know when we have moved away from our Center: it's apparent in our lack of energy, enthusiasm, and joy. Finding and holding the Center, particularly in our daily adventures in chaos, is a tough thing because it sometimes requires that we disappoint others to be true to ourselves. It requires that we believe in ourselves and in our own abilities more than we believe in anything else. It asks us to take our future into our own hands.

There are three ways to know if we've found our Center:
1.) It makes time pass by so quickly and effortlessly that we barely notice how long we've been there.

2.) The activities we perform at our Center give us energy and we never grow tired of them.

3.) Our Center is the summation of the very best gifts we have to offer to the world.

For me, my Center is found in writing and yoga. I've been writing daily for three and a half years, and intermittently as far back into my childhood as I can remember. I've had a steady yoga practice for 10 years. Time has flown! These activities give me boundless energy and let me show my most joyful face to the world.

And so, I am taking James Hubbell's: in 2010, I will go to my Center and reflect what is there. By the time 2010 is singing its swan song, I'll find a way to make writing and yoga the Center of my life. I'll find a way to earn my living through them. The 'fierce urgency of now' is calling me far too clearly to spend my life any other way.

My Year of Hopefulness - Full-time Social Activist

2009-12-28T12:00:00.000-05:00

Social activism has often been associated with people who work for nonprofits or for social enterprises, people who spend every waking moment on the front lines of generating social change. In actuality, social activism is everyone's profession. With our every purchase, we make a statement about about how we wish to live in the world and the way we want our world to be. All of our choices reveal a piece of our character, reflect our values, and tell the world about our priorities. We don't choose whether or not we are a social activist, we choose the social ideas that our mandatory activism represents.

On Christmas Day, I received one of my favorites gifts via email, and it clearly reflects my work as a social activist. A few months ago, I lent money through Kiva.org to a woman in Ghana who wanted to open a hair salon. On December 25th, Kiva.org notified me that the loan had been fully-repaid months ahead of schedule. I was shocked and thrilled by the news! Now I have the choice to withdraw the funds or lend them to another entrepreneur. Given my positive experience with Kiva, of course I will loan the funds again. I believe in the power of entrepreneurship to transform lives, and I want to support the desire for self-sufficiency among people around the world, a desire I share and deeply understand.

To further reflect these beliefs, I have also loaned money to Grameen America, a brand of Mohammad Yunus's incredible organization. It cost me $10 and about 30 seconds of my time, and gave me the opportunity to make a difference in the life of another New Yorker. There are plenty of opportunities for social activism around the world, but we should not lose sight of the opportunities for social activism that lie just outside our own doors.

Philanthropy is not the only way to choose the how of our activism. We can give time, raise awareness about organization we admire, purchase goods and services from respectable companies, and use our own personal talents in direct ways. For the past two years, I have spent the bulk of my volunteer time on public education. I've taught high school and middle school students in Lower Manhattan and the South Bronx, and I am a book buddy to a local third grade student. On this blog and through my Examiner.com column, I have highlighted organizations whose work inspires me. I try to support local, organic farmers through my grocery shopping. The project I am most excited about in 2010 is my participation with Citizen Schools; I will pilot an after-school program in East Harlem to teach 6th graders about entrepreneurship, product development, and innovation. These accomplishments are not at all extraordinary; they're just choices that reflect my core beliefs.

We have more influence over our world and on others than we realize. There are so many options that it can be difficult to know where to begin. We need only to pick a cause that lights a fire within us, get out there into the world, and let our voices be heard. Invariably, we will find other voices that echo our own.

My Year of Hopefulness - Chasing Down Inspiration

2009-12-27T00:49:00.000-05:00

"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." ~ Jack London, author

Before 2009, I used to think of inspiration a something that just hits us. I kept a folder of inspirational pictures, stories, quotes, and clippings that I trolled through when I needed some uplifting thoughts and none seemed to find me. I believed in writer's block and the mystical muse of creativity who decided if, when, and how to show up in our lives. No more. After a year of actively seeking out hope and writing about it every day, I believe in the Jack London method, my inspiration-chasing club always at the ready.

In New York City, we're lucky that chasing down inspiration means just putting on a pair of shoes and walking outside our doors. Inspiration is everywhere. We have a host of amazing museums that I visit frequently (thanks to my employer's fantastic perk that gets us into almost every museum in New York for free!) Central Park and Riverside Park are two blocks away from my apartment. Broadway, off-Broadway, and off-off Broadway are burgeoning with some of the most inventive work to come along in decades. Bookstores are on nearly every corner, and there is no shortage of fascinating lectures, readings, and continuing ed classes in every subject, at every level. And if all else fails, just take a walk around the block, any block. You're sure to find some characters.

In other cities, some much smaller than New York, inspiration abound as well. In Orlando, Florida, I found the largest collection of Tiffany glass in the world. In Charlottesville, Virginia, I had some of the best meals of my life. In my own hometown of Highland, New York, the view from the Catskill Mountains still takes my breathe away. In Providence, Rhode Island, I saw one of the finest productions of Moon for the Misbegotten that I've ever seen.

Inspiration is everywhere - all we need to do is get out into the world and look. We can travel thousands of miles from home, or we can hang around in our own backyard. What matters is the pursuit: do we want to be inspired and are we willing to "sift the sands of the desert to see what we can find," as Clarissa Pinkola Estes says so eloquently in Women Who Run with the Wolves? If the answer is yes, then there are adventures upon adventures just waiting for us to hope on board. And if you can get your hands on a big club, that may help, too.

The image above is not my own. It can be found here.

My Year of Hopefulness - Think of Today

2009-12-26T00:21:00.001-05:00

"I never think of the future. It comes soon enough." ~ Albert Einstein

December 26th, forever relegated to its place as 'the day after Christmas'. A lot of people sleep in; many are on vacation; it begins the long, slow slide into the new year. A day of "lull", and well-deserved after the shopping, eating, visiting frenzy induced by December 25th.

Given that Albert Einstein was one of the greatest visionaries to ever live, I'm not sure that his quote above is entirely truthful. He actually thought about the future quite a bit, particularly when it came to his work on General Relativity and the Manhattan Project. What I think he was doing was trying to remind us that if we focus too much on the future we lose sight of the opportunities right in front of us today.

It would be easy and quite understandable to let this week float on by as just the week between Christmas and New Year's. It may even cause some of us to build up some nervousness about the impending new year, or we could just look at 2009 as a lame duck year, almost finished and therefore not worth any more effort. With some creativity, we can still get our much-needed rest and make this week a happy and productive one.

If I learned anything in 2009 it is that our days, all of them, are terrible things to waste. This week I'll curl up on that comfy couch and reach for that magazine or book that's been waiting for me. I can relax and spend time with my family and friends without feeling rushed. I can get my plans in order when it comes to my impending GRE. I'll take time out for yoga every day as preparation for my yoga teacher training class that starts in February. Whoever said that productivity and relaxation had to be mutually exclusive activities?

My Year of Hopefulness - Thanks for Making My Childhood Dream Come True

2009-12-25T12:00:00.000-05:00

Last year I wrote a few posts about Randy Pausch's Last Lecture. I first watched him give the Last Lecture on YouTube through tear-filled eyes and had to take myself for a long walk 3 months later when I read about his passing. His Last Lecture, devoted entirely to his pursuit of childhood dreams, reminded me of how important our earliest dreams are and how they shape us in adulthood. Randy Pausch reconfirmed my belief that childhood dreams, those daring, bold expressions of our deepest desire before we ever realize we have limitations, are some of the most valuable things we own. We should celebrate them and go for them with gusto, no matter what our age is.

This morning, I watched Lorelei, my two year old niece, open her gifts with wild abandon. She threw her head back and laughed with each one, regardless of how big or small it was. She liked the wrapping paper and boxes as much as the gifts inside. Watching her, I wondered how she would remember our Christmases together when she gets older. I want to do everything possible to make her childhood a blissfully happy period of her life, a time when great dreams were formed inside her beautiful heart.

Children change us, whether those children are our own, in our family, part of our friends' families, or children we work with in our communities. We rediscover a sense of wonder and magic through their eyes, and Christmas magnifies that wonder. They use that same wonder about the world to formulate the ideas that will become their childhood dreams, and if we spend enough time with them we'll find that they can help us formulate new dreams, too, while also reminding us of everything we dreamed of as children.

When I made up my list of childhood dreams, one of the big things I wanted to do was to be a published author. I thought that meant convincing a publisher that I was good enough for print. I never imagined there would be free (on-line) tools that would make this dream possible to achieve regardless of whether or not any publisher believed in me. I did spend a good amount of time worrying that no one would ever read what I wrote. In the past two and a half years writing this blog, I realized this incredible childhood dream with your help and support, and I wish I knew how to thank you all enough.

This Christmas, I am deeply grateful to all of you who have come to this blog to read about my journey. Your comments, emails, text messages, conversations, and face-to-face opinions and advice mean more to me than I could ever adequately explain. You made one of the great dreams of my life come true - you made me a writer. I hope you'll stick with me, and that my writing will continue to be helpful to you. I hope we'll be able to build some more dreams together. Wishing you a very Merry Christmas, this year and always.

The image above is not my own. It can be found here.

My Year of Hopefulness - Balancing Writing and Living in Alabama

2009-12-24T11:15:00.003-05:00

Writing has a funny little dichotomy: it is a mostly solitary activity whose content is greatly influenced by social interaction. That balance between living life and writing about it can be a tricky one to manage, particularly if you write on a part-time basis while working at another full-time job. And yet, that balance is critical to creating a body of writing that is poignant and relevant. Without the social interaction piece, writing becomes flat and dull.

This week I'm in Florida with my sister, brother-in-law, and niece. They are packing up on Christmas afternoon to head to Alabama to see his family and I was planning to stay here at their home to study for the GRE and to write. Yesterday at lunch, we started talking about the possibility of me going to Alabama along with them. As it turns out, that ride will give me a lot of time to study and I'll have my own toasty bedroom to write and learn GRE vocabulary words until my heart's content.

At first, I immediately thought that there is just no way I can go to Alabama. I have a to-do list that needs doin'. And it's so much time in the car, and I'm already traveling to Fort Lauderdale to celebrate the New Year with friends. I mean, I need my rest!

And then I thought, well, what exactly is it that I'm resting up for? Should I stay home alone with my GRE book and my computer, or would it be better to be with people I love and get all of my work done, too? With that thought, what other choice was there? Staying home alone just felt like a horribly empty option, especially at this time of year. All I could think of was an image of the Grinch high up in his home, alone for the holidays. Life was a lot sweeter when he came down off his mountain, and I bet his writing was better, too.

For me, the holidays are about family and friends and dashing here and there and loving it. My writing is about that, too. So my books, my laptop, and my family are hitting the road to Sweet Home Alabama in about 24 hours to see what we can find. If nothing else, it's got to make for some interesting writing and fun holiday memories.

Examiner.com: 5 Tips to Help You Create and Achieve New Year's Resolutions

2009-12-23T23:53:00.007-05:00

So here it is: time to crank out a list of lofty resolutions that you know will never last past January 31st, right? Don't do this to yourself. Please. You'll feel like a failure, and that's just not fair to do that to yourself. Examiner.com knows this, and they've asked all of their writers to share tips on how to make readers wildly successful with their New Year's Resolutions in 2010.

I just posted 5 tips, followed by a personal story of my 2009 resolution, that I hope will be helpful to you as you begin to turn your attention toward a bright new year teeming with possibility. For the article, please click here.

The image above is not my own. It can be found here.

My Year of Hopefulness - Alfie

2009-12-23T10:00:00.001-05:00

“You see, life is a very special kind of thing.” ~ John Denver

I remember the day John Denver died. I was a senior in college, working on a period theatre production as a costume designer. My assistant designer loved John Denver as much as I did and we spent the afternoon perusing thrift shops and commiserating over the loss of this beautiful, troubled man.

John Denver’s Christmas album with the Muppets remains one of my very favorites and I’ve been listening to it constantly this season. It’s like a warm, comfy hug for me. My sister, Weez, and I have been known to sing along with it at very high volumes. There’s one song on there, titled simply “Christmas”, which always makes me tear up a bit. It gets right to the heart of how I think about my days: life is a very special kind of thing…for each and every living breathing thing.” And if we could just tailor our every action, our every word to that sentiment, think what kind of world we could have. We could make a lot of our problems vanish over night if could consistently act according to this belief.

It sounds so simple, and it is, if we could just stay out of our own way. Think how all of our relationships would be transformed, how our environment, our government, our careers, and our communities would be if respect for the value of every life was always the priority. This Christmas, that’s my only wish: to recognize at every moment that life is a very special kind of thing for everyone.

For those who have never heard the song, “Christmas”, here is the poem that John Denver reads at the beginning of it. Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas.

“Did you ever hear the story of the Christmas tree who just didn’t want to change the show? He liked living in the woods and playing with squirrels. He liked icicles and snow. He liked wolves, and eagles, and grizzly bears, and critters, and creatures that crawled. Why bugs were some of his very best friends, spiders and ants and all.

“Now that’s not to say that he ever looked down on a vision of twinkling lights or on mirrored bubbles and peppermint canes and a thousand other delights. And he often had dreams of tiny reindeer and a jolly old man and a sleigh full of toys and presents and wonderful things. The story of Christmas Day.

“Oh Alfie believed in Christmas alright. He was full of Christmas cheer, all of each and day and all throughout the year. To him it was much more than a special time, much more than a special day. It was more than a beautiful story; it was a special kind of way.

“You see some folks have never heard a jingle bell ring and they’ve never heard of Santa Claus. They’ve never heard the story of the Son of God and that made Alfie pause. Did that mean that they’d never know of peace on Earth, or the brotherhood of man, or know how to love, or know how to give? If they can’t, no one can.

“You see life is a very special kind of thing, not just for a chosen, but for each and every living, breathing thing. Not just me and you. So in your Christmas prayers this year, Alfie asked me if I’d ask you [to] say a prayer for the wind, and the water, and the wood, and those who live there, too."

My Year of Hopefulness - We Could Learn a Lot from the Muppets

2009-12-22T08:03:00.002-05:00

On Sunday night I watched A Very Merry Muppet Christmas on TV. Kermit and his pals realize their dream of having their own theatre only to have it threatened by a scheming landlord who wants to shut them down to open a posh new nightclub. Kermit blames himself for losing the fight to save the theatre, confiding to an angel that he wishes he was never born.

As the story unfolds, we see how the lives of his friends would have been different without Kermit. All of them, without question, would have achieved far less without Kermit as their friend. Through this lesson, the angel teaches Kermit that our actions and words have a greater impact on people than we realize - a good lesson for all of us. This lesson prodded me to think of all the ways in which we influence one another.

The encouragement that we offer to others, our belief in one another's abilities to create change, and our own willingness to take a stand on issues of great importance all have deeper reaching impact than we know. With our words we can foster dreams, ours and those of others. Our simple belief that someone else can achieve a lofty goal can provide a much needed boost to someone who lacks personal confidence. If and how we work on issues such as healthcare, education, poverty, and the environment conveys who we are on a very deep and personal level.

Not only do our actions and words have impact, but our lack of action and the sentiments we do not convey have an impact as well. When a friend or colleague turns to us for help and support, do we stand with them or do we turn away? When someone tells us they don't think they can achieve their dream, do we doubt them or do we encourage them? When something in our community, or in the world at-large, has gone haywire, do we accept the current situation as is or do we decide to change it?

Our answers to these questions also reveal our integrity of character. So often, we think life lessons have to come from books of philosophy or in the classrooms of the Ivy League. My experience yesterday watching the Muppets reminded me that inspiration exists all around us, in every conversation, in every TV viewing, and in everyday experiences. We would be wise and the world would be a better place if we could pay greater attention to the callings and reminders that show up at our door all the time. We never know what pearl of wisdom may fall from the lips of a lovable, unassuming frog.

The photo above is not my own. It can be found here.

My Year of Hopefulness - I've Got It Easy

2009-12-21T07:58:00.000-05:00

As I trudged out of my apartment and through the streets to the M60 bus, I was silently cursing the incompatibility of snow banks and rolling luggage. I was hopping over the snow banks still stacked high on the sidewalks of my neighborhood, my rolling luggage clumsily in tow. In 5 blocks, I reached the bus stop, and was glad I would shortly be on my way toLaGuardia airport, albeit with a slightly sore lower back.

As I was lamenting my difficult walk, across the street came a man in a manual wheelchair, young and entirely unfazed by the slushy snow that was much harder for him to navigate than it was for me. I felt like such a whiny, mealy-mouthed jerk. Oh poor me! I have nice luggage with wheels to load up on a bus that will take me to a plane that will take me to warm, sunny Florida where I will spend the holiday with my fabulous, adorable, loving family. Oh the tragedy! However will I make it?

Sometimes terrible things happen to me, and yet when life gets me down I remember my mother’s constant phrase during my childhood, “there is always someone in the world worse off than you.” Her point was that I should stop whining about whatever was bothering me, and she was right. Whining never got anyone very far in this world. In the midst of tough circumstances, perspective is difficult to come by. When I pick my head up a bit from my own difficulties, I find other people who are getting by in life with far few blessings than I have. I’m grateful for the reminders of how truly lucky I am.

My Year of Hopefulness - The Whisper of Snow

2009-12-20T09:21:00.005-05:00

And the snow fell and fell and fell. Some people will hunker down during a snow storm, watch a movie, play a board game, read. And some of us will run out into that snow and feel proud that they didn't let the weather get them down. The people in this latter group are insane, and I'm one of them. I made my way down to 36th Street for dinner with my friend, Monika, last night and then got across town in record time (underground) to my friend, Cindy's, holiday party.

Cindy's parties are always an interesting mix of guests, and I am guaranteed to meet someone (or 2 or 3 someones) new every time. With the company of Anderson Cooper's lead cameraman to a talented animator to one of the head stylists at Bumble & Bumble, there is never a shortage of cool stories, laughter, and delicious cocktails and food. I like to bring someone along every time to further liven up the mix. This time I brought my good pal, Jeff, who is always very outgoing and loves meeting new people as much as I do. After a good number of hours of merriment, I decided to head back out into the snow and get home.

I stepped outside into a world of sparkly white. The snow was breath-taking. Maybe the first snow fall always has a magical quality to it, though last night's snow seemed to be something special. I never saw it glisten that way (and no, it wasn't the candy cane eggnog I had at Cindy's!) It felt like I was in a movie, as if a painter had taken a brush to my life and made everything around me glow.

So how would I get home in this foot of snow? At that time of night the subway is slow and I would have needed 2 transfers to get home anyway (getting across town in New York is rarely easy!) Cabs were getting stuck and spinning out everywhere I looked. Buses were no where to be found. My mom said to me that when she lived in New York, her best mode of transportation was a good pair of shoes. I had two inches heeled boots, and still I thought of her quote and didn't think twice about making the hike on-foot. On a nice day, it would be a good, relaxing walk. In the snow at night, it would require a little more willpower and caution. I was up for it.

I skipped over and through the snowbanks, wound my way along the 79th Street passage through Central Park, and the whole time thought about how beautiful this city is. It was so quiet that I could actually hear the snow falling. The sky had a pink tint to it. The cold wind had died down. I felt a huge wave of gladness.

It was my next to last night in New York for 2009 since I'll be leaving for the holidays in Florida on Monday. This snowstorm was a little gift for me, and I could swear I heard the world whispering, "Yes, you made it. You can file away 2009 as a year of experiences that opened your life to new possibilities, a year when so much fell away so that you could find new ways forward. This year, in a time of great loss, you received the opportunity to re-imagine and re-craft every area of your life. Put this chance to good use."

When the subways are crowded, the streets are jammed, and the noise reaches levels you never thought were possible, New York can frustrate even those of us who love it most. It's times like last night, in that beautiful, mystical snowfall, that remind of how much of a home this city is for me, how much of a home it will always be for me. There is a certain crackle of life that lives here, and I feel blessed to live among it.

The image above is not my own. It was taken by Seth Wenig/AP.

My Year of Hopefulness - I'm Rich

2009-12-19T10:50:00.005-05:00

"Wealth consists not in having great possessions but in having few wants." ~ Esther de Waal, author of Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict

Trish Scott, one of the readers of this blog (and a wonderful blogger herself), recently left a comment that got me thinking and connecting some disparate dots that have been showing up in my life. She asked me to consider how I might feel about leaving empty moments empty for a little while. Especially during this time of year, there is an urge and a propensity to fill up everything to the brim: stockings, large holiday dinner plates, space under the tree, our schedules, and the list goes on. Hurry hurry hurry - Christmas is only x number of days away and you're in your house missing out on all the cheer outside of your door. No wonder we all settle down for a long winter's nap on December 26th. We're exhausted! So what if we could just sit, for a moment, and be glad to feel a little empty? What would that do for us?

This Christmas I didn't make a wish list. For the first time ever I realized I am rich because there isn't anything I need that I don't already have. I'm now exactly where I always wanted to be in my financial life. I don't want for anything; I feel steady and secure financially, despite that the economy is in constant turmoil. With this thought, I felt a tidal wave of gratitude. By Esther de Waal's beautiful definition of wealth, I am rich. I sat for a moment today and took that feeling in. After so many years of working so hard, wanting so much to not worry about money, I realized I had arrived at my destination. Today, I got there. My heart started humming.

And then I took a look at my busy December. I didn't get to see everyone I wanted to see. I didn't get to every outing I was invited to, nor every holiday gathering. I had to take some time for myself, and to do some selfless volunteer work which is so needed at this time of year. So I missed out on some experiences. And yet, I feel so extraordinarily lucky that I have so many incredible people in my life to spend my time with, that I have so many projects that I am happy to spend my time on, that I have places to be where I am needed and wanted. I sat for a moment today and took that feeling in. About this time 7 years ago, I decided to leave my job to settle in one place and start to build a life, a community where I felt like I belonged. Today, I realized I had gotten exactly that after so many years of building. What an amazing feat! My heart began to sing.

So now we wait indoors for the Blizzard of 2009 to arrive any minute. We're supposed to be snowed in with 12 inches of gorgeous, puffy, white snowflakes. Let it be. Snow me in, world. Make me sit down and reflect on the many, many blessings I have in my life. Some of them were hard won, and others showed up like little miracles from thin air. For all of them I am thankful. So here I'll sit for a bit today, sip some tea, listen to Christmas carols, light a candle that smells like cinnamon, and be glad to just be right here, right now, pinching myself to make sure that this rich and magical life I lead is real.

My Year of Hopefulness - Learning to Love Through the Particular

2009-12-18T16:02:00.000-05:00

"The love of humanity is a noble sentiment, but most of the time we live our lives by smaller solidarities. We learn to love humanity not in general, but through its particular expressions." ~ Montesquieu

Michael Sandel used this quote by Montesquieu in one of his recent lectures on Justice. I spend a lot of time being of use to people I don't know, many of whom I'll never meet, many of whom I'll never even know by name. They are the people I help through my volunteer work, who come across this blog though never reach out to me directly, people who are helped by the nonprofits I donate money to.

I learned to care about the hungry because when I was a kid, I knew what it felt like to be hungry. I learned to write some inspiring words because the inspiring words of so many other writers helped me when I really needed to hear words of encouragement. I learned how important alumni donations are because some alumni helped me receive financial aid through their own charitable contributions; their donations helped me get the education that changed the course of my life so now I donate to my schools so that others like me can receive the help they need. I learned to love children because of my niece, Lorelei, and I learned to love people in general because of how much I love my own family and friends. My particular circumstances shaped how I look at the world as a whole.

This holiday, I wanted to do something special for some people close to me, and in honor of those people, I wanted to do something special for others that I don't know personally. I bought individual Christmas cards for my relatives. After a few recent passings in my family, I realized that I had no more need for a box of Christmas cards. I only needed a handful. I teared up a little in the greeting card aisle and then smiled as I picked out individual cards for my aunties, uncles, and cousins. I packed up a great big box for my immediate family filled with all kinds of goodies - some shared and some individual ones. For New Year's, I'll be having a little party in Florida for some of my very favorite friends. I am so happy to be able to do special things for people I really love.

And for the long-term impact: I have always bought Sebastian, our wonderful family dog, a present for Christmas. This is our first holiday without him, so in his honor I donated to the ASPCA. This week I received a magazine in the mail from Heifer International. It told the stories of the many people that they have helped to reach sufficiency. The stories were so moving that for the first time, I donated to their organization, asking that my contribution be put toward their honey bee program. The hives that my money will provide to several needy families have the ability to turn around an entire village in a very short period of time. So many people helped my family when we really needed the help, and this is a way to pay that kindness forward. It feels good to spread the wealth, to return so many of the favors that I've received over my lifetime.

This Christmas I've enjoyed spending a little time reflecting on my own particular circumstances. I've been thinking about the times when I really needed help, and who helped me, and how. And now that I've come through some tough situations, I want to help someone else, equally in need, whose needs I can identify with. I do believe that the Universe helps those who help themselves, and I also believe that every once in a while the Universe could use a little help and by being that help, we find that our own riches grow.

My Year of Hopefulness - Empty Moments and Shark Jumping

2009-12-17T21:27:00.005-05:00

"What do you think is better: the store brand or Breyer's?" And so began a conversation at my local Whole Foods this week. Breyer's ice cream and the Whole Foods brand ice cream were the same price. Recognizing that clearly I am an ice cream connoisseur and that I know my stuff when it comes to the delicious frozen treat, a fellow customer was asking me for my opinion. Even for me, this questions was a toss up. I went for the Breyer's - it had a nicer picture and I could see the black flecks of the vanilla bean in the photo. (For the record, I've never tried the Whole Foods brand, and it well may be much better. I'll try it when I'm next in the store!)

This got me thinking about what names stand for, and how important authenticity is. A lot of people believe we need to strive for authenticity. Brian, my therapist, adamantly disagrees. This week I was telling him about some big steps I have taken in my life recently and how easy they were to do when I just got out of my own way. "That's because the authentic self wants to come through and the only thing stopping her is you," he said to me. I can't argue with that - being authentic is so much easier than trying to be someone else, whether you're a human being or ice cream. Authenticity is easy; being comfortable with personal authenticity is the tough piece because is demands that we stand up, make our case for who we are when every piece of veneer falls away, and then asks us to support that authentic self, lovely or not.

My friend Anthony opened my eyes this week to the concept of "jumping the shark". When a TV series has run too long, and loses its way, those in the biz call that "jumping the shark". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark). Jumping the shark occurs at that point where a hit show gets away from what made it a hit in the first place and takes a turn for the worst. This idea made me consider how tough it is to stay authentic and be successful because we have this idea of what success looks and smells like. It's too easy to let others define us, and before we know it we have to live up to some high ideal we didn't create and don't even want. Instead of just being Breyer's, we now have to be Breyer's and compete with Whole Foods. Instead of following my dreams and speaking my mind, I need to conform to an accepted ideal in every area of my life. Or do I?

This is the tough part - knowing when to walk away. When do we get off the circus train? When do we decide that being ourselves is much more important, and also more gratifying, than trying to be anything or anyone else? The truth is that we can get there so long as we discover what it means to be who we are when everything else falls away. Who are we in the empty moments?

My Year of Hopefulness - The Beauty of Restlessness

2009-12-16T16:48:00.001-05:00

"The purpose of this course is to awaken the restlessness of reason, and if we have done at least that, and restlessness continues to afflict you in the days and years to come, then we together have achieved no small thing." ~ Michael Sandel

Michael Sandel's online class at Harvard, Justice, ended a few weeks ago. Over the course of the semester it became my weekly ritual every Thursday to watch the class via YouTube and then participate on the online forum. I will admit that I miss the class. Professor Sandel has a way of creating restlessness, discomfort, in his students that keeps them pondering his points and those of the philosophers he highlights long after the class ends. He inspires curiosity.

It's this inspiration that keeps teachers going. I consider some of my very best teachers, inside and outside the classroom, and everything that they did to help me get far beyond my circumstances. The best of them didn't have all the answers. They just had more questions. Beautiful, articulate questions that made me restless. Questions that still keep my restless, years and years later. It's this restlessness, and the ideas that cause it, that expand our visions. These ideas imagine what's possible rather than accepting what's probably. They push boundaries; they build dreams.

In addition to inspiring curiosity, my teachers also inspired me to aspire. Not for a title or a certain amount of money or power or influence. They inspired me to aspire to get every last drop of value out of this one life that I have. They poured a lot of grace into my dreams so when I consider what I'll do with my time, it isn't just my own days that I need to live to the fullest. Reaching and then exceeding my potential isn't just about my own sense of achievement. I live part of my dreams for them, too. For all of them. It is a responsibility that I willingly, gladly accept because grace is a terrible thing to waste.

My Year of Hopefulness - You and Me Against a 50% Graduation Rate

2009-12-15T14:27:00.002-05:00

“None of this was beyond my potential. It was just beyond my reach” ~ 13 year old apprentice in a Citizen Schools after-school program

Today I had the great good fortune to hear John Payton, President of the Legal Defense Fund, speak. Long considered one of the finest practicing attorneys, particularly in the field of Civil Rights, Mr. Payton exhibited passion and grace when articulating the complicated issue of racism in America, and its tragic legacy. He helped me to see that we the people, all of us, have to get involved in this issue, regardless of our race, because it is plaguing our society to such a degree that it is tough to see a way through.

The statistics that Mr. Payton discussed are the same we see everyday on the front of every newspaper across the country. And they’re horrifying:

- 86% of black 4th graders read below grade level
- Black men make up 41% of prison inmates while only 4% of all higher education students are black men. 1:3 black men will spend a portion of their life in prison
- 30% of children in poor elementary schools, mostly blacks and Latinos, have a vision problem that could easily be corrected with glasses if they had access to an eye doctor. They have insurance through Medicaid, but no access to care. Because of poor vision, they are labeled as “slow learners”
- 50% of black students in New York City drop-put before graduation. In Columbus, Ohio, 60% drop-out and in Baltimore 65% drop-out

And the list of sickening statistics goes on and on to the point that we almost grow numb to the numbers. They are too big, too awful to fathom. So we move to the suburbs. The problem becomes so unnerving that we can’t look it in the eyes anymore. It seems like there’s nothing we can do.

Except that there is something you and I can do. It would be easy, at least in the short-term, to just go back to our little desks in our little cubicles and work away trying to keep our jobs so that we can feed and clothe and house ourselves and our loved ones. Sometimes it seems that this is all we have the energy for, and yet if we don’t do more than we think we can do, these statistics as bad as they are will only get worse. And we can’t afford worse.

So here’s what gave me hope today in the wake of Mr. Payton’s talk: Citizen Schools. Last night I went to the Google offices here in New York. 250 concerned committed adults gathered to talk to four groups of middle school students who learned how to write code to create video games, cell phone applications, and artificial intelligence. 6th, 7th, and 8th graders, with the help of many dedicated Googlers extended their reach far beyond what they thought was possible.

Lennon, a very poised 7th grade student, took the podium to open up the evening. He talked about how Citizen Schools helped him gain confidence and improved his grades. He learned how to make friends and collaborate with others on a project. For the first time, he realized how his studies apply to life and he’s started to think about a career. Dedicated individuals, just like you and me, shared what they know to help these kids like Lennon get another chance to better their own lives.

Turning around these statistics won’t be easy and it will take a long time. It will require great faith in ourselves, our talents, and our ability to make a difference. We can do this, together. 10 kids at a time, one program at a time. A drop in the bucket? Certainly. But consider this – by participating with Citizen Schools, we have the opportunity to save, literally save, 10 lives from becoming part of those scary statistics that John Payton discussed today. How much would you give to save 10 lives? You can start by giving 2 hours a week for 10 weeks through Citizen Schools. To get involved, please visit http://www.citizenschools.org/

My Year of Hopefulness - Moments that Made My Life

2009-12-14T13:52:00.006-05:00

My friend, Josh, over at World’s Strongest Librarian wrote a post that is so beautiful and profound that I had to share it here. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it all day. He talked about the defining moments of his life in terms of when they happened, how he felt about them, and what they meant to him. It’s a form that I love so much that I created my own snapshots of when. So many thanks to Josh for inspiring my writing and my life. Here goes…

When I first saw my niece, I realized why it was so important to have children in our lives.

When my heart broke, I realized that it didn’t take as long to heal and love again as I thought it would.

When he passed away, I didn’t feel as relieved as I thought I would – it was then that I started down the very long path to forgiveness.

When I crossed that finish line, realizing a dream years in the making, I was more grateful for the strength of my body than ever before.

When I decided to keep loving through the hurt, I realized that on the other side there was more love.

When I graduated, I knew at that moment that I could do anything I set my mind to.

When I looked out at the wild surf of South Africa, I realized that I had traveled very far from home and still felt like I belonged.

When I stood in front of a classroom for the first time, I had much more to offer than I ever expected.

When I chased a dream as far as I could and it still wasn’t enough to make it real, I was amazed at my resilience to just get a new dream.

When I said a final good-bye to my dear and faithful friend, I found that not everything or everyone is replaceable. Some parts of our lives and hearts can never be reclaimed, and that’s okay.

When I first put my writing out into the world for everyone to see, I found that there was a lot more support for my ideas that I ever knew and much of that support came from people I didn’t even know.

When the curtain came down and I heard the applause, I knew I had been part of something much greater than myself.

When I almost didn’t get a tomorrow, I understood how precious every moment is and that dreams can’t wait.

When I lost almost all of my belongings, I found that I didn’t really need any of them to survive and thrive and for the first time in my life I felt truly free.

When I found the courage to tell my own story, I discovered that I had the ability to inspire the same courage in others.

The image above is not my own. It can be found here.

My Year of Hopefulness - Playing Games

2009-12-13T20:19:00.004-05:00

I woke up this morning to rainy skies and a little knot in my stomach. This is the week that I begin my verbal review for the GRE, and I'm having some anxiety over it. My friend, Allan, made me stop beating myself up over my seemingly large deficiency in vocabulary. Honestly, I don't recognize half of the words on the GRE as English. Allan clued me in to the fact that no one recognizes these words as English because no one actually ever uses them. I felt mildly better. No matter - they're showing up on the test, and I have to learn them.

When I was little, I used to play the dictionary game with my mom. I'd open the dictionary to any word, and she would give the definition of the word. I never, ever stumped her. She knew every word, no matter how archaic it was. I couldn't understand it. How did she know all of these words? And how come I didn't know any of them? Why do I still feel like I don't know any of them now?

Begrudgingly, I went to my 3 inch thick GRE prep book, and started making my flashcards with a heavy heart. And then I decided I had better get with it. I had better make a game out of this or I am doomed to not do well. And I can't afford a low score. I just can't - PhD programs are competitive and every piece of an application counts.

The GRE book is full of helpful hints, and as I learned each hint I saw puzzle pieces falling into place. Now I know how my mom could figure out all of those words. She took many years of Latin, requiring her to learn a variety of roots, suffixes, and prefixes. Our language is largely made of little pieces that are recombined again and again in different ways. For example, "mal-" means bad, so words beginning with "mal-" likely have a negative meaning. It also means bad in Spanish, so knowing a foreign language helps enormously when deciphering new vocabulary words because English is largely a language of other languages. My mother speaks French and Latin, so it's no wonder the size of her English vocabulary is through the roof!

As my GRE studying progressed, I found myself getting more and more excited about it. I found myself finally, finally understanding pieces of our language I never knew before. Studying for the GRE isn't just to gain entrance to a program; it's actually beneficial for my life and for my writing. Now when I read, I have an eye on roots and suffixes and prefixes. I see arguments being pieced together with new insights that I never saw before. I see polygons and parallel lines and acute and obtuse angles everywhere I turn. The basis of the GRE is all around us. And while I've seen all of these things before, I'm now noticing them with new eyes and a new found curiosity.

My learning took a great leap forward today. It's so easy, and more than a little tempting, to get lost in our books and studies. The real power of our studies is when we can pick our eyes up from our books, look out into the world, and see that opportunities for learning, and application of our learning, is all around us. Or better yet, our learning helps us to see what could be out in the world, and gives us the tools and the resolve to go make it happen. Whoever said games were only for kids?

My Year of Hopefulness - Spirit on Bone

2009-12-12T16:23:00.002-05:00

"Have compassion for everyone you meet, even if they don't want it. What appears bad manners, an ill temper, or cynicism, is always a sign of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen. You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone." ~ Miller Williams

I was struck by the last line of this quote by Miller Williams because it relates perfectly to a situation that a friend of mine encountered this week. My friend was in town for a business meeting, and when he went to say good-bye to his boss, his boss pulled out a holiday gift and card for him. The card detailed everything he admired about my friend, and given my friend's talents, I am sure that the list of admirable qualities was long. The oddest thing about this encounter is that my friend's boss never gives Christmas presents, never says what he admires about others, and would be hard pressed to give anyone a heart-felt compliment unless there was some personal gain to be had from doing so.

My friend's boss was saying good-bye with this gift and card. It appears that his boss's time is up at their company, and parting is a difficult thing for someone who thought he was playing the game by all the right rules. He probably was; the trouble is that with this economy the ground shifts so quickly, and with it the game and subsequent rules change as well. It's just that no one tells you when a change has occurred. My friend's boss learned this lesson the hard way.

For about a year, I've been upset with my friend's boss. He's been manipulative and cruel, someone who took some kind of sad, sick pleasure in making someone else feel small. He was the consummate bad cop. Now, I'm not so sure. Maybe that bad cop was a front. Maybe there was always a good guy underneath that tough veneer. Maybe there was a heart there all along.

I guess we never really know what's going on inside someone's mind and soul. All we truly know are their actions and words. I suspect that my friend's boss was motivated by fear, and that caused him to behave so badly for so long. Now his number's up, and he's regretting some of his actions and words, wishing he could change them and knowing that it is far too late to fully make amends. The gift and the card is the best he can do, and perhaps that's enough.

A number of years ago, I had a boss who impressed me with one lesson that I think about all the time. A team member of ours was horribly rude to my boss, in public, and a few days later the team member came into my boss's office to apologize. My boss accepted the apology, no questions asked. I was stunned.

"How could you do that?" I asked him.

"Christa, asking for forgiveness is the hardest thing we do in life. You have to let someone apologize. If someone has the courage to come to me and apologize, then I can have the courage to forgive them."

It was one of those light bulb moments for me and I try to keep it close to my heart, even when someone has hurt me terribly. We have to let people say they're sorry, in their own way, in their own time. Sometimes it's in the form of a present or card, as it was between my friend and his boss. Sometimes it's a phone call, or an email, or a simple face-to-face conversation. By asking for forgiveness and granting it we can help one another to ease any tension that arises where the spirit meets the bone. And that might be the greatest gift we can ever give or receive.

The images above is not my own. It can be found here.

Owning Pink Feature

2009-12-12T13:31:00.002-05:00

I am so honored today to have my writing featured on Owning Pink at http://www.owningpink.com/2009/12/12/your-one-wild-and-precious-life/. I'm excited to see the response to the question: "What will you do with your one wild and precious life?"

My Year of Hopefulness - Writing Ourselves Free

2009-12-11T00:32:00.000-05:00

"Words do not label things already there. Words are like the knife of a carver: They free the idea, the thing, from the general formlessness of the outside. As a man speaks, not only is his language in a state of birth, but also the very thing about which he is talking." ~ Inuit Wisdom

Today I finished up the book The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist, and the Inuit quote above kicks off one of the last chapters. So many of her ideas about money helped me to reconsider the role of money in my life, both when I was very young and had no money and now when I have a well paying job. Her words helped me to see money as just another form of energy which we can utilize to shape the world around us. In her words I was able to make peace with finance, a difficult thing to do in our consumer-driven, debt-ridden culture.

Words are powerful tools not just for communicating ideas, but also to form them. So often I come to a blank screen on my computer, unsure of what I'll write or where my writing will lead. Over time, I've learned to trust the process of writing the way that a carver trusts his knife. In my imagination there is always a story waiting to be told, similar to the figure that is within a slate of marble. The skill of the writer or artist releases the form.

I'm now weeks away from meeting my goal of writing about hope every day for a year. I started this journey as someone who felt let down by the world, someone who was worried about her future. Now that I have spent nearly 365 days actively seeking out what's hopeful in our society, I am emerging from my quest with a confident, revitalized soul. I wrote myself free form the burden of worry.

So often we think a lack of commitments frees us. We give up relationships, jobs, materials goods, and tasks in pursuit of greater flexibility and freedom. And sometimes that works. Though before I give up anything or anyone, I remind myself of Willa Cather's quote in O Pioneers! - "Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere." I want my freedom to mean that I choose to do everything in my life, not that I am forced to do something which I don't want to do. My writing frees me because it lets me express what I'm feeling, and gives me the opportunity to connect with others. I've found that my connections to others frees my own heart rather than binding it up.

I found my writing voice not by closing down and shutting off, but by opening up to the experiences of the world and making the commitment to come here to this blog every day and share those experiences. I became a better writer by committing to the craft. I think life is shockingly similar to writing in this way - we live it better by practicing, by stepping out and stepping up, by committing our heart to others and to the world around us. And as we do this, I hope we'll all take some time and write it all down. Having the courage to tell others our own stories ironically frees them to do the same.

The photo above is not my own. It can be found here.

My Year of Hopefulness - More Than We Can Do

2009-12-10T20:00:00.000-05:00

"I have always admired the ability to bite off more than one can chew and then chew it."
~ William C. deMille, American screenwriter and film director

Challenge is an important thing in our lives. Without it, we lose a certain zest. We become too complacent. By taking on more than we think we can handle, we rise to greater levels than we ever imaged possible. I highly recommend it.

It's with this thought in mind that today I submitted my application to Columbia's Teachers College. I have applied to their PhD program in Anthropology and Education. I've been thinking about a PhD since graduating from business school. I thought a PhD would be something I'd get to somewhere down the line. I have known for some time that I love teaching, and that a PhD was the best way for me to do that with a great amount of freedom. I just didn't think I had enough to offer students until now. And after my 2009, I realized that we don't always get to decide when "down the line" is. "Down the line" has to be now if we want to do something phenomenal with our lives.

After so many months of standing on the edge, I took the plunge today and threw my hat into the ring to the best darn education PhD program out there. As luck would have it, "out there" is 20 blocks up the street from my apartment (literally!) I went to the orientation and I felt right at home, a similar feeling to the one I had when I went to visit Darden. I knew I belonged there.

There are certain places on the Earth where we feel ourselves fall right into the flow of life. There are times when we know we are on the right track because it all seems to fall in line with an uncanny timing. All of a sudden what seemed to be disparate parts of lives fit together perfectly and a new dream for our life emerges. For me, now is one of those times. Perhaps it's biting off more than I can chew, but then again, I wouldn't want to live my life any other way.

My Year of Hopefulness - Teaching butterflies to fall in line

2009-12-09T21:59:00.003-05:00

"The best speakers know enough to be scared...the only difference between the pros and novices is that the pros have trained the butterflies to fly in formation." ~ Edward R. Murrow

I have a little secret - all my life I have had a terrible battle with stage fright. Job interviews, first dates, meeting new friends, first day of class. Any new experience with new people has me quaking in my boots for weeks beforehand. I combat this with a brave face and decent acting skills, but it's painful. In college, I lost 10 pounds in a week preparing for the play, Agnes of God. I kept getting sick right before every rehearsal and then right before every show. I have a hard time watching debates on TV because I get sympathy stage fright!

This weekend I read the book Confessions of a Public Speaker by Scott Berkun. The book is riotously funny and Berkun is an endearingly honest writer. He makes no bones about the knocks he gets for his profession, and yet his humor brings about such a sense of respect and admiration for what he does day in and day out to earn a living.

The quote by Edward R. Murrow is one of my favorites that Berkun uses, and the chapter of the book that follows this quote is better yet. Berkun lists the top 14 fears people indicated in a recent survey. Speaking before a group was the greatest fear people had. Death was #7, loneliness was #9, and escalators was #14. Crazy when we consider that for the most part we can avoid speaking in public, and we can't avoid things like, oh, death. We're most afraid of something we can control. What does that say about us?

Recognizing the ludicrous ranking, Berkun goes on to talk about his own fear of public speaking, and the fear of speaking publicly that many of the world's notable speakers have (Bono, Elvis, JFK, and Barbara Walters to name just a few.) The trick isn't eradicating the fear; it's figuring out how to use it to our best advantage that counts. Get the butterflies to fall in line. For me, my fear is best used to teach and my defense is to prepare, prepare, prepare. And if you're thinking about that ol' "imagine everyone in their underwear" trick, Berkun will give you his perspective on why that is a very, very bad idea.

In Confessions of a Public Speaker, I realized that the fear of public speaking is really about being afraid we just aren't enough. Essentially, public speakers of every variety stand up there and put themselves in the perfect position to be knocked down and dragged by the hair to the back of the room. They tell themselves "what if I'm not good enough, smart enough, or entertaining enough?" The fear of public speaking is really the fear of not being accepted for who we are.

Later on in the book, Berkun discusses the reasons people go to hear public speakers, including the desire to learn something, be inspired, and have a positive experience they can share with others. Simple reasons really, and when looked at through the lens of "give the people what they want", the butterflies begin to work together to create one gorgeous pattern, each lending their own unique flair. For the many of us who suffer from stage fright, I'm convinced that Berkun is on to something here.

My Year of Hopefulness - Sense of Wonder

2009-12-08T21:52:00.006-05:00

This morning as I flipped through the latest copy of Fast Company on my way to work, I came across a short article featuring Nicole Lazzaro, a passionate game developer and the designer of Tilt, the first iPhone accelerometer game. She talked about the phenomenon of mobile gaming as having "a lot of curiosity, wonder, and surprise, which is very powerful because wonder is a hard emotion for adults to feel." That statement hit me like a ton of bricks. I then walked into a Starbucks and saw a sign by the cream and sugar area that read something akin to "I wish that adults could dream like children." Coincidence, or is the world giving me something to seriously think about?

Have we let the world make us so bitter that we lost our sense of wonder? If ever there was a time of year that we could, should, and must look around us in wonder, it's Christmas time, a season of dreams, a season that is grounded in faith and belief, even in things that seem impossible. It is a time of miracles. Christmas always arrives just in time to rekindle my spirits and give me fresh hopes and dreams for the new year. Christmas keeps me going.

There are a few traditions I have, things I do that restore my sense of wonder every Christmas. I wanted to share them with you in case you need a bit more dreaming in your life. I'd love to hear yours, too!

1.) I always take a trip down to Rockefeller Center to see the tree. I like to go very late at night or very early in the morning when it's dark out and there aren't many people around. I stare at those lights until they go a little fuzzy and there's a glow across the whole plaza. And then I soak up as much of that glow as possible and carry it with me wherever I go.

2.) When I first moved to New York 11 years ago, I wanted to figure out how to get a job dressing windows at Bergdorf Goodman. Maybe I've seen the movie Mannequin way too many times. There is something so magical about those windows. I'm always amazed that they can top themselves year over year. In 2010, I'm going to find a way to do something for one of those windows. I don't care if it just means tearing up tiny bits of paper that a collage artist uses to make something magnificent - I just want to see the process of how it all comes together!

3.) I walk up to St. John the Divine and light a Christmas candle. I spend some time in the Cathedral mulling over the year that's almost behind me and considering what I'd like to do in the year ahead. I ask God for some help and guidance, and I thank him for continuing to show up in my life in mysterious and surprising ways.

4.) A visit to Balducci's is one of the single greatest memories from my childhood. I would wonder around the store with my sister, Weez, and brother, Joey, and we would take in all of those delicious scents. At Christmas time, the store reminds me of the wonderful heritage I come from.

5.) I make my end-of-year charitable donations: money, clothing, and food items. This simple act reminds me how lucky I am, and how much I can help others.

6.) Prime time TV is bursting with Christmas specials in December. I try to catch The Grinch and Charlie Brown's Christmas at the very least while sipping hot cocoa and remembering how my family used to gather around the TV to watch those very same shows so many years ago. They hold special memories for me.

7.) Christmas concerts of all kinds are happening all over the city this month - I love to stop in to a few of them, especially if it's permissible to sing along! You can also find me spending some amount of time each day in December cranking up Christmas tunes in my apartment and having a little dance party as I rock around my very tiny Christmas tree - Brenda Lee would be proud.

8.) About this time, the weather starts to turn a bit colder. As I get out my winter coat and bundle up, I stop to consider the miracle that here we are on the same planet, with the same sun, moon, and stars, and depending on a slight axis tilt one way or the other, we get a heat wave or a blizzard. Amazing.

9.) The Christmas markets in Columbus Circle and Union Square are some of my favorite places at Christmas time. I get a donut, a cup of apple cider, and browse around for a few unique gifts, all while pretending that I've stepped back in time when markets like these were the primary shopping destinations for gifts.

10.) Marking time is an ancient, sacred act. Before we know it, December 25th will have come and gone from our lives for another year. As I try to rush to get everything done in time for the big day, I remind myself that in every countdown is the embedded message that time is precious. And is there anything more full of wonder than the passing of time itself and our own ability to survive, adapt, and thrive in this ever-changing, challenging world?

Wishing you a season full of wonder-renewing moments!

My Year of Hopefulness - Just Enough

2009-12-07T07:33:00.001-05:00

"Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished." ~ Lao Tzu

We live in a deadline-conscious world. Every day there is another to-do list, another crisis to attend to, another stress we didn't count on. Sometimes I feel stressed by my to-do list. This weekend even though I had a lot to do, I focused on enjoying every task. Even studying for my GREs. My stress of to-do's comes from always thinking about the next item I need to accomplish on my list. By enjoying every moment, even the busiest ones, I felt a greater sense of satisfaction, and I got my list completed faster than I thought I could.

I wonder if nature takes this same approach with her own to-do list. Nature operates on the principle of "just enough". Just enough consumption and production. Natures conducts life in seasons, surging at certain times and resting at others. Renewing and replenishing when needed. Taking the opportunity to grow and flourish when the conditions are just right.

As I worked through my to-do list this weekend, I wondered if we could build lives that more closely resemble nature's way of working. Could we place just the right amount of effort into the different parts of our lives? Could we learn to eliminate waste in all its forms as much as possible, take advantage of positive circumstances, and learn to retreat and wait when the skies above us grow dark? Could we find a way for all the pieces of our lives to integrate into one beautiful landscape? Can we gracefully adapt to change?

With nature as such a healthy example, I'm hopeful that we can find greater harmony, within ourselves and with others if only we set our minds and hearts to it.

The image above is not my own. It can be found here.

My Year of Hopefulness - Treasure Hunting

2009-12-06T16:46:00.002-05:00

Life is a treasure. The deeper you dig, the more you will find. You've got to get underneath, find out what brings about true joy, what opens our hearts, what inspires us to go further than we ever thought possible. In December I always feel compelled to keep on digging right through to the new year. The lights that fill New York's streets at this time of year match the light I always find in my own life during the holidays.

December always seem to fly right by me. I blink and it's New Years Eve. Maybe it's the jobs I've had. Maybe it's that I always seem to be in the middle of a personal project during this time. It could be the incessant countdown that seems to get faster with each passing day this month. Most likely, I think it's the fact that time flies when we're enjoying ourselves, and this is my very favorite time of year.

I always find that my sense of hope is renewed in December, too. My faith in the benefits of hard work, determination, and steadfast empathy is met with continual new opportunities for learning and personal growth this month. I often find myself skipping down the street, driven by an overwhelming sense of gratitude for my good fortune. In other words, it feels like Christmas.

This year, I'm making a pact with myself to seek out the treasures in my life, hold them up to the light, and give thanks for each of them in a way that I never have before. To spend as much time with friends and family as I possibly can. I'll forgo a little more sleep than usual. I'll take long walks, even though it's cold outside, so I can soak up every bit of cheer I can find. I'll sing and dance and groove to my favorite Christmas tunes. I'll watch the specials on TV, bake cookies, trim a tree or two, and donate time and money to causes I care about. That's my gift to myself this year: the treasure of joy, and as much of it as I can muster.

Book Buddy Letter 2

2009-12-06T09:16:00.005-05:00

Dwight, the 3rd grader I write letters to as part of the Learning Leaders Book Buddy program, just sent me his first letter. We are reading Charlotte's Web together and we write letters back and forth at designated points in our reading. As promised, here is Dwight's letter to me, and my letter back to him.

"Dear Christa,
I like writing letters to you, too. This is one of my favorite books, too. I enjoy reading, too. I find inspiration in my reading, too. I grew up in Queens. My favorite part of Charlotte's Web is when Wilbur and Charlotte meet.

Your Book Buddy,
Dwight"

"Dear Dwight,

I enjoyed reading your letter. We have so much in common! We both like to write letters, we both find inspiration in our reading, and we both like meeting new friends.

Another activity I really enjoy is helping my friends and family members, just like Charlotte
helped Wilbur. It is a very special thing to know that we have skills and resources to help someone we care about when they have a problem that they need to solve. I am very close to my family and friends, and they are a very important part of my life.

We are at an interesting point in Charlotte’s Web. Her solution to use her webs to talk about Wilbur was really creative! I like that she chose interesting words and phrases that were very different from how people usually described Wilbur. What did you think of Charlotte’s plan?

Now that they are off to the fair, I wonder if Charlotte will continue putting words into her webs or if she will think of something different to do. Wilbur is really counting on her to help him win the competition at the fair. What do you think her plan for the fair will be?

I’m looking forward to getting your next letter!

Your Book Buddy,

Christa"

These letters remind me of how important it is for children to have adult role models in their lives, people they can talk to about their thoughts and opinions. Articulating our own stories is an underrated skill, and one that I hope I can help Dwight with through these letters.

Examiner.com: Interview with Danielle Di Vecchio, Founder of bakery Biscotti di Vecchio

2009-12-05T16:53:00.002-05:00

I learned about Danielle Di Vecchio and her business, Biscotti di Vecchio through Crain’s story about online bakeries. Danielle had been making sinfully delicious biscotti for years and giving them away as gifts. Her grandmother taught her to make these traditional Italian cookies, a staple of every Italian kitchen. (Coming from an Italian family myself, my grandmother always had chocolate and vanilla biscotti for us to nibble on. I distinctly remember their scent and place in her kitchen.) Family and friends encouraged Danielle to form a business based on her baking hobby. Danielle's biscotti, made from the finest, all-natural ingredients, make perfect holiday gifts.

For the interview, click here.

My Year of Hopefulness - Seeing

2009-12-05T15:17:00.004-05:00

Today I had my annual eye exam, and with it came the dilation of my eyes rendering my near vision pretty useless for a few hours. In that time, I was unable to read, write, study for my GRE, use my computer, find phone numbers on my phone, clean my apartment, or watch TV. All I could do was get myself home, and then I could sit, and wait for my vision to return. This is the stillness Brian was talking about yesterday. And so, I waited and while I was waiting, I allowed some feelings to surface.

Sadness:
While I was getting ready for my Junior Achievement class on Wednesday night, I couldn't find any office supplies in my apartment. I used to have a large box of them and they were lost in the fire. I sighed deeply for all the little things that I had to leave behind.

Shortly after the fire, I stopped dating someone I really liked. I wanted to take the relationship up a notch, and he wanted to let it go. He didn't show up for me when I needed him most. I tried to be friends with him for a bit and quickly realized that our friendship made me unhappy. And so, I released him and have had very little contact with him in the past few months. It's sad to let someone go, especially someone whom you enjoyed being with. I miss him, or at least I miss the person I thought he was going to be in my life. And I'm sad that he doesn't miss me.

After Thanksgiving, I would have brought my dog, Sebastian, back from Florida and he would have been running around my apartment now. We would have been playing in the park together, going for walks, taking naps, and having a grand old time together. I'm sad that we lost him too soon, that he never had a chance to be in New York with me.

Anger:
I'm really angry that a woman set my old apartment building on fire, and that as a result I almost lost my life and lost most of my belongings. I'm angry that a number of people in my life didn't understand how traumatic that loss was. One friend commented "why are you so upset about it? You got all new stuff." We're not friends any more.

The guy I was dating spent the week after the fire giving me daily percentages of how far along the road to recovery I was, while also telling me that I really couldn't be angry at the woman who set my building on fire. (Brian's response to this was "Um, whose side is he on?") And a week later he decided it would be a good idea to tell me that he "wasn't sure of his feelings for me." I listened patiently to his concerns, even though all I wanted to do was kick him in the shins and walk away. Since I had found a new apartment, he felt I was now able to listen to his tales of emotional unavailability. Seriously? I saw him a few more times after that, and eventually I did walk away though I refrained from kicking him in the shins.

I'm angry at myself that I didn't bring Sebastian to New York sooner. He likely would have developed the same condition that caused us to put him down, though maybe a better vet here could have helped him. I wish he was here, and I'm so angry that I didn't get a chance to hug him one more time and tell him how much I loved him.

Very soon after letting these feelings surface, and going through a few tissues in the process, my vision returned. Logically, I know that the dilation drops wore off though it signified something more than that, too. This time of being physically unable to see let me sit and see things that I have been busy burying. I do feel lighter now, and am able to see a bit more hope peeking through the clouds.

My Year of Hopefulness - Good Grief

2009-12-04T14:52:00.001-05:00

One of the things this year that has brought me so much hope is my new ability to ask and receive help. By nature, I am not good at asking for help, though I am fantastic at providing it. A few weeks ago I told my friend, Rob, about my strong desire to make all of the change I've been through this year into a positive experience. I want to look back on 2009 and see that it was a decisive, magical turning point in my life. Enter, Brian.

Early on in my life, I spent a number of years in therapy to acquire tools to help me handle certain aspects of my childhood in a healthy way. They've served me well for 33 years and now I need some new tools to help me manage a whole new set of challenges. Brian is a social worker by training who has an incredible gift for helping people to get the most out of the lives they have to help them achieve the lives that they want. He sets about his work with the desire to help people turn their experiences and dreams into action. He is exactly the kind of person I need right now.

I began my weekly sessions with him today and because I am so open about my life's circumstances, we were able to get to the root of our work together very quickly. It helps that I found Brian based on Rob's strong recommendation. Because I trust Rob, I immediately trusted Brian. Because I trust myself and know how I want my life to take shape, it was easy to ask someone as knowledgeable as Brian for help. And so, it begins...

Being a forever student, I asked for homework at the end of our session. "I want you to be still and allow the feelings of loss you've had this year to surface. You're so busy getting away from grief that you never really look it in the eye and see how it can actually help you." True, and scary, and difficult, and necessary. I was so concerned about getting through my losses this year that I didn't stop to look around and see what they really had to offer me. I just wanted to be done, and in my desire to be done, I forgot to let myself grieve. I took a "well that happened so now get on with it" approach without letting myself say "that was frightening and sad, and I'm going to miss those things and people in my life."

Grief is difficult; suppressed grief eventually becomes unbearable and makes itself a nuisance and makes us tired. With Brian's help, I'm going to figure out how to make grief serve me well.

My Year of Hopefulness - M.S. 223 One Year Later

2009-12-03T15:56:00.006-05:00

"A writer - someone who is enormously taken by things anyone else would walk by." ~ a quote found in the hallways on M.S. 223

Today I went to M.S. 223 in the South Bronx with Junior Achievement. It has been a year almost to the day that I first visited that school. One year later, I still felt excited and nervous, prepared and completely unprepared. My work with the organization, and others like it, make me feel more useful and alive than I feel anywhere else. Teaching is hard work - perhaps the hardest work I've ever done because it requires me to draw on every skill I have and then some. Every time I stand in front of a class, I learn something new about myself and about the world.

We spent the morning talking about international trade - how it works and its impact on our everyday lives. In one topic, we covered math, politics, economics, diplomacy, contract negotiations, sociology, and psychology. We didn't even get to the prescribed activities because the students had so many questions, insights, and concerns. As usual, I had to summon my improvisation skills early and often.

When we talked about product imports and legal stipulations that often impact those imports, some students brought up a topic I was not at all expecting: guns. They knew about licensing, having a warrant to search a house, the relationships between the police and people in a community, and the damage that guns cause. They asked me about laws governing guns, in the U.S. and abroad, their sale, purchase, and sadly, their use in neighborhoods in New York City. It was a tough conversation - this is the reality of an inner-city middle school student.

After lunch, they were wound up. We reviewed the activities in their workbooks. Some were engaged, and some were not. Most couldn't seem to sit still or focus or listen to one another. For the first time in a classroom I began to see the split between students who really embraced learning and those who did not, and I got very worried. I couldn't leave some behind and feel good about the day. I had to find a way to bring them all with me. What I was doing wasn't working and so for the last activity, we turned to the tool I love best - a blank sheet of paper.

On the back of their workbooks, I had them design and describe a product they would like to make and sell.

"How much money do we have?" they asked.

"Unlimited," I responded.

"How do I make something?" they asked.

"Think of something in your life that you want to fix and develop a product or service that fixes it," I said.

"Anything?" they asked.

"Yes, anything you want," I replied.

The floodgates were open. Even the most disruptive students had a rush of ideas: a global communication device that translates your voice to another language so communication with others is easier across the globe; a machine that cures every disease known to man; a pocket-sized screen connected to a home security camera. There was no shortage of creativity in that room and I was able to relate what I do every day at work to what these students were doing in this exercise.

"You get paid to make things?" one student asked.

"I do," I replied.

"Wow, you're lucky," another one said.

"It's not about luck," I said. "It's about deciding to get a certain skill set and then working hard. You could do it, too."

They raised their eyebrows as if to say, "Really?"

Our class ended in a rush and before I knew it, silence filled the classroom. Off they went out into the world, to circumstances that are more difficult than most people can ever imagine. I worry about them all the time. I'd like to think that years from now, one of them will create a product or service because of our 45 minute lesson on product development. Maybe it inspired a small dream that someday becomes a reality for one of them.

This is the most curious thing about teaching: you plant seeds with nothing but love and faith, hoping that somewhere down the line something you said resonates with someone, inspires them, encourages them, gives them a reason to believe.

My Year of Hopefulness - Your One Wild and Precious Life

2009-12-02T22:17:00.007-05:00

Long a mainstay of college admissions processes and orientations, I recently heard about the poem The Summer Day by Mary Oliver. (I've pasted it at the bottom of this post.) My sister, Weez, tells me that it is my great hope in life to be employed as a professional student. She's right.

I am a sucker for places that make us dream big, that push us beyond our limits, that stretch our imaginations and minds in ways that we never thought possible. I am a forever student, very much at home in the classroom wherever that classroom happens to be, whether I am up front teaching or happily seated in the front row soaking up all that glorious information like a sponge. So of course the big questions are my very favorites, and Mary Oliver hits on what may be my favorite question yet: "What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" Isn't that gorgeous? Makes me want to print it out 1,000 times and plaster it all over my neighborhood.

This week I have had new options unfolding for me every day. Just when I think I am set upon a course of action, some other wonderful possibility falls into my path to consider. I think I'm being tested (which is fine by me since students love tests.) I think I'm being shown a way to focus on exactly what field in life gets me most excited, education, and then also being offered a myriad of distractions that are testing my passion for it. Mary Oliver's question is like a beacon in the haze. What if we looked at every option that's thrown our way, what if we considered every road before us with this lens. What if we made choices by asking "is this what you want to do with your one wild and precious life (knowing that our lives are so short)?"

The very thought of this takes my breathe away. Our lives are so short. We have such little time here, making every day a wild and precious thing. So here is my answer to Mary Oliver, no matter how many days I have left:

To write courageously and passionately so that it stirs the hearts and imaginations of others

To give children every where the chances that I had to improve my own lot in life through education, dedication, and very hard work

To lift others up as I rise

To generate more kindness, compassion, and generosity in the world

To take these two wild and precious hands and build things that have value and meaning, for me and for many others

To travel far and wide, to experience other cultures, to see new scenery, to meet as many citizens of the world as possible

And, yes, every day I want to be both a teacher and a student

The Summer Day

by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

The image above is not my own. It can be found here.

Examiner.com: An Interview with Kristen Ernst, Founder of Life Path Living

2009-12-01T23:05:00.003-05:00

I met Kristen on Owning Pink, a community of amazing women who encourage one another's dreams and help one another through tough times. It is one of the most supportive groups I have ever been a part of. Kristen stood out to me as someone special because she reached out to me after reading some of my blog posts that detailed some rough times I was going through. I had never heard from her before and yet she offered so much kindness and support and continued to check up on me weeks later. I clicked through to her profile and discovered her business, Life Path Living, and its merchandise line, Life Path Tees.

For the full interview, please click here.

My Year of Hopefulness - Take Up the Torch

2009-12-01T09:45:00.001-05:00

“Life is no brief candle, it’s a torch. I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on.” ~ George Bernard Shaw

I saw this quote by George Bernard Shaw on Twitter over the weekend. Someone sent it to me after reading my blog posts about my trip to Costa Rica and my plans for the future. Thinking of life as a torch, something we can and should wield as a powerful instrument to light up the world around us, reinforced my belief that if we are just subsisting and not doing our life’s work every day, then a change is necessary, sooner rather than later. As my mom often says, “we will not pass this way again. So make this pass count as much as you can.”

Yesterday a friend of mine was telling me about a conversation he recently had with his dad. His father told him that his job was my friend’s life’s work. My friend objected and then his dad asked him a few questions:

“Son, where do you spend the most hours of your day?”

“At work.”

“What do you think about for the most number of hours per day?”

“Work.”

“Then your job is your life’s work. How do you feel about that? Is it fulfilling?”

“No. I don’t get any fulfillment from it. It’s just a job,” my friend answered.

“Sounds like you better change it. You don’t want your life’s work to be just a job.”

These are harsh words that could have been said with a kinder voice, though the point is crystal clear. Where and with whom we spend most of our time is our life’s work. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about where my energy and time is spent, and what that’s accomplishing. I spend a lot of my time volunteering, and a lot of that volunteering is done in the field of education. I come alive in a classroom of any kind whether I’m the student or the teacher, and classrooms can be found throughout our communities. It’s that learning environment that is so invigorating, that gives me the most hope for our future.

And so, in the words of my friend’s father, I am about to set to work on making a change to make that time in education my life’s work. When I think about how much good can be done there, how much I have to offer in that setting, I realize that my torch is growing brighter.

The image above is not my own. It can be found here.

My Year of Hopefulness - I Got my Whole Future in My Hands

2009-11-30T16:05:00.000-05:00

"Put your future in good hands - your own." ~ Anonymous

I read this quote a few days ago on Owning Pink's Twitter account (@Owningpink), one of my very favorite accounts to check. It is always brimming with inspiring ideas. This one spoke to me quite clearly and was just the advice I needed. Taking our future into our own hands is a brave and frightening act, though once we accept it as a way to move forward, it really can move mountains.

Today I had to have a conversation that I have been dreading for some time now. I knew it was coming and I was nervous about it. I was afraid of what the reaction of the of the other person might be and I was afraid of my tendency toward blatant honesty. How delicately did I need to plead my case? Would I have to tap dance around what I really wanted to say, playing politics, or could I just get on with it?

No surprise that I went the honesty route. I explained how I wanted my future to unfold and where I thought the best place to do my life's work would be. And a remarkable thing happened - the very person I was frightened of, the very person who I thought would not at all support my decision, stepped up and offered his hand. This person and I have on occasion had a rough go of it. We haven't always seen eye-to-eye. As a matter of fact we've butted heads so often that it's become a habit for us. And yet, there is some kind of magic that honesty breeds. Once he understood my point-of-view, he realized that he had the opportunity to make my dream come true, or at least to help it along in a significant way. And so, he did.

Before I went to see him, I took a deep breathe, smiled, and told myself, "you can do this. Just go in there with an honest heart and say exactly what you think." I did. He listened. And before I even had to ask for help, before I even dared to ask for help, he offered it up with a smile. All my worrying had been for naught. He asked me to think it over, and make sure that this is really the direction I want to go in. I thanked him, knowing that I'll be back to see him tomorrow, to tell him I'm ready to build the life I imagine, to thank him for his help, and to take my life into my own hands.

The Journal of Cultural Conversation - The Power of Design Thinking

2009-11-29T20:47:00.002-05:00

Hello from The Journal of Cultural Conversation! Laura has just returned from her Peruvian adventures and I've trekked back from Costa Rica by way of Florida with the fam. All the while we've kept up our blogging, commenting, story-telling antics and anecdotes. We hope you'll join us today for a conversation about the power of design thinking. Click here.

My Year of Hopefulness - Thankful for the Unknown

2009-11-29T07:37:00.000-05:00

"Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You have no security unless you can live bravely, excitingly, imaginatively, unless you can choose a challenge instead of a competence." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

An opinion article was published in the New York Times on Thanksgiving that gave thanks for the unknown. It struck me so profoundly because of all the surprise that entered my life this year. Through it all, I never stopped believing that something good would come from it all, that I'd be able to raise my head up eventually, shake off the sadness, and rejoin the human race as a more empathic, compassionate person. What I didn't expect is that I would emerge so brazenly fearless, that I would myself feeling more secure once everything extraneous was stripped away.

The great joy of living through something that we imagine we cannot live through is that we become unable to tolerate the act of wasting time. Tragedy makes our vision crystal clear; it helps us to see things with a sharp focus that we never had before. I sometimes wish that we could obtain this kind of clarity without having to live through tragedy. One of my business school professors talked to us about the sad necessity of the "burning platform" that inspires change. I wish my platform, my home, didn't have to literally catch fire, bringing a whole new meaning to the term "burning platform". It certainly did inspire me to change my life in profound and daring ways. I've been putting off a PhD program for over a year; I've been settling in my career and my relationships; material possessions were beginning to wield too much importance in my life. I needed a shake-up, a change, and I got it in spades. Now I'm studying for the GRE, pumping up my efforts on the relationships in my life that are truly valuable to me, and embracing a lifestyle that places far less value on material valuables.

The unknown is a scary, precious thing. The holidays are a great marker for us, a time of reflection to consider exactly what we want our lives to be about. This is an opportunity for us to be with friends and family and truly consider Eleanor Roosevelt's great question: are we challenging ourselves or resting on our competencies? Are we stepping up to meet the world or taking a comfortable seat and just watching the world go by? As we take a bit of time to relax this holiday season, it's my great hope that we will seriously re-consider our priorities and how we spend our time and effort so that we do as much good in 2010 as we possibly can. There is no time like the present to take up a new adventure.

My Year of Hopefulness - Find Your "T"

2009-11-28T21:03:00.003-05:00

This morning on the plane home I read an article from Stanford's Social Innovation Review entitled "Design Thinking for Social Innovation" by IDEO's Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt. In the article the talk about looking for team members who have their own "T". The vertical line of the "T" is each team member's unique skill or knowledge that they bring to a cross-functional team and the horizontal line of the "T" is a shared set of characteristics that all of the team members share: empathy, respect for the unique talents of others, openness, curiosity, optimism, a tendency to learn by doing, and experimentation.

I like this approach to team-building because it inherently incorporates diversity into the structure of a successful team while also making sure that team members are cut from the same cloth at a very basic human values level. I also think it's a healthy recipe for building out friendships and relationships in our lives, as well as a good strategy for building a family. It's a formula for accumulating a set of good-hearted, talented people. And isn't that the kind of people we'd all like to surround ourselves with?

How does one go about building a personal "T"? Can empathy, curiosity, and optimism be taught or are these traits we must be born with? Can we build an education system that instills and nurtures these values into our children at the very beginning of their learning years? I'd like to think that we're all born curious, and I'd like to think that our natural creative, empathic nature is so strong that even if we have lost our way, these tendencies can be recovered and strengthened.

And what about that vertical in the "T"? How do we discover what makes us special? Is that something special about each of us something we are born with or is it something that we learn? And can it be changed throughout our lives? I believe that the answer is a resounding "yes" on all counts. My special trait is my storytelling, my writing. While I have a natural inclination for this, it requires practice. I certainly wasn't born knowing how to write well. I needed to put a lot of time and effort into it, though because I enjoyed it and saw a rapid rate of improvement with my practice, I was encouraged to become an even better writer.

I've seen this same pattern with every person in my life: my brother-in-law who is a fine painter, my friend, Kelly, who is a master project manager, my friend, Ken, who is a beautiful dancer and a gifted physical therapy assistant, my friend, Brooke, who is one of the most promising young acting talents on television, and my friend and mentor, Richard, who is one of the most successful and talented fundraisers in the nonprofit field. Incidentally, they all have a fabulous sense of humor and are some of the kindest people I've ever met.

I suppose that there are Mozarts and Einsteins among us, walking around, born brilliant, born as prodigies. I just don't know any. All of the brilliant people in my life, and I am very fortunate to have many, have found and leveraged their "T" because they have worked hard at something they love. And they're better off for this because their hard work also gives them the empathy and appreciation they need to be not only brilliant, but to be imbued with hearts of gold. Their "T"s are apparent in every part of their lives. They give me an example to strive for and are my greatest reason for hope.

Examiner.com: An Update with Amanda Steinberg of DailyWorth

2009-11-27T16:54:00.003-05:00

Since I first featured Amanda Steinberg, Founder of DailyWorth, the site has grown considerably. DailyWorth is a website that helps women manage their finances, though the information is incredibly valuable for men as well. I recently caught up with her to ask about the site, her business, and how she's managing change.

Check it out.

My Year of Hopefulness - Everyone Can Draw

2009-11-27T16:16:00.004-05:00

"If you think you can't draw, too bad. Do it anyway." ~ Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, in his book Change by Design

I've been lamenting for some time that I can't draw. I'm a much better writer than visual artist, and this is exacerbated because I am an auditory learner, not a visual learner. Thank that's weird? You're right - auditory learners make up only 20% of the population. Add it up and it's easy to understand why I don't have any natural ability to draw, nor have I ever really had a desire to learn.

And then I read Tim Brown's excellent book, Change by Design, that explains his philosophy on design-thinking and the future of the field. He talks about mind maps, schematics that illustrate ideas though visual depictions rather than through written briefs or powerpoint presentations. This is a kind of drawing I can get into. Think of them as multi-dimensional tree diagrams blending pictures and words to illustrate ideas. Rather than just working left to right and using the basic construct of option A or B to progress from problem to solution, a mind map starts with a question that takes the form of "How might we ( fill in the blank)?" for a specific population. For my program with Citizen Schools, I will be asking the kids I work with to solve this dilemma with a mind map "How might we build a public school curriculum for the graders to encourage creativity and entrepreneurship?"

As so often happens, as I was reading Tim's book, I saw an interview with another Tim whom I greatly admire, Tim Burton. He was discussing his views on drawing and creativity and echoed Tim Brown's sentiment. "Every child believes he or she can draw. Too many adults have found their creativity beaten out of them." And this brings me back to my long-held belief that I have only just begun to fully articulate: it is much easier (and effective) to help children maintain their creativity through to adulthood than it is to repair the confidence of adults who believe they have no creativity at all.

The truth is that I've lost confidence in my ability to draw, believing that my creativity is relegated to writing and developing products and not at all to drawing. The Tims helped me realize that I am selling myself short. Somewhere inside me is a visual artist of some sort yearning for a paint brush (or crayon or chalk or colored pencil) and a canvas (or piece of paper or blank wall or empty piece of sidewalk).

So here I go with another resolution to live a more authentic life: even if it's not good, I'm going to draw a little bit every week with the help of my mind maps. I'll let you know, or better yet I'll show you, how it goes by publishing the pieces to this blog. Stay tuned as I re-teach myself to draw.

The image above is not my own; I'm just starting to draw so my pictures aren't this good - yet. It is the image created by Tim Brown for the table of content of his book Change by Design. It can be found here.

My Year of Hopefulness - More Thankful Than Ever

2009-11-26T17:13:00.000-05:00

"A thankful heart is not only the greatest virtue, but the parent of all the other virtues." ~ Cicero

This Thanksgiving is a particularly special one for me. All week I have been with my family in Florida, playing and laughing and cooking, grateful for all of this time with them. I've never spent this much time with them over the holidays. In a year that has been so difficult, in a year when I came very close to not being here at all, I can hardly think of something I'm not grateful for. This Thanksgiving was a big milestone for me because I have been using it as a marker to a time I wanted to get to, a time when I would be in a position to make some big decisions about my life going forward. And this week I have - applying to a PhD program, formulating my own business plan, signing up for a full yoga teacher certification course. Life is looking grand from this side of Thanksgiving.

Today I am very thankful for my family and friends and mentors, people who have not only been supporting me through this difficult year, but also encouraging me to get the most out of my time here.

Earlier this week Weez and I went to the grocery store to do some Thanksgiving shopping and we talked about the fire in my apartment building. I told her how that event really eradicated any fear I have about all aspects of my future; when you almost don't get a tomorrow, every day is gravy so I might as well get on with doing exactly what I want to do with my days. No more compromises. There's no sense in waiting. She agreed, as has everyone in my life that I've talked to about this experience. That fire made every day Thanksgiving for me.

I'm grateful for my health and my ability to imagine a new future with new dreams. Surprisingly, I'm thankful for all that I lost this year because it has made me so grateful for what I have. It cleaned out my life and made room for a drastically better future than the life I was living. It made me realize that a lot of good can be created from something terrible so long as we have the right attitude, so long as we embrace the idea that everything we live through can be an opportunity for learning, for strength, for love. It's this learning, strength, and love that I am most thankful for and I plan to use this thankfulness to bring these new dreams of mine to life.

My Year of Hopefulness - It Takes A Village, or an Army

2009-11-25T23:00:00.000-05:00

I've been having a great time in Florida with my niece, Lorelei. I can hardly believe that she'll be 2 in January. I wrote about her on this blog the day that she was born and she has appeared a number of other times in my posts. It's fun to watch her learn and change. My sister and brother-in-law are tired pretty much all the time - Lorelei is always on the go and always curious. She's also somehow inherited insomnia from my mom and I.

While many people say that it takes a village to raise a child, I'd add that it requires a very large village, or in many cases an army. It's amazing how many things Lorelei gets into. Everything from electric outlets to cabinet doors to chairs that are a tiny bit too tall for her. She needs feeding and changing and washing and activities that teach her reading, her colors, her numbers, etc. And the list goes on. She needs an eye on her constantly.

Lorelei is lucky - she has so many people in her life who watch out for her, who love her, and take care of her. Every day, I think about how lucky she is, and how many kids are not so lucky. I think about how many kids don't have a village much less an army. Some don't have anyone at all. This is where we can all come in.

This Fall, I had the opportunity to volunteer teach at one of the best high schools in New York. When I told a friend of mine about the choice I had to make to do that assignment or work on my own program in East Harlem, she said, "Christa, those kids in that high school are fine. They don't need you. They have plenty of advantages. Whether or not you're there won't matter to them. It will matter to those kids in East Harlem. Go where you're needed."

Every day, we have a chance to be a part of a child's village, and it's most important for us to begin building a village for kids who don't have one at all. This might be the greatest challenge of our time. We can be that village, that army, with a small donation of time or money or concern. If we have any interest at all in the future of our planet, in the future of our own children, we have to stand up for other kids who need us.

The Journal of Cultural Conversation - Lessons in Spirituality and Why I Hugged a Tree Yesterday

2009-11-25T10:57:00.001-05:00

This is a post by my writing pal, Laura, on her latest adventure in Peru. Enjoy!

I grew up in a very Catholic household. Before my super cool mom married my equally remarkable dad, she was a nun. I won’t elaborate – that should explain most of it.

For the full post, click here.

My Year of Hopefulness - Learn by Doing

2009-11-24T10:29:00.003-05:00

This week Michael Sande l at Harvard talked about Aristotle's Politics. Sandel compares the art of politics to playing an instrument, telling a joke, and cooking. Theses disciplines cannot be learned just from a book or by watching others. Great political orators like great musicians, comics, and cooks must be actively engaged in their craft, practicing consistently, to become masters of it.

Social change is the same way. We can read and write about social change. We can study it. We can be inspired by others who are actively generating social change though only by rolling up our sleeves and participating can we understand the particulars, the details, needed to create change. Change requires trial and error, a variety of approaches, and practice.

In the coming weeks I'll be attending the final projects, called Wow!s, for this semester's Citizen Schools afterschool programs. Attending these sessions will give me an idea of what I need to put together for Innovation Station, the afterschool program for 6th graders in East Harlem that I am building around the concepts of innovation and entrepreneurship. I will learn so much by attending these Wow!s, though I know that this Spring I need to get in there and test the methods myself. I'm looking forward to the practice.

My Year of Hopefulness - Personal Statements

2009-11-23T22:48:00.004-05:00

Today I began writing my personal statement for my PhD application to Columbia. I have been thinking about it for a week. Usually writing comes very easy to me. It's something I love and a skill I work on every day. The words usually come faster than I can type them. Several times I have sat down to write this personal statement and starred at a blank page for a long time, closing my laptop with nothing to show for my time.

What is it that's getting to me? Why is it that putting fingers to keys to write this personal statement is so tough? I can talk about why I want to get my PhD; I know my dissertation topic and I know what I want to do post-PhD. So why is this personal statement giving me writer's block?

In one to two pages I have to explain who I am and what I'm most passionate about to people who barely know me. Every word counts. Because of the critical importance of this piece I was editing before I even started writing. I let my quest for perfection get in the way of telling the truth, plain and simple.

While I need perfection before I click the 'submit' button, I was forgetting that the first draft, along with the second, third, and thirtieth can be far less than perfect. A final piece that shines from beginning to end is composed of bits and pieces of glimmer from the many drafts that come before it.

Life's the same way. Love's the same way. Careers are the same way. We usually don't get things perfectly correct the first time around. It takes a lot of trial, and error, and trial again. It takes the courage to fail, to follow a dream as far as it will take us. And many times our dreams dead end and we have to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and start all over again. Life, love, and careers take many drafts, and in each new experience we gain a little piece of magic, a little piece of awareness that will get us a bit closer to our own version of perfect. The trick is to never call it quits until we get exactly what we want.

The Journal of Cultural Conversation - A Tico Life for Me

2009-11-23T22:41:00.002-05:00

My latest post is up on The Journal of Cultural Conversation - a description of my incredible trip to Costa Rica.

"The first time I learned Spanish, it was to satisfy a school requirement in 7^th grade. The second time I learned Spanish it was for love – my first boyfriend in college was a Venezuelan and I wanted very much to know and understand his culture, especially the language. Now in the process of learning Spanish for the third time, it is to improve my own life and the lives of others."

To read the full article, please visit: http://www.thejcconline.com/a-tico-life-for-me/

Laura is in Peru this week - we passed each other in the skies over Miami. She recently posted a piece about her arrival there: http://www.thejcconline.com/live-from-machu-picchu-chatting-with-locals-coca-tea-and-hugs/

My Year of Hopefulness - Unquestioned Answers

2009-11-22T22:38:00.001-05:00

While in Costa Rica, I continued reading Lynne Twist's book The Soul of Money. So many of her sentiments about the use of money, sufficiency, and abundance have resonated with me. At the end of one particular chapter she challenges readers to explore not unanswered questions, but unquestioned answers. I have not been able to get this term out of my head. I spent a long night in Costa Rica, tossing and turning, wrestling with the unquestioned answers in my own professional life.

Since going to business school, I have been on a track - to pay back my loans, to believe that I must make a certain amount of money in my single paycheck, to climb, climb, climb as high as I can in the field of business. We hear so often that there are not enough women at the very top of business world, that people from my socioeconomic background are under-represented and needed in large corporations, as are those who embrace empathy and innovation and change. Up until now, I assumed that these sentiments were a given, answers to timeless questions and concerns in business, and that I must heed this call.

With this latest economic downturn, these very things that I have held to be true without question are now up for scrutiny. Everything is up for debate. I went to an innovation conference several weeks ago, hosted by Roger Martin of the Rotman School of Business. My former boss, Bob, invited me because he knows of my deep interest in change and design. Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO and one of the panelists at the conference, discussed the dilemma of big business today as it relates to change. IDEO runs workshops throughout the year that are training sessions for business people to encourage more creativity within their companies. They are wildly popular events, and there's only one problem with them. "Once people open up their minds to the world of design," Brown said, "they can never go back. Many times, attendees of our workshops leave their jobs shortly after they complete the sessions. They can't accept a life in typical big corporations anymore. They know better."

Big corporations have been trying so hard to make innovation and change a part of the culture, or at least trying hard to pay lip-service to change. The difficulty is that only a handful of corporations really believe in the power and necessity of change. Target, Apple, Nike are among the few. By and large most big corporations just want to return to the good old days of fat profits, zero regulation, and big, big bonuses. Those individuals who really want change, innovation, and design to be incorporated into the fabric of a company get too frustrated with bureaucracy and the slow, lumbering gait of a company strangled by its own size. And so, they leave for smaller, more nimble, freer pastures. Who could blame them?

These are the brave souls questioning the answers that business has for so long assumed to be universal truths. Now, the truth is not quite so clear as it once was. The people who have long-benefited from business as usual (so much so that BAU has become a common acronym in their lexicon) are getting very nervous because their lifestyle is being threatened by those asking why, those who are questioning the 'given' answers.

For those brave enough to ask why, their dilemma now lies not in how to get their ideas heard by the ones who phone it in, but whether or not it's even worth it to ask why at all. Many are leaving to build their own dreams, to bet on themselves rather than on a big corporation. The world of business should be afraid. To survive in this new economy, corporations need the questioners much more than the questioners need the big corporations.

I laid in my bed, realizing that these questioners are the next great breed of entrepreneurs, the next batch of people who are on the verge of jumping from the safe, secure cliff and changing the world as we know it. And then I asked myself the question, "Will I be brave enough to count myself among them?" I waited long into the night for an answer to come from the darkness, and with the sun my own heart rose up to speak a quiet, strong, clear "yes".

My Year of Hopefulness - Visions and Plans

2009-11-21T23:29:00.004-05:00

"How could a vision ever be given to someone to harbor if that person could not be trusted to carry it out? The message is simple: commitment precedes vision." ~ High Eagle

In San Jose, we stopped at an artisan market to buy gifts for family and friends back home. The market was filled with stalls that contained crafts of all kinds from coffee mugs to home goods to jewelry. I found some things for my family and purchased a journal for myself, of course, handmade from materials from a coffee plant. I am using it to write down my dreams for each part of my life. On this trip, a number of paths rolled out before me and I wanted to make sure to capture them as they revealed their many details.

In Costa Rica I found the space to breath and dream, the space to craft visions of what I want my life to be going forward. Bringing these dreams to life will take some short-term sacrifices, financially and personally, though the long-term pay off is well worth it. Realizing what I can live without has given me so much freedom. I don't feel weighted down by needs and wants. I feel lighter and feel that my life is both full and fulfilling. Many of the volunteers I worked with have taken this similar path, simplifying and downsizing their lives, taking a chance on big dreams. It was very inspiring and encouraging to be among them and to hear their stories. Like me, they were a little hesitant and a little scared, and they kept going anyway.

On the plane back to the U.S., I allowed my mind to wander. I didn't multi-task the way I have on every other flight I've ever been on. I simply started down one vision, turning over every stone, concentrating on all of the beautiful little details, and recording them in my coffee plant book. Within the pages of this book, I have put fear aside and written down my wildest aspirations without judging them in any way. I let the visions show up, knowing that High Eagle was absolutely right - of course I have the ability to bring them to life. If I'm committed to building a better life for myself and for others, then visions and the ability to make them my reality will follow. It is invigorating to be grounded in so much faith.

My Year of Hopefulness - Sunshine and Rain

2009-11-20T19:07:00.002-05:00

"There is no passion to be found playing small - in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living." ~ Nelson Mandela

By nature, I have a very hard time with good-byes. Today was our last day with the abuelitos, people I have grown to love in such a short period of time. How is it that in 4 days for a total of 12 hours, I have come to care so much about people whom I barely know? How is it that our hearts open up so freely to so many in this beautiful, foreign country?

We were encouraged by Oscar, the activities director, and Dona Sandra, the passionate owner of the Center at San Raphael, to say ‘hasta luego’ (‘see you later’) rather than ‘adios’ (a more permanent good-bye). I settled on a saying that I heard all the time when I traveled to Venezuela 15 years ago, ‘via con Dios’ (go with God), and I meant it more than anything I’ve ever said in my life. In my heart I knew that is was quite possible that I might never see any of these abuelitos again and I suppose that’s why the tears came so freely and quickly despite my desire to hold them back. Among people who love so freely and easily, I have found that in this week I have learned to love more freely, too. And so, the tears of good-bye were unstoppable, as were the smiles. In Costa Rica, the sun often shines as the rain falls, so tears mixed with smiles are only natural.

As predicted, the people here have offered up much more to me than I think I was able to offer them. I wish I spoke Spanish with greater fluency, and I resolve to do so by the time I visit again. I wish I had more time here. I wish I didn’t have so much debt from business school so that I could afford to give more money to groups like CCS to continue their work in communities like San Rafael. I wish I had more freedom to do what I want to do whenever and wherever I want. Travel, and international travel in particular, provides the distance and space we need to allow our dreams to take root.

I returned to the CCS home base with a heavy heart, with so much gladness and sadness – glad that I could be here, glad that I could be helpful, and sad that our time here was rapidly drawing to a close. My favorite part of the CCS home base are all of the quotes and hand prints that past volunteers have put on the walls. Volunteers choose quotes that encapsulate their experience here - the one above by Nelson Mandela was among my very favorites and really got to the heart of how I feel about my life now that I have been in this beautiful place for a week.

The quote I chose for the wall to accompany my hand print at the CCS home base is my favorite, a quote that gives me courage and strength and embodies this idea of “now is the time”. It’s by Victor Hugo, the author of the book Les Miserables, and very simply states, “There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” This idea of carving out the life I want, a life of freedom and mobility and generosity, in this strange and beautiful world is an idea whose time has come.

My time in Costa Rica has confirmed that yes, now is the time for me to go after everything I want in my life: my own business, more international travel, the opportunity to teach yoga and to teach at a university level, the ability to effect public policy to provide a voice to those who need our attention and care, a loving, committed relationship, and much more time with my friends and family. The opportunity for this life has been with me all along, though it took traveling many miles from my home to realize how much is within my grasp. It’s with much thanks and gratitude that I bid farewell to the abuelitos today. They changed my life more than they could ever possibly know and more than I could ever possibly tell them.

My Year of Hopefulness - La Musica de los Ninos

2009-11-19T19:02:00.000-05:00

Today I had the opportunity to visit a day care center in the morning. Maria, one of the other volunteers, needed some extra help with the kids and I raised my hand to go along. The children at the day care are between 8 months and 5 years old, and volunteers spend time playing with them and organizing activities. We made masks from construction paper and popsicle sticks, and played on the slides and swings. Monica, one of the other volunteers, and I spent some time cleaning out a very dirty refrigerator that had been donated to the center. It was full of mildew and mold. Dirty work, though so necessary for the children, and so we were glad to do it.

Later on I had the chance to do yoga with the kids. Teaching yoga to kids is a very different experience that teaching yoga to adults. It’s also very challenging because I have never done a class in Spanish. Thank goodness that Maria, who is originally from Spain, was there to translate! With kids, I find it’s easiest to have flashcards with pictures of animals and things that correspond to different asanas. Frog pose, airplane pose, monkey pose, etc. While adult classes many times focus on silence and on holding a pose for an extended period of time, classes for kids often involve laughing and moving about and making the noise of the very thing the asana is named after. There wasn’t really enough room for the class – the daycare center is a over-crowded – and we had a great time laughing and tumbling over one another anyway. It was the happiest I have been in a very long time.

What immediately struck me at the start of the class is that the sound of children playing is universal, regardless of the language they speak or the country where they live. The sound of laughter and joy is the same the world over. Again, I was reminded today of how much we are able to give to others with such a small amount of effort and time, and how much we receive in return. When we give, our own abundance grows.

My Year of Hopefulness - Honoring Time

2009-11-18T22:24:00.002-05:00

I have only been here three days and I am amazed by how easy it has been to leave behind life in the U.S. for a while. I miss my family, my friends, and my neighborhood, though I don't miss anything else. I can imagine being here for a very long time with no problem at all. It's a delicious feeling, far different than any feeling I have experienced on any other vacation. How did this place begin to feel like home so quickly?

Today I had a chance conversation with another volunteer about her experience working at a school just outside of Cartago. She told me what struck her most was the great honor that Costa Ricans feel when an international volunteer works with them. They know how many other ways people have to spend their time and the fact that people travel from foreign countries to participate with Costa Ricans, improving the neighborhoods in this country, is truly a gift for them. This idea of honoring time is so different from the way so many feel in the U.S., and it is a pervasive sentiment throughout this country. Costa Ricans place the highest value on time and the way that it is spent.

At the senior center today in San Rafael, we spent time coloring with the seniors and making reindeer Christmas ornaments from pipe cleaners, clothes pins, and glitter. These simple activities brought them so much joy. Truly what they wanted was just to spend time with us, to talk to us about our lives and theirs. I continue to be struck by how little people need to be happy here, and how sad it is for us in the U.S. to believe that we need so much. My great hope for today is that once I return to the U.S. on Saturday night, I will be able to embrace the idea of honoring time, my own and that of others, and to hang onto the idea that truly we need so little in the way of material items. I need to find a way to carry a little Costa Rica with me wherever I go.

My Year of Hopefulness - Holy Water

2009-11-17T23:20:00.002-05:00

In the center of Cartago there is a church known as La Basilica de la Virgen de los Angeles. In 1635, it is told that a statue of the Virgin was found in the forest by an Indian girl. She took it home and put it in a box. When she returned to the forest the next day, she found the statue again in the same place. When she went home, the statue was gone from the box. This same sequence of events happened to her several more times. She told her priest about the miracle and he took the statue from the forest and locked it in a box in his church. The statue performed the same miracle, and so it was decreed that the Virgin must have wanted a church built over that very spot in the forest.

On August 2nd every year, Costa Ricans come to La Basilica as a pilgrimage, some walking for days across the country and crawling on their knees from the start of the aisle up to the altar. Several of us went to the church yesterday and today to witness the extreme devotion that Costa Ricans feel for this church and for the Virgin Mary. They come here to ask for help and healing and peace and luck, something we can all use a little more of. There is a river that flows under the church and there is a small spring where people collect the holy water in bottle, wash their faces in it, and drink it as an elixir of all things in their lives that they wish to come true, things that they wish to change.

I am not a religious person, and haven't been for a long time, though I do find religion to be a compelling area of study and I do believe fervently in a higher purpose and power. I do believe we are all connected; my religion is simply kindness. Hearing the miracles that the church has performed for people in Costa Rica, I felt compelled to pay my respects, to ask the Universe for help me now at this time in my life as I make big changes to transform it into the life I want to live, and I did wash my face in the holy water.

Sometimes, we must accept that there are things that do not make sense to us, things that happen and sources of power that we cannot see nor explain. I don't know if the Virgin appeared in the forest and I don't know that a church needed to be built on that site in Cartago. I do know that faith is a very powerful feeling, that it is capable of accomplishing that which we cannot possibly accomplish without it. I do believe in our ability to change, and every once in a while I believe that miracles really do happen. Today, was one of those days.

I left the church and I did feel a little bit more brave as I headed back to the house. Perhaps bravery and our ability to change that which we do not like in our lives is a miracle in and of itself.

My Year of Hopefulness - Turn Right at the Fancy House

2009-11-16T21:00:00.001-05:00

(Internet has returned to my house in Costa Rica so I can begin recording all of my experiences here so long as the connection holds - 'via a Dios'.)

I am famously bad with directions. I never know where I'm going, even with a map. I have to repeat the same path many times over and mentally make note of landmarks along the way. I suppose I could hunker down and just get a little bit better at this skill, though to be honest I've just gotten comfortable feeling lost. I enjoy it because every road, whether I've been on it or not, is a new adventure this way.

Imagine my great happiness to learn that there is an entire country full of people with this same issue! In Costa Rica, there are no postal addresses. There is barely a postal service at all. Address are something akin to 'go 25 meters east from the large yellow building with the slat windows and blue shutters, then turn north at the Soda Pollo (literally means Chicken Restaurant) and go another 100 meters until you reach two little stray dogs, one brown and one black, that are always outside an orange house'. As our program manager, Santi, said when giving us directions to our volunteer placement, "Turn right at the fancy house and walk up the hill."

This is the greatest pleasure of travel - to learn the customs and history and culture of other people, to realize that our little lives in our little cities, no matter how big they are, are just one tiny slice of life on this planet. We learn that there are so many other options to conduct our lives. For people like me who are considering a jump off the cliff, travel helps us see that what to us seems like a big risk is not really a big risk at all. It is just a step change; it is just a different choice and this realization is a great comfort.

There are so many people on my program who made this same leap into a different life. Their courage is encouraging me, inspiring me. I know I am here in the lovely town of Cartago, today, for a very specific reason. I know I was brought here at this time in my life to help me see that this different way forward that I imagine is not only possible, but probable, bordering on certainty. The comfort I am finding in this house, with these people, in this town, in this beautiful and loving country, is a great gift.

Internet in Costa Rica

2009-11-16T20:42:00.002-05:00

The internet in Costa Rica is horrendous and everything else is incredible. I will likely be unable to post to this blog for the remainder of this week, but never fear. I´ll be writing every day and will upload all of the posts when I return to the U.S. this weekend.

I will say that the people in Costa Rica are among the friendliest and most genuine I´ve ever met. My Spanish is flooding back into my mind, and I immediately felt at home here. In just one day, I have so much to share. This is a place of tremendous healing and happiness. This will be a turning point in my life that I will look back on with great fondness.

Hasta Domingo....

My Year of Hopefulness - Finding Pura Vida

2009-11-15T20:00:00.002-05:00

Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer. Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in at a glance and a lack of harmony and proportion is more readily seen." ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

I don't know how the folks at Daily Good are able to sit in my head 24/7 but they've done it again. This quote showed up in my inbox today, the day I leave on a vacation I've been planning for almost a year.

I’ve had the good fortune to travel a lot as an adult – both for work and for leisure. It should have come as no surprise to me that my travel to Costa Rica would be just what I needed to lift myself up out of sadness, disappointment, frustration, loss, and anger of the last few months. I agree that so often what’s needed is a change of self and not a change of scene – I just find that a change of scene, even if it’s just for a short time, kick starts the change of self.

I left for the airport at 5am – my preferred leave time when I’m traveling. I like to jump up out of bed, throw on my clothes, grab my bags, and run to the M60 bus that carries me away to LaGuardia airport. On the bus this morning, my mind was still reeling from some circumstances in my life that I cannot change. I just couldn’t let go; I couldn’t clear my head.

I boarded the plane and stashed my carry-on bag. I was worried. “Are my disappointments going to follow me around for the next weeks? Are they going to ruin this vacation I’ve been planning for almost a year?” I thought. And then I heard the announcements come over the loudspeaker in Spanish. I have been practicing my Spanish, reminding myself of vocabulary and grammatical structures that I haven’t thought about in years. The excitement began to mount.

I leaned my head against the window as we backed away from the gate, my Spanish phrasebook in hand. “Please God, let this go well,” I prayed. The whirring of the plane’s engines put me to sleep for about 30 minutes, and I woke up to a face full of sunshine. We had broken through the cloud cover. We had soared to a place where my disappointments could not go – I literally felt them fall away and go crashing to the ground below. I imagined them as angry little characters down there on the ground I could no longer see, shaking their fists at me as I went on my way without them. And then they hung their heads and sulked away, lamenting the one, me, who got away.

In Costa Rica, the common greeting that people exchange is “Pura Vida”, which literally translates to “Pure Life”. From the moment I set foot in this beautiful country, I vowed to embrace that as my motto going forward, no matter where in the world I am. I will be my one guiding principle for how to live each moment: with the feeling of being truly alive. The time of contentment and “good enough” and “maybe tomorrow” is not an option anymore – I left those sentiments back there with my disappointments, far below the cloud cover.

The image above is not my own. It can be found here.

My Year of Hopefulness - You Get What You Give

2009-11-14T08:39:00.000-05:00

"What I know for sure is that what you give comes back to you." ~ Oprah Winfrey

I'm off to Costa Rica tomorrow on a volunteer project with Cross-Cultural Solutions. A lot of people have asked me why I chose to do a volunteer vacation. Why would I spend my vacation working? There are several small reasons: I did a volunteer vacation in the south of France in 2005 and loved it, it's a great way to truly experience the culture of a new country, it's a fun way to travel alone without being alone, and I enjoy meeting new people more than I enjoy just about anything else. The true reason I'm volunteering on vacation? It's good for the world - Oprah's right, as usual. What we give comes back to us, and I would add that it comes back to us 10-fold.

Though I am volunteering to help others, truly it's me that I'm helping. I am certain that the Cross-Cultural Solutions program will teach me and help me far more than I could ever teach or help anyone else. It's an interesting fact about service - you go into it to help others and you're the one who ends up with the greatest benefit from the work. In theory, this doesn't make sense. In practice, it is most certainly true.

For the past few months I've heard a lot of people wishing out loud. They need a better job, a better place to live, better relationships, better health. They have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to acquire these things, and I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how I can help them. I wonder if service might be the best remedy for wishing.

I wonder if it's really true that what we seek for ourselves we can obtain by providing that very thing for someone else. Love, confidence, money, health, a positive outlook on life, trust, friendship, courage. Our list of wishes is never-ending, and therefore the number of opportunities for service is unlimited. How do our lives change if we take on the view "we only get what we give"? And in the process, how can this view change the whole world? I'll let you know if I find some answers in Costa Rica. Talk to you tomorrow from beautiful Cartago!

My Year of Hopefulness - Safety in Change

2009-11-13T21:50:00.003-05:00

"It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power." ~ Alan Cohen

My friend, Rob, and I were talking about safety a few weeks ago. Rob talked to me about how we've conned ourselves into believing that a company, a job, can give us some feeling of security and stability when really it's a house of cards. I've seen it happen to so many of my friends - they are cranking along in their jobs, exhibiting exceptional performance and results, and then the pink slip. Rob's advice on my news of moving on: "You've done the hard part: making the choice to step outside the box that hems one in, and keeps one from dreaming bigger dreams...know you are supported from many quadrants. More as it goes..."

I emailed some friends about my impending jump off the cliff. I told them that it feels great to have made this decision, though my friend, Eric, in his characteristic empathy sensed that I'm scared. And then in his continuing characteristic empathy, he responded : "Don't worry, Christa - I already hit rock bottom underneath that cliff - so I'll be there to catch you!" Not at all surprising since Eric honestly saved my life as I muddled through my MBA. My friend Laura simply responded "I am 150000% behind you." My friend, Allan, said "You are very brave and thoughtful." These are the very messages I needed today to lift me up.

When I think about finding security and stability, I'm reminded that it's in our friends and family and in the chance we take on our own abilities that we can find a haven. The safest route for me is not to stand on that cliff hoping that it doesn't crumble beneath me; it's to jump, knowing that friends like Rob, Eric. Laura, and so many others are there to catch me if I need catching. They are the ones I can place my faith and trust in.

My friend, Jamie, finished up his last day at his job today. We went for a celebratory dinner, yummy cheap Thai food around the corner from my apartment at Sura. We toasted to our new adventures, to our choice to be free and to build the lives we want to live. And while there is still that underlying ripple of fear of the unknown, fear of what's next, there is also a tremendous sense of excitement, of realizing that we are on the edge of becoming more ourselves.

I was reminded all day today, through so many different channels, that in September I came very close to never getting a tomorrow. I stood on West 96th Street, watching smoke billow out of my building, realizing I was living a life of great comfort and little meaning. That great "what if" hangs over my head every day, and rather than being plagued by it, I am so grateful for it. What if I hadn't made it out of that building? What if that was the end? Could I have looked back on September 4th and said, "yes, I'm so glad that I was living that life?" No - not at all. In that moment, change became not an option, but an inevitability, and it's been driving me forward, upward, and onward toward a life lived with greater meaning, greater purpose, every day since.

The image above is not my own. It can be found here.

My Year of Hopefulness - The Gift of Curiosity

2009-11-12T21:14:00.003-05:00

"You can't always be happy, but you can almost always be profoundly aware and curious, and reap the psychological and physical benefits. Thankfully, curiosity is not a fixed characteristic. It's a strength we can develop and wield on the path to a more fulfilling life." ~ Todd Kashdan

This quote has special meaning for me today. I learned about some unkind things that someone in my life has been spreading around about me, things that simply are just not true. This isn't someone I trusted, or someone I even liked for that matter, but it is someone I see every day and who has some impact on my life. At first I was a little shocked to learn this information, though now that I reflect on this person a bit more, it all makes sense really.

In the first few minutes of learning this information I was very unhappy. If someone drags my name through the mud because of something I actually did, then I'll take the consequences. To say things that just aren't true is another thing entirely. And then after a few minutes, I had a good laugh at myself. I had turned the corner to curiosity. Why would she do this? What could she possibly hope to gain from it?

Life throws us curve balls all the time, things we don't understand, things that make us anxious and weary. I'm finding that the trick is to develop one good question from each difficult situation, one lesson learned that we can hang our hat on and use going forward. Curiosity dissipates unhappiness and anger, it frees us up to be the kind of people we'd like to be, to live the kind of lives we'd like to live. It provides us with possibilities.

My Year of Hopefulness - Climb Up A Ways

2009-11-11T19:36:00.005-05:00

One of the first Broadway shows I worked on was Cabaret at Studio 54. I would sit in the back of the theatre night after night and watch that story unfold, every show more beautiful than the show before. One of my favorite lines is from Herr Schultz (played by Ron Rifkin) to Fräulein Schneider (played by Blair Brown). Herr Schultz is trying to convince Fräulein Schneider to enter into a relationship with him, despite the fact that he is Jewish and the world is looking a little bleak for people of his heritage. He tells her that the apples at the base of tree are easy to pick up, though the fruit at the top of tree, if she is willing to climb up a ways, is so much sweeter. I worked on that show almost 11 years ago, and still I think of that line and how applicable it is to our lives every day.

I feel comfortable admitting in this blog post that very soon I will be moving on to a new position in my career. I've had an honest conversation with my boss and explained my intentions. I hope she understands. At the end of the day, the future of her team that she's laid out is just not what gets me going. I completely understand that she's in charge of the team and has every right to change the direction of the bus. My obligation is to decide whether or not to whole-heartedly get on the bus. I've decided to actively look for a new bus, and there are some stupendous options on the horizon.

Some people think I'm a little crazy for making this move. I've done a lot of good work in my position; I've built solid relationships that would serve me so well and get me promoted quickly. If only I could put my head down, keep my mouth shut, and phone it in just the way that I've been scripted, I'd be just fine. I could coast right through to the end of this recession no matter how long it lasts.

Those who know me a bit better just smile and nod when I say I'm looking for new opportunities that get me up out of bed in the morning. They know I'm not built for coasting. Yes, coasting is much easier in that it requires no exertion on my part. The trouble is that for me coasting is just an unbearable existence. Putting the pedal to the metal and 'trying to get up that great big hill of hope' is more my style. Herr Schultz was right: The vistas up there are so much wider and more open and beautiful. Fräulein Schneider didn't know what she was missing.

The photo above is not my own. It can be found here.

My Year of Hopefulness - The Great Progression

2009-11-10T17:00:00.000-05:00

"We must be silent before we can listen. We must listen before we can learn. We must learn before we can prepare. We must prepare before we can serve. We must serve before we can lead." ~ William Arthur Ward

The Universe is trying to tell me something. Here I am on Day 2 with no voice. I can get out a squeak here and there. My friends have commented that I sound like a cross between Marge Simpson and those people on talk shows who want their identities to remain hidden. There is an odd kind of peace found in being silent. I can be silent about as long as I can sit still, which is to say roughly 5 seconds or so. At the moment, the universe is not giving me any choice in the matter. So I'm parked on my couch, being vewy, vewy quiet....

Those telepathic folks over at DailyGood sent me this quote last night about silence. I have definitely felt conflicting messages flooding my life lately - how to keep up and slow down at the same time, how to balance the effort to enjoy our lives with a constant eye on achievement and success. These are tough things to do. They don't all play nicely together in the sandbox and often make us feel like we are at odds with ourselves.

So what if we begin with silence. My great hope is that you have not been forced into silence like me, but that it's something you can choose, just for an hour or two. What can we find in silence? What kind of ideas can we get by sitting and being and doing nothing else? What do we listen to when we quiet our audible voice and the narrative inside our own minds?

Today, I am listening to the message that my life has many options. I don't feel trapped at all - right now I feel like I have more options before me than I have ever had in my life. I am now most concerned with how to provide myself with the greatest amount of flexibility and freedom possible. And I'm learning that there are many ways to be free. We are free as soon as we choose to be.

I've also found that every day for the past several months I am learning so much about myself. I am becoming increasingly aware of what I enjoy and don't enjoy, what makes me happy and what makes me sad, what kind of people I want to surround myself with and sadly which people I must release from my life, at least for now. I'm learning about the contribution I want to make to humanity, and I'm learning how my actions and words effect others and vice versa. To tell you the truth, it's fun, albeit sometimes a little exhausting, to be in a state of hyper-learning.

And now the preparation. I was on the subway yesterday riding home from work and reading the following on one of the NYC subway posters: "If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it. ~ Abraham Lincoln, A House Divided" This sentiment was true not only for the U.S. in 1858, when Lincoln made this speech, but for our own lives as well. Silence and listening leads us to know the first first piece of Lincoln's statement so that we can then prepare, serve, and lead our futures.

I'm finding it very hard to have different segments of my life call for a different kind of personality. I certainly believe in and practice the principle of knowing my audience, though I also believe ardently that we must be authentic at every moment, we must be more like who actually are at every moment. In this new life that I am creating for myself, filled with freedom and flexibility, I am preparing the way, offering myself a variety of options for income and making way for opportunities to pursue whatever makes me happy and piques my interest. Yoga, teaching, creating products and services, writing, travel, and research. With solid preparation, it is all possible.

All this preparation leads us to serve the world and our own happiness in the best way for each of us. We all have unique talents and abilities. The way to happiness for one of us is not necessarily the way to happiness for someone else. We have different priorities and interests, we have different goals and different paths we'd like to take to get to those goals. The key is to always ask "is this the best way forward? Am I providing an optimal amount of service by going about my life this particular way."

And then finally all of our service leads us naturally on to leadership. Leadership is a funny thing. While there are some that feel the best way to lead is with strong opinions, to develop a clear delineated chain of command structure, I couldn't disagree more. To me, leadership is service in its highest form. As a leader, and by leadership I don't mean a title but a behavior, my only role is to serve those I'm leading, to lift them up to be the very best people they can become, to lead the very best lives possible.

I have been abundantly blessed with great leaders in my life, in my family, at work, in school, and among my friends, people who actively gave me tough advice and great support and love all at once. The greatest hope of my life as I begin Act 2 is that I can bundle up that advice, love, and support for others who I will lead going forward, whether they are in a classroom, at work, or people who come to me for any kind of advice or help. Success will be that I can impart any wisdom on them with the same degree of grace and humility that my leaders have shown me. And then I will be certain that the great progression that Williams Arthur Ward discusses will be well on its way.

The images above is not my own. It can be found here.

Examiner.com: Interview with Lorin Rokoff and Laura Paterson, Founders of Hot Blondies Bakery

2009-11-10T12:17:00.003-05:00

I learned about Hot Blondies Bakery through Crain’s. They were the headline business in a feature article about online bakeries. A friend of mine from business school is considering a similar avenue so I opened up the Crain’s article to have a peek at what these ladies were up to. Laura's and Lorin's story of making the leap from stable jobs to entrepreneurship was inspiring so I hopped over to their site. Their market positioning and branding is unique and fun – I like the edge they take with their baking and they clearly have the business savvy to match their sumptuous baked goods!

Find the interview here.

My Year of Hopefulness - Make Big Decisions Real

2009-11-09T20:07:00.005-05:00

"A problem well defined is half solved." ~ John Dewey

Just when you think you have it all figured out life does something very funny - it changes everything on us. We get thrown an option that we never even imagined as a possibility. This recently happened to me while I was in the middle of making a very big decision. I thought I just had to choose between A and B, A being far superior to B, so superior that it didn't even seem like a choice at all. Enter choice C, a real choice. Houston, we now have a big decision to make and this one is not easy.

I've got several mechanisms for deciding between options. I'm a fan of the pro con lists. I like talking to lots of different people and getting their perspectives on what they'd do if they were me. I've also been known to just wait and see in silence until some helpful piece of info emerges. This latest decision is a bit more complicated. B and C are actually equally great options. I'd be lucky to have the opportunity to pursue either avenue. Now it looks like I'll have the chance to choice, and they will lead me in wildly different, happy directions. This is the classic case of two roads diverged in a yellow wood.

For inspiration in my decision-making, I was reading through some of my books this weekend and came across a few books by ?WhatIf! Innovation. In How to Have Kick-Ass Ideas, Chris Baréz-Brown talks about the very personal decision-making he and his wife went through when they were deciding whether or not to have children. To make their choice, they decided to live their life for a week as if they had decided to not have kids. This helped them live their through the lens of that decision, sort of like a test-drive of a car. After that week they re-evaluated their choice to see if it felt right.

Chris's method is vastly superior than my pro con lists and asking 100 different people what they would do. His method makes the choice more personal and lets us experience some of the consequences that hit us shortly after we make a choice. In truth, I'm a little scared of this process and I'm going for it anyway. I've recently noticed that one of my areas of personal improvement is to see the downside of a situation as clearly as I see the upside. Chris's process will allow me to not only see the downside, but experience it. It brings a certain reality to the situation. If tough decisions need anything at all, it's a healthy dose of reality. I'll let you know what I find in a week!

If you've never read Chris's book, I highly recommend it. It's a perfect, inspiring read for anyone at a crossroads looking for guidance from one of the world's leading creative minds. Get it here.

My Year of Hopefulness - The Power of Silence

2009-11-08T20:52:00.004-05:00

"Let us love, since our heart is made for nothing else." ~ St. Therese

I have completely lost my voice to this cold I have been fighting. I can barely eek out an audible whisper. This is especially hilarious because talking is one of my favorite activities. Truly, I've been known to have a very interesting conversation with a brick wall. I talk to myself in my apartment, as I'm working through problems. I have lots and lots of opinions on just about everything. And now I have been silenced.

I was in DC this weekend with a load of my business school friends for our friends' Chris and Steph's wedding. I don't know that I've ever seen a groom that happy. Seriously, if Chris's smile was any wider his face would have cracked. It was wonderful to see someone I love so much so happy.

After the wedding and reception, my voice was really getting hoarse. The trouble with this sore throat is that it is not currently accompanied by any other symptoms. I feel fine; I just sound a little funny. Actually, I sound a lot funny. To get the blood flowing in my throat, I went to a yoga class with my friend, Julie, at 9am. I always learn so much going to a yoga class. I watch for teaching technique and I invariably learn a new pose or a new way of thinking about a pose that allows me to deepen my practice and teaching.

In Savasana, corpse pose, I was completely relaxed, or so I thought. Savasana is done at the end of virtually every yoga practice. It allows our bodies and minds to approach a meditative state after being worked through the preceding asanas. People have become so relaxed in Savasana that they've been known to fall into a sleep / dream state.

The teacher came around to each of us, pressing our shoulders firmly to the mat and down away from our ears. Until she did this, I didn't realize that I was holding any tension there at all. In fact, I was scrunching up my heart a bit. With the teacher's pressure, my heart opened with a little bit of a creak and a crack. I felt lighter. I felt a bit more love.

It is an amazing thing about silence and time with friends and yoga and the witnessing of an act of love and commitment. In the past few months, I have been shown how risky and wonderful loving with an open heart can be. I looked around at the wedding reception: at Chris and Steph, of course, and also at my friends Daphne and Eric, and Courtney and Brian, also newly married this year. Their lives are richer for having one another. There is this unspoken chemistry that just works with all of them. At some point, they must have all been a little bit scared, too, maybe afraid to keep their hearts open. Somehow, they worked through that fear and emerged happy and healthy and whole to find another person happy and healthy and whole with an open heart ready to love them.

Today I felt more certain than ever that eventually I'd find the guy for me. That creaking and cracking of my heart was symbolic of that openness I've been able to find in the second half of this year. In the midst of my forced silence and voluntary yoga practice, my heart and my mind came together, my mind accepting that this heart o' mine after being put through the fire many times is now shined and polished and poised for the kind of love and commitment that so many of my friends have generously shown can work.

The image above is not my own. It can be found here.

My Year of Hopefulness - The Invitation

2009-11-07T13:55:00.000-05:00

I am still sort of getting my new home set up. I’m having a hard time getting myself entirely set up. I’m sure this is being brought on by some left over emotional fall-out from the fire. I suppose I’m scared and worried that all of this will just got up in smoke again, literally. On Friday night, after a very long tough week, I rounded the corner to my apartment building to find my street littered with fire trucks and flashing lights and big brawny fire fighters in their gas masks and black and yellow suits. Pre-September 5^th, my first thought upon seeing this kind of scene was “I hope everyone is okay.” On Friday night, my first thought was “not again”. As Dinah Washington said, “What a difference a day makes.”

The fire on Friday wasn’t in my apartment building, it was across the street, and no one was hurt. I asked the fire fighters. I went upstairs to my apartment grateful that everything was still the exact way I left it Friday morning. Just inside my front door, there’s a piece of art that I read every morning. It’s a poem by Oriah Mountain Dreamer, an Indian Elder, which I wrote out many years ago in my nicest penmanship on fancy paper. It was one of the few things to survive my apartment building fire, and I am sure that is not a coincidence.

There are a few lines in this poem that have really effected me as of late:

Can you disappoint others to be true to yourself?

Can you stand in the centre of your sorrow and still shout at the great Silver Moon, “yes!”?

Do you like the company you keep in the empty moments?

Being true to yourself:

This can manifest in our careers, relationships to others, in how we spend our free time. It’s hard work to be true to ourselves, it’s tough for us to get over the guilt of what we think we owe to others. And too often we disappoint ourselves for the sake of others. In truth, we let people down even more when we aren’t authentic, when we feign happiness instead of actually being happy.

Stand in the centre of our sorrow:

Disappointments and sadness are a part of life. I’ve known people who deal with their sadness by using it as fuel for creating happiness. I consider all of my friends who have recently lost their jobs and used their job loss as an opportunity to do something they’ve always wanted to do. These are the people who shout “yes”, yes to the goodness of life, even if life at that very moment is not very good at all. These are the people who keep me feeling hopeful in times that seem so bleak. They are my inspiration.

Unfortunately, I’ve also known people who use their sadness and disappointment as a way to make themselves and everyone around them miserable. These are people who can’t commit, who can’t seem to build healthy relationships, and as a result feel constantly alone and disconnected. They stand in the middle of their sorrow and sulk. Temporary sulking is okay – we all need to sulk once in a while. We just can’t let it get the best of the us.

The empty moments:

Someone who smiles when no one around is a person who is truly happy. These are the people I want in my life, people who like their own company. My friend, Ken, is someone I look to as this example. Ken could spend all day in his house by himself and have the best day of his life. He is someone who loves the empty moments.

Below is Oriah Mountain Dreamer’s poem, The Invitation. I hope it helps you as much as it has helped me for so many years:

"It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.

It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.

I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals.

I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own; if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, be realistic.

I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul.

I want to know if you can see Beauty even when it is not pretty every day. And if you can source your own life from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure, and still stand at the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, 'Yes.'

It doesn't interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments."

My Year of Hopefulness - No Choice but to Help

2009-11-06T22:00:00.000-05:00

Sometimes people ask me why I feel so called to service, why I feel passionately about giving back, particularly in the areas of education and poverty. Why do I spend time in the South Bronx and East Harlem? Here is the answer in cold, hard data: a study was recently done on the student population of the top 146 countries in the U.S. Over 70% come from the wealthiest 25% of families. Only 3% come from the poorest 25% of families. That's me, down there in the latter group. I went to a top university not once, but twice, and I may be on my way to a third if I'm lucky. I beat the odds, big time.

I learned about this study through Michael Sandel's weekly lecture on Justice. It hit me like a ton of bricks. 3%? Really? My mother always told me I was special, but stats like that don't make me feel special. They make me sad and angry and frustrated. And I've learned that sadness, anger, and frustration are great motivators for change if we harness them properly. That's what I do in my community service - I'm harnessing those feelings and using them to turn around the very situation that made me feel those feelings in the first place. It's my attempt at leveling the playing field.

In this week's Justice class, Sandel talks about the distribution of wealth, a favorite topic of mine and one that I think about every day of my ridiculously blessed life. I constantly wrestle with feelings of pride in my accomplishments, guilt over my lifestyle (which is modest, but good), and the obligation I have to help others who live in the same type of situation I faced as a child. I firmly stand behind the belief that those of great fortune must take on great responsibility.

Shutting ourselves up in our little homes tucked away in safe little neighborhoods is a recipe for disaster. Tom Friedman famously said "if you don't visit the bad neighborhoods, the bad neighborhoods will visit you." (Ironically, or not, Tom Friedman and his wife Ann, are two of the largest donors that make Michael Sandel's free online class possible.) I hold that thought at the front of my mind as much as possible.

Friedman is very clearly stating that the ability to choose our involvement with people who need our help is not a choice at all. We choose by our action or by our failure to act - the choice between these two options effects whether or not our worlds collide in a positive or negative event. There is no way to our worlds from mingling. By being involved, we have the opportunity to make the collision a positive one. The alternative shows up in our prisons and on the sad headlines of papers and news programs across this country.

What keeps me going most of all in my service work is knowing that there were a lot of people who gave of themselves so I could have the education and opportunity I had at Penn and at UVA. There were policy makers and elected officials who fought for my access to student loans at affordable rates. There were donors who made gifts to these universities so that I could be granted financial aid and top quality resources. There were teachers and mentors and staff members who made it the work of their lives to help students get the very best education possible so long as they were willing to work hard.

A lot of people gave an awful lot of themselves to help total strangers like me - I'll never meet them all; I'll never even know all of their names. And still I owe them a huge amount of gratitude. I show that gratitude by paying it forward to others, and I hope the people I help will be willing and able to pay it forward, too. It's the only way we're going to make this world a better place for everyone. We've got to come together; we've got to show up for one another.

The image above is not my own. It can be found here.

The World's Strongest Librarian cites Christa In New York and The Journal of Cultural Conversation

2009-11-06T07:58:00.004-05:00

This morning I was was thrilled to learn that Josh Hanagarne, one of my writing role models and author of the wildly popular blog World's Strongest Librarian, named this blog and The Journal of Cultural Conversation (TJCC) as 2 of the 6 blogs he loves to read. I am humbled and honored, as is pal Laura, the mastermind behind TJCC.

For Josh's full post, click here.

My Year of Hopefulness - Making It Happen: The Great Opportunity Before Us

2009-11-05T22:10:00.006-05:00

In the past few months I've become a big fan of the DailyOm. I don't know how those people on the other side of that message know exactly what to say at the exact moment I need to hear their sage words of the day. All I know is that every time I open their emails, I feel like they're living inside my mind. My pal and writing partner, Laura, introduced me to this email and I've been basking in its glow ever since.

Today's message: "There are times in our lives when all the signs seem to be pointing us in a particular direction. Our thoughts and dreams are echoed in the songs and stories we hear and the media we see. And when we are open and listening, the next step is to take action and go for it. Wherever your dreams are pointing you today, take a step. Take action and manifest your inner urges and soul whisperings."

Now is the moment of our own reinvention. Tonight I went to a Darden alumni event about innovation and entrepreneurship. I had the chance to speak with one of our Deans who was hosting the event. I asked him how the students are feeling, how the faculty is feeling. Are they scared, nervous, concerned, anxious? In his signature calming style, he said that there is a lot of concern flying around Charlottesville, though this is really the time to reinvent, to become a better version of ourselves. Yes, we could hang our heads low and bemoan all of the change that we are facing. We could pine for the good ol' days. Instead, the Dean was advocating for a new and crazy good way forward. I couldn't agree more.

Yesterday evening, after a day spent in bed not feeling so great, I got up and stretched and went to my yoga mat. I meditated, moved through a series of asanas (the fancy name for yoga poses), and let myself accept a new way forward in my life, free from fear and anxiety about change. In the words of my brilliant yoga teacher, Johanna, I assumed a strength pose with the intention "bring it on". I am ready for massive upheaval and change within my own heart and mind, a crazy good way forward.

I rolled up my yoga mat, logged onto Mac, and signed up for a yoga teacher training class at my yoga studio which will begin in February. I've wanted to have this full certification for a long time, and the time has arrived. This is my next step toward a life of multiple income streams pursuing things I love. This is my next bend in the road of reinventing me.

The image above is not my own. It can be found here.

The Journal of Cultural Conversation - Keep It Positive

2009-11-04T21:16:00.002-05:00

Latest post on The Journal of Cultural Conversation: Keeping it Positive and what I do to maintain optimism in the current economy. It's a bit more business-y than our signature cultural posts. One of my economics professors at Darden always opened his classes by saying economics is the most relevant of all subjects to study because it underpins everything we do in the world. He's a bit biased of course being an economist, though I completely agree. Money talks and (fill in the blank) walks.

Take a peek at the article, let us know what you think, and give us any feedback on our new site design, too. Click here for the article.