We only got 86,400 seconds in a day
To turn it all around or throw it all away
Gotta tell ‘em that we love ‘em while we got the chance to say
Gotta live like we’re dying
-Kris Allen, Live Like We’re Dying

I have heard the words, “Don’t rush, be patient, there’s plenty of time,” more times in my life than I can count.  I hear it often because I am impulsive and I am impetuous, traits considered to be faults by many people.

I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine about his Bucket List and his decision to begin actively checking items off it.  I’ve never felt a need to make one for myself; I generally decide I want to experience something – skydive, visit Hawaii, spend a month traveling Europe – and just make it happen.

Lately, however, I’ve been waiting, being patient, fighting my own nature, not developing ideas about new places I want to see or experiences I want to have, not setting goals for myself or my business.

Cooper and I have stayed pretty close to home, sad about all the big life changes that have shaken us up.  And it’s been making me miserable, because I’m going against my nature, heading upstream in a life that is much better suited to going where the current leads it.

My “live like it’s your last day” lifestyle has roots planted deep in my past, stemming from a need to fully experience every day I’ve been given.  My dad died when he was 38, sixteen days after I was born.  This is a fact that stays with me, haunts me, scares me away from patience the way many people stay away from the cliffs I so willingly jump off.

If I avoid major disaster or illness and am given the same amount of time my father had on this earth, that leaves me with ten years, five months and six days left to live.  Barely a decade.  If I knew for sure that was all I’d get, then that’s not a lot of time to fit in all the living I want to do.

So, armed with this knowledge, I follow my heart the best I can.  I try to live as good an existence as possible, love when I love, cry when I cry, fold when my heart says it’s time.  And always, I hear the echoes of, “Be patient, don’t rush, you’ve got plenty of time.”

I’ve been listening to those voices too much lately, staying away from the cliffs that have always brought me joy.  I’ve had plenty of time and I’ve wasted unbelievable amounts of it.  I’ve been doing it the past several weeks, drifting because I failed, I got burned, I was on the losing side of something I gave my whole heart and soul to, forced to admit defeat after throwing caution to the wind.

And yet, the beauty of leaping is sometimes the fall.  Once I land, hopefully on my feet and not my face, I reassemble myself, and I’m always pleasantly surprised to find that while the rough landing might have damaged some pieces that weren’t securely attached, everything else seems to have been rearranged to fit a little more snugly, strengthening my foundation.

Life is meant to be lived.  Hearts are meant to love.  Sometimes hearts break, and sometimes life goes off track, and that’s the price you pay for the privilege of waking up on the right side of the grass.  I’m so grateful for the opportunity to live and love and fail and have my heart broken, pick the pieces up and do it all again.

…I’ve never met a cliff that wasn’t worth the leap.

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I, Little Miss “I hike in sneakers!” scaled a 4,340ft, heavily iced-over mountain yesterday, completely by accident.

I see that questioning look – “By accident, Carlene?”  To which I respond, “How long have you known me?”

I love hiking; I love it enough to drag my hungover self out of bed at 7am on a Saturday morning after about four and a half hours’ worth of sleep.

It was compliments of this hangover that I maybe didn’t hear my buddy Chris mention that our little group would be hiking up in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, which are about the equivalent of the Adirondacks in New York, or for the uninformed, full of really big mountains.

Imagine my surprise when the mountains visible from the highway started showing white snow on their peaks.  I am, however, the most gullible human to ever walk this earth, and as Chris had told me that this was an easy hike, I simply admired the scenery and sipped my Dunkin’ Donuts coffee.

Our hiking foursome arrived at the trailhead, shrugged on our packs, and started up the mountain (after, of course, the prerequisite ten minutes of girls needing to pee in the woods and working out the logistics that involved).

At this point I still had no idea that we were about to scale one of the “Four-Thousand Footers” beloved by serious hikers everywhere, and have I mentioned I was wearing sneakers.  For my easy hike.  That I was still hungover for.

So, I enthusiastically marched up the mountain.

One of the reasons I love to hike is because of the length of my legs.  I live in a world of people generally much shorter than me, and hiking allows me to lengthen my stride and mosey up and down the side of a mountain at my own pace.

As I loped along next to Chris (we left the slower girls in the dust almost immediately), he turned and confided in me.

“I didn’t want to tell the girls how long this hike was because it would scare them off.”

I looked at him, curious.  “How long is it?”

Chris laughed, and kept hiking forward.  “It’s about 4,300 feet; the trail is a little over eight miles.”

I stopped dead in my tracks for a full ten seconds.  Um….did I mention the sneakers?  And hangover?  Easy hike?  We’re hiking a FOUR-THOUSAND FOOTER?  I didn’t even pack a lunch.

But, what do you do when you’re halfway up a mountain that turns out to be twice as large as you expected and way out of your current mental state/basic needs/footwear league?

You just keep going til you get to the top.

Along the hike, since I had so much more time than I originally realized, I was able to do a lot of thinking.  Life hasn’t exactly been….easy….lately, and it was nice to be able to work through my thoughts and feelings until I felt as though I had a semblance of order in my brain.

As I worked everything out in my head, the craziest thing happened.  Almost immediately as I started to feel better, I turned a corner in the trail, looked up, and froze in place for the second time of the day.

To back things up for a moment, I had been taken to a random mountain, an hour and a half away from home, and was taken to one of several trailheads leading up the mountain.  The group I was with had been delayed getting out the door, stopped for Dunkin’ Donuts, and a whole manner of other little delays had happened.

There are people who believe in the Universe and there are people who don’t; if I had ever been a person who didn’t believe, it would have changed in that moment, a moment where every coincidence in the world had to happen for me to be in this exact place at this exact time.

I looked up and froze, because in front of me, on top of a random mountain whose name I didn’t even know yet (it was Mt. Osceola, for the record), on an icy trail my sneakers and I had no business being on, was my friend Tim.

As I did when I wrote about my breakup with Ian, I will not tell the story about what happened between Tim and myself.  It’s not the story that’s important; it’s what the consequences were.  In this case, the consequences were that I felt hurt, betrayed, and abandoned by my close friend, who ended up deeply involved in a very personal event in my life.

There were a few moments where Tim and I each could hear the seconds ticking by, completely unsure of what to do, and then Tim shook his head, grimaced, grinned, and finally said, “Holy shit.”

That summed it up fairly well, I thought.  He looked at me and said, “I’ve been driving by your office and thinking about apologizing, and I keep coming up with reasons why I shouldn’t stop by – you might have a client, or be really busy.  I guess fate just took this into its own hands and is saying, ‘Nope, Tim, you’re going to deal with this right now.’”

He and I ended up having a good conversation where he apologized and we cleared the air, and after we hugged and went our separate ways on the mountain, I smiled and thought to myself, “I live a magical life, and I am so very grateful for that.”

Yesterday I climbed my first four-thousand foot mountain, and I did it hungover and in sneakers.  Along the way, I was able to make amends with a situation that had been causing me grief.  And I got to the top of that mountain; I sat on the summit and listened to the silence of Nature, and I felt a little piece of my soul heal.

Yesterday was my proof that as long as I keep my faith in the beauty and magic of this crazy Universe, the Universe will see to it that everything is okay in the end.  And what else could I ask for?

Well, maybe some hiking boots.

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I haven’t blogged much about this sudden and new chapter of my life.  I haven’t known how to say the things I’ve thought and felt without hurting people I know will read my words and take them very seriously.

And so, I haven’t blogged and haven’t really organized my thoughts and feelings in the ways I normally do.

Usually, I would write a song, write a blog entry, write an email to a friend.  I am very good at getting out the poison and bouncing back; the fact that I survived my past and made it out alive, let alone with such an optimistic spirit, is a testament to the level of resiliency in my soul.

This time, I’m still figuring out the best way to bounce back.  There’s nothing to do but fit myself back into the same life, and none of the old pieces fit as neatly as they once did.

I had to leave a man I loved with my entire heart.  I climbed mountains for him, gave him my entire world without hesitation, and I loved him as best as I knew how.  When I love, I love freely and fully.

At one point, Ian was my soulmate.  He possessed an inner light that shone as brightly as mine.  After years of being with people who had tried to take our light without giving any back, it was beautiful to be able to enjoy being in one another’s glow, as equals.

What neither one of us realized was that Ian’s light was only on temporarily.  It wasn’t the case of a “new relationship” sparkle that faded; I had awakened Ian from a deep depression that was stronger than the happiness we brought to each other.

As time went by, Ian slipped deeper and deeper into what he and I now call “Ian World.”  Instead of acting out of love, he started to consistently act from a place of self-fulfillment.  I instantly felt the difference and spent the next year and a half begging for “my Ian” to come back.

And Ian thought I was crazy, that this was just how he was, why couldn’t I be happy with what he was willing to give?

So, as people who love freely and fully do, I looked inside myself.  I said, “Self, we left home for this man, we love him, what can we do to make this love better for both of us?”

And I stopped fighting, learned to channel my anger into conversations, rented out a beautiful office I couldn’t quite afford, and did it willingly and with total love.

It helped.  Things improved, we barely fought anymore, and I started secretly thinking of the period of peace we lived in as the “Pax Romana.”

What I never realized was, if I thought of my relationship as being in an island of peace surrounded by fighting, that must mean I expected the peace to end.

And, as all little life ironies manage to play out, it did.

I don’t want to get into the details of the end of my relationship with Ian.  It’s not the details that are important; what matters are the consequences of those details.

I lost a love I gave my entire heart and soul to, and the losing of it was never my choice.  I couldn’t control it going away, and I can’t force it to come back.

I’ve been fighting against the anger, resentment, the hopelessness of the situation.  As much as I like to act as though I have it more together than I do, I’ve been moving through the five stages of grief as slowly and surely as everyone must.

I may bounce back more quickly than most people, but I still hurt when I hurt and cry when I need to cry.

Until I can accept the end of this chapter of my life, I won’t be able to heal and neither will anyone else in the situation.  This has been the biggest heartbreak I’ve ever experienced, not only from the loss of a partner, but also from the loss of so many of the people who had become my family.

This is the darkest of days; this is when it seems there’s no clear future, where clinging to a past that doesn’t work seems like a better answer than following a new, unmarked road.  I’m scared, and right now even I, the Unrelenting Optimist, am having a hard time finding hope that everything will be okay in the end.

But, fear is part of it all.  We don’t get roadmaps for life, and no matter the situation we are always shooting blind; every step we take out our front doors is a little leap of faith.

There’s a quote in The Secret from Dr. Michael Beckwith that has always struck a chord with me:

“We love to know exactly where we are going and to have control of that venture, but there are times when we travel a path we have chosen and have no idea of how we get there.

Take, for example, a road trip at night: let’s say from Massachusetts to California.

We plan the route carefully and study the map, but our headlights can only illuminate 200 feet ahead, mile after mile.

We can’t see the route but we know we will eventually arrive at our destination. We have to trust that the road is there.

If we cannot trust what lies beyond the headlights then we will never go at all.”

It’s what reminds me that all we can do is continue to walk outside our front doors and take our little leaps of faith, and eventually we will get to where we need to go.

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The Unrelenting Optimist

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One of my friends wrote me about how she likes reading my blog because she can relate to a lot of it.  In my last entry I talked about my own experience with sexual and physical abuse, and she shared some of her own experiences with me, quickly followed up with, “But I’m not saying my experiences were anywhere near as bad as yours…”

I have come across emails very similar to this enough that it’s become a pattern, and I wanted to share my view on something.

I firmly believe that the worst thing that’s ever happened to me is no worse than the worst thing that’s ever happened to anyone else. We all feel the same emotions, and feel them equally as intensely.

The “worst thing that happened to me” may have been psychologically harder to deal with “the worst thing that happened” to another person, but the emotional scars are the same – it’s just that it’s easier to categorize and put away the death of a grandfather than, in my case, an ex-stepfather forcing horrid sexual things on you, especially in a society like ours where “we don’t talk about THAT.”

It seems like there’s a fight to own the “Victim’s Seat” amongst people who have lived hard-knock lives, and I just leave it to them.  If I wrote out my biography and submitted it to the “who’s had the worst life” contest I might get an honorable mention, but then again I grew up in the United States of America with vaccines, trash disposal, and shoes, so I think even with the bad stuff I’ve had it fairly good.

For whatever reason, I’ve been marked to walk a different path than many people.  My father died sixteen days after I was born, my ex-stepfather chose to treat me like a girlfriend instead of a daughter, I had my deepest, darkest secrets taken by the police and shown to a courtroom full of people, I lived through five years of poverty, helped my mom pay the mortgage at sixteen while working three jobs and slicing up my arms.

And know what?  The “worst” thing that’s ever happened to me is still a breakup with a man who broke every bit of my trust.  Just a regular relationship.  That’s my “worst,” not any of the other stuff most people assume is a burden I still bear.

We get a few basic emotions.  We get fear.  We get happiness.  We get sadness, and we get joy.  We get anger, we get love.  And that’s all; that’s what we get.

Don’t be afraid to lay emotions out there; feelings are not a competition.  No one has the right to tell anyone that their grief is less profound, that their happiness is foolish, that their fears are unfounded.  My fear is no more or less important than my friend’s fear.  My anger or sadness does not matter more than yours.

And that’s important to say.

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I get “notes from The Universe” in my inbox each day courtesy of tut.com.  Sometimes the notes are fantastic, sometimes they’re stupid, sometimes they’re so far off in left field that I have to wonder what The Universe was drinking when it typed up a particular gem.

Today’s, however, was great; I loved it because it exactly matched my personal ideology (and who doesn’t feel a little more self-important when they hear their opinions spit back at them):

When “bad” things happen to “good” people, Carlene, it’s often because they want to become even better teachers, guides, and helpers to those precious souls who will one day need them to be their rock.

Which kind of means, Carlene, that only good things happen to people….

Having lived through a decade of sexual and physical abuse, having survived the normal cuts to the heart that come from being in relationships that eventually end, having lived life, I have always believed that every bump in the road has turned out to be a positive in the end.

People are often shocked when I’m so nonchalant about being abused; to me, it’s something that’s made me smarter, stronger, and has given me something akin to a sixth sense when it comes to testing situations or new people.

To me, the bad has given me too much in the way of good for me to regret it.

Ian and I had a spat this weekend, now resolved, over wedding planning.  The wedding planning process, I firmly believe, was invented to see how much poison a relationship can take, and if you can get through it intact enough to walk down the aisle, best of luck to the both of you.

I bring up the spat because if I hadn’t had my heart broken by any ended past relationships, I would have stayed just as stubborn and angry as I used to be.  Ian and I would not have been able to have a conversation; words would have shriveled up under the heat of my Bitch Glare – I was the queen of the Bitch Glare.

You should pity my ex-boyfriends, because “spitfire” is the nicest word I can think up to describe my past self in relationships.

So, in the end, even though the broken relationships may have made it seem like my life was over, and it seemed like there was a hole in my chest that would never heal, I was learning how to be a decent human being underneath it all.

Now, all that “bad” has allowed me to have a beautiful relationship where a man I love sometimes disagrees with me or hurts my feelings, and we can talk through it and emerge out the other side in one piece.

Talk!  Not Bitch Glare!  Imagine that.

Today, when you drop your coffee all over your shoes, when your boss screams at you over his own incompetency, when you left your wallet at home and discover this just in time for lunch, somewhere in that “bad” is a “good.”

Granted, it will take five months to become apparent where the good is, but when you patent your idea for a spill-less coffee cup and make millions, walk out on your job and start your own business, or realize you’ve lost five inches on your waist thanks to your forgetfulness, you’ll see where I’m coming from.

Some happy links if you’re having the kind of day when you need them:

The Secret website
Get your own daily quotes from
Totally Unique Thoughts (TUT.com) (not an affiliate link)

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This morning, I donated a little bit of money to a food pantry called New Horizons in Manchester, NH; apparently I’m all about the charity this week, which is great – give what you can, when you can, I always say.

Seth Godin’s article made me think about “charity,” such as it is, and made me wonder if there isn’t a bigger way to go about all this.

Here’s a quote from the article that I feel sums the idea up pretty well:

How to prime the pump of the system … enough that things get better?

Markets.

When two people trade, both win. No one buys a bar of soap unless the money they’re spending is worth less to them than the soap itself.

When someone in poverty buys a device that improves productivity, the device pays for itself (if it didn’t, they wouldn’t buy it.) So a drip irrigation system, for example, may pay off by creating two or three harvests a year instead of one.

What does that do for the family that buys it? Well, if you have one harvest a year and you’re living at subsistence, it means your income is zero, or probably just a little below.

If you can irrigate and get two or three harvests a year, though, your income goes up by infinity. Now, instead of making -1 pennies a day, you’re making 100 or 200 pennies a day. That’s a surplus of $700 a year. That’s enough to participate in other productivity or life-enhancing investments, like a well, or a roof, or health care. Now, the edge is a lot further away.

Read the rest of the article here.

The article then goes on to explain that a fund called the Acumen Fund is basically providing the funds for people in third-world countries to buy these small but life-changing devices.  These are devices that let them help the people around them have a better quality of life (awesome), and then provide income for their own families (bonus awesome).  It’s the old “Givers gain” philosophy.

When I’m rich enough to let my money make itself, I want to create a local program – either fund it myself, or get together a little brain trust to help with seed money – to grow food specifically for our Food Bank and help make it at least partially self-sustainable.

I want the program to create a purpose behind the food line; turn it into something that benefits the community, the Food Bank, and most importantly, people’s self-esteem.

Time for my little, local Utopia dream.

What if, instead of the Food Bank taking our donations to buy food and giving it to the people lining up (short-term solution), a harvesting program is created that grows food specifically for the Food Bank and provides a set number of short-term, “help farm our land for __ weeks for $__ per week,” low-paying but paying jobs for people who might otherwise have nothing (long-term solution)?

The Food Bank would have access to fresh produce – to do whatever they want with: use in their kitchen, distribute to other food pantries, sell, etc. – and with the money they save from not purchasing this (or by using donations for this program) they could provide short-term general farming jobs – family mealtimes provided for all workers as added incentive – for people who might otherwise be standing in line.

The program could give people a responsibility, food throughout the program, plus a recent job listing to put on a resume.  That in turn would give them a better shot at finding steady work when their short-term job comes to its end.

Also, free help would be available from people not in need, who just want to pitch in and make their community better.  I’d go at least once a month, and I can think of ten friends and colleagues who would come along, just off the top of my head.  Methinks it would also be an effective discipline for children with a major case of the “I wants,” but I digress.

I’m sure people can come up with a million reasons why I’ll be told this idea couldn’t work – insurance concerns, safety issues, etc, but if community gardens in New York City can be successful, why can’t a food pantry grow some of its own food and do some bonus good deed-ness along the way?

I think Seth Godin and the Acumen Fund have got the right way of it; I’m ready to stop throwing money at the problem and start growing solutions.

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I had the funniest thing happen to me today.  In case you wondered, by “funny” I mean a typical and annoying situation that I found the bright side to.

I was hired by an agent from a popular insurance company to take headshots for him and a colleague.  The company he works for has hired me extensively for company headshots in the past, so I’m no stranger to them or their policies.  This particular agent failed to show up for his appointment, and then left a message trying to lowball my already discounted price.  I offer this company 25% off all headshots.

Here was the message: “Oh hi, Carlene, this is Doucheface from Blankety Blank Insurance. Sooo, [in an Office Space voice] I’m gonna have to reschedule because I talked to our boss [no, you didn't], and she thinks $75 is a little steep for a headshot [no, it's lower than industry standard].  She’s only willing to pay $40 apiece [good luck with that], so unless you can work with that price, my hands are tied….”

My immediate reaction was to think, “Dick,” in my head.  Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed as I realized that he was going to have to get his headshots done at Walmart or Sears with his “budgeted” $40 and suddenly I was sunny and happy again!

I called back, got his voicemail, and cheerfully informed him that I completely understood that while the head honcho regional manager – who has approved both me and my rates and directed all future agents to go through me as the company’s unofficial photographer – was more than okay with both my prices and the quality of my work, I could certainly understand that his other boss wasn’t going to approve the price that half the agents in the state have already paid.

I then let him know that the only places I could think of off the top of my head for $40 headshots were the aforementioned Sears and Walmart….should have thrown in Glamourshots, in hindsight….and I would think about it some more to see if I could find another company.

It’s situations like these that make me extremely grateful to have my mojo back.

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Two of my guy friends are roommates, and as roommates often do, they had an argument.

To sum up the cause of the fight, one roommate decided spur-of-the-moment to buy a vacuum cleaner to clean their disgusting apartment.  He popped into his roommate’s bank job unannounced to tell him he needed $25 to cover half the cost.

The other roommate was angry to be asked for money he wasn’t planning on spending and refused to pay.  Instead of heading home after work to face his friend, he went to a bar to cool off and spent at least $25 on angry beers.

This is familiar to most of us, I’m willing to bet.  I have stood on the sidelines and watched my pride ruin friendships and relationships, all over being unwilling to say the two-worded phrases in the following variations: “You’re right,” “I’m wrong,” or “I’m sorry.”

Once I figured out how to admit my 50% of fault in an argument, I started to become better at admitting the real reasons behind the angry emotions – “I’m scared,” “I’m insecure,” “I’m lazy,” “I’m selfish.”  It was like waving a magic wand over my relationships, particularly my relationship with Ian.

Since it was obvious my friends’ fight was not really about the vacuum cleaner, I suggested they try to defuse the situation and get to the real reason they were angry with each other.  It’s tough to continue a fight if you step up and admit to what you’ve done wrong:

Jen (angrily): “Carlene, you left your dishes all over the counter, this place is a dump!
Me (calmly and apologetically): “You’re right, I was being lazy and should have helped clean up last night, there’s really no excuse.”
Jen (less angrily): “You’re right, you were being lazy, it wasn’t cool.”
Me (calmly and apologetically): “I completely understand that you’re angry at me, it was very uncool of me to leave my mess everywhere.”
Jen (trying real hard to stay angry but it’s not working): “I’m sure I’ll get over it but can you please not do it in the future?  I felt like your maid.”
Me (calmly and apologetically): “You’re right, and you should never feel like I take you for granted, I’m sorry.”

….and in most situations, the fight is diffused, and a more honest conversation can begin.

It’s a dialogue I wish I could hand to every relationship, but it has to be learned the hard way: lived through so you understand it down to your bones.  It’s in our nature to “fight or flight,” and it absolutely sucks to stop yourself in your tracks, give a mental slap to the face, and spit out the true, secret reason behind your anger and unhappiness.

What’s the fighting worth, anyway?  What does being right accomplish; if you win the fight over the $50 vacuum cleaner, what have you actually won?

Nada.  Ziltch.  Zero.  Except a world’s worth of troubles with that cheap-ass vacuum.

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