What would you do
(differently)
If you knew
You had an expiry date?
Like a loaf of bread,
Or a block of butter.
It’s amusing that you
Think
That time works differently
For you,
Just because
You’re bigger
Than a breadbox.
It’s a shame
To let your heart go stale,
To let your dreams become rancid,
When you are such a delicious possibility.
I hate to see good stuff fill the compost
Before it could be fully savoured.
Wilful waste makes woeful want.
~ Bay
The days are getting longer.
“Hallelujah!â€
A beleaguered Canada proclaims,
In a winter-exhausted jubilance.
All the bulbs are bursting out of the ground,
Beautiful zombies after a cold apocalypse,
Reaching up like Lazarus from the grave.
And people are smiling again,
Rejoicing in Spring.
“We made it!â€
As though we aren’t living in Victoria,
Confusing all the world with our mild climate
And relatively benign winters,
If you can call three days just below freezing
Winter.
See, I like Winter.
I miss its quiet, peaceful blanket.
The solitude, the cozying up, the hot cocoa.
Diamond-glazed trees and crystalline trees.
A reason to cuddle (in case you need a reason).
But Spring is coming.
And I shudder,
Because I don’t love Spring.
I’m not sure I really even like it all that much.
All that rain.
All that grey.
All that mud.
I’m over it.
I went for a run last week,
Through a flurry of cherry blossom petals,
Which was very pretty,
I’ll admit,
Until
I inhaled a petal by accident,
And dry-heaved and spluttered
Like a fool on the chip trail,
In between Cook Street and the playground.
I know it’s not okay to dislike spring;
It’s like saying you don’t like puppies.
But I do like puppies,
Very much, thank you.
And Spring just tried to choke me.
Let’s get on with Summer.
~ Bay 2016
While I appreciate the urgency with which
You feel the need to snuggle into my elbow,
Desperate to squeeze a little more loveÂ
Out of
And
Into
Today.
I can’t help but notice the minor annoyance
I experience.
You see,
You’re in my way.
I’m trying to do important things,
Like write poetry.
Really important, seriously artistic
Poetry of the soul.
But instead,
I’m writing about trying
To write,
With a puppy nestled at my hip,
His head resting on my thigh.
And as you snore softly,
Smelling indelicately like those corn chips
In the shape of little bugles,
I would fit on my fingertips
When I was a kid (I’d probably still do it now),
I wish we could stay like this
Forever.
I know our forever will be short,
And a day will come
I’ll wish empty wishes
that you’d be inconveniencing me still,
Though,
So I don’t really mind,
For now,
That you’re
In my way.
I’m sitting in Starbucks, where I do my best work. That’s not true, really. It’s just that when I’m away, the wifi is the way I like it: Free. This time, I’m in San Diego. I’m bumming around while Adam is training coaches, which of course means I bought new shoes. They look like this (Jen: More shoes for collecting the eggs <<wink wink>>):
This Starbucks is awesome. So far, I’ve seen two chihuahuas and one cute and one bizarre-looking French bulldog come wandering in. There are lots of dogs here, which is good when you’re missing your pets. I’ve also seen a girl wearing brown cowboy boots, star-printed jean cut-offs that showed the crease of her bum, a tank top with no bra (all of these things were really obvious. I wasn’t being super creepy). The thing is, she looked great. I’m serious. Normally, I’m full of judgment and this time, I think I’m just wishing I could pull it off (I’m not going to try. I promise.). The best part? She just reached down into her boot to pull out her phone. Seriously. She’s amazing. I think she might be Daisy Duke, if Daisy Duke were a pirate (I don’t know why I think only pirates keep things in their boots, but there it is).
Anyway, I’m off to check out Seaport Village today. I picked a super-cute outfit and then spilled on it (if you look closely in the photo above, you can see the marks on my dress). Sigh. C’mon, Bay. Get it together. Tonight we head to LA, which sounds fancy, but really, Disneyland is the destination. I can’t wait! It’s SO much fun. Also? It’s supposed to get up to 35º. It will be sweaty and magical in The Happiest Place on Earth.
It feels like time to catch you up on what’s been going on, so here you go:
Wow. What a month April has been. Lots of ups and downs and most of them in breakdown. The good news is that when you’re in breakdown, that means that a breakthrough is available and (hopefully) imminent. This is always much easier to remember when someone else is experiencing breakdown in their life than when it’s your own. The less-good news is that being in breakdown sucks. Even more annoying is the fact that how much it sucks has little to do with the actual circumstances and a lot to do with how you’re being about them. Needless to say, I’ve been being less than understanding about my breakdown, so it feels like my circumstances are making up the difference in enthusiasm. Awesome.
I’m coming to the end of this breakdown cycle, which is to say that I’m surrendering my resistance to Life and its shenanigans and trying out some compassion instead. This might sound obvious to you, but compassion is not something I can access too easily for myself, though I have it in spades for everyone else. When things get tough, I like to grit my teeth, pushing to work harder. It’s kind of like when someone is talking to someone who doesn’t speak English, so they say everything again, just louder. Super effective.
This compassion has looked like taking care of myself without calling myself a lazy slacker (a self judgment I clear daily): Taking the pressure off my projects (in a surprising turn of events, the extra judgment wasn’t creating results. Huh.); getting enough sleep; getting my nails done, because it makes me feel good to have pretty fingers and toes; getting lots of exercise — running, cycling and yoga; long walks to enjoy the beauty of springtime; and lots of time to chill out.
Here’s some of what happened this month:
Oh, and I bet some of you wonder how I’m doing since I left my job with the government. I’m doing great. No regrets, whatsoever. I knew I wouldn’t have any, but some of you may have wondered. I’m happy to report that being self-employed, no matter how scary and unsure it can sometimes feel, is definitely the right path for me. I’m clear that coaching is what I want to do, instead of pretending it’s one of the many things I want. There are still lots of things I want to do, but I can say I’m a coach without worrying that I need some back-up plan or safety net to keep people (read: Me) from worrying about my future.
We set our clocks ahead this weekend and, well, I’ll be: Didn’t it just turn to spring overnight. Apart from the annoying way that losing one hour of sleep seems so much worse when you weren’t staying up doing something fun and possibly regrettable in the morning, it’s nice to have the sun up for so much longer. Summer’s a-coming, people!
I do realize that spring is coming first, but since I find spring to be a mostly soggy affair, and an allergy-ridden poor cousin to my favourite other seasons (read: all the other seasons), the fact is that it is getting decidedly warmer out. While out running today, it occurred to me that I may need to switch to shorts soon. Â And I have a serious spring-cleaning thing going on, too. Our friends, Ben and Ashley, are clearing out their stuff so that they can sail off into the life of their dreams. This is inspiring in about a thousand ways. Follow your dreams? Okay!
Additionally, it’s inspiring to think of asking myself if this will fit on a boat anytime I contemplate making a purchase (this is the question Ben and Ash ask themselves all the time). Currently, I’m not making purchases, because I gave up buying stuff for Lent (food doesn’t count because I need food and also because I make the rules). Normally, I give up dessert and candy and sweets and joy-flavoured foods, but as Adam pointed out, that’s not particularly hard for me to do. I have pretty strong willpower when it comes to food, except for kryptonite chips. I briefly contemplated giving up chips, but thought to myself, “that’s crazy talk.” Then I weighed myself at a friend’s place and, well, sigh. I should probably give up chips, too… For now, I will give up shopping. Jesus couldn’t buy shoes in the desert and neither will I.
But I digress. I’ve long wanted to clear out about 90 percent of our material belongings (my shoes are not a part of this exodus. Obviously.), but I get so overwhelmed by all the stuff. OMIGOSH ALL THE STUFFS.
How did we get this much stuff? And why is it so hard to part with it? We don’t even use most of it, most of the time (and some of it, any of the time). It seems so easy in my head, or whenever I’m looking at small home designs on Pinterest, which is pretty frequently (they’re so cute and tiny!). As soon as I’m face to face with the endless piles of stuff we’ve accumulated, however, I start to wonder if maybe we might need it at some yet-to-be-determined time in the nondescript future. For example, the punch bowl: We have one. Why, I don’t know, since we’ve never, ever needed one. Punch is not really a thing people drink these days. I don’t know when I’m going to make a blend of juice that sits in a bowl and people ladle out into matching glass cups. I think it might be never.
In fact, our buffet is filled with stuff we don’t use but feel we can’t ditch. Actually, that’s not true: Adam would gladly huck it all out the window and then I have to remind him that windows are not places through which we chuck things. No.
So far, I’ve been reducing my makeup and nail polish collections. I haven’t enough faces, fingers or toes to EVER USE THAT MUCH ever in seven human life spans. It’s ridiculous. No seriously. It’s ridiculous. I can’t even tell you how much I have, because then I’ll be institutionalized or put on that Intervention show. DEAR MAC/OPI/SPARitual/CHINA GLAZE/BUTTER LONDON: PLEASE DEAR HEAVEN ABOVE STOP MAKING MORE STUFF WITH CUTE NAMES THAT IS SHIMMERY AND NEARLY/TOTALLY IDENTICAL TO A BAJILLION MAKEUPS/NAIL POLISHES THAT I ALREADY OWN. Stop it. Please. Help me help me. It’s unethical. I’m a colour addict and you are an enabler. You should be ashamed. I am. Mostly of myself, but still. Still. You, too.
The closet was hit next. I’ve got laundry baskets full of clothes that are being donated and I still want to get rid of more. I even have some shoes in there. Some. More like a handful, or very few pairs. But still, you guys; it’s some shoes and that’s a big step for someone like me. Because I love shoes more than I love makeup and nail polish (take THAT, cosmetics industry!).
Anyway, that’s what’s been going on. Oh, and this:
I have waited for this moment forever. I’ve always wanted pets who’d snuggle. Granted, Hermes was sleeping here before Grimby sidled up to share the sunbeam, and it’s distinctly possible that Chubbs Hermes was too lazy to move, but whatever. It’s a snuggle and it counts!
Well, I finally did it: I achieved the impossible. I know I should be proud, but I feel kind of guilty, instead.
So, what’s the big impossible thing I did?
I killed an air plant.
How hard can it be to keep an air plant alive? Actually, don’t answer that; clearly it is hard for me.
I mean, how do you even do that? I understand that some of my plants have suffered under my care (or, I suppose, more accurately, my lack of care thereof):
I will admit that I have occasionally forgotten to water and sing to them on a regular basis. I don’t know if it’s the water, the singing or the combination of the two that keeps my plants thriving, but I don’t want to risk the lives of innocent vegetation to find out through empirical experimentation. Repotting happens roughly eighteen months — at the soonest — after it first looked necessary to repot the plant for its future well-being and viability.
But an air plant? How? It’s an air plant. It’s called that because it lives on air, for crying out loud. We have plenty of that in our condo and it requires no action on my part, which was sort of the idea. I mist it every few days, as per the instructions, and it’s been fine since Christmas, when it joined our happy home.
We got a second air plant (they hang in these cool little glass bubble-like thingys) on Valentine’s Day. I wonder if the first one died of a broken heart, thinking we’d grown weary of it. We didn’t, little air plant, I swear! We loved you! We gave you the best air we had!
I’d like to get a new air plant to replace him. Partly because it makes me sad and partly because the dead one kind of looks like a hideous spider and it’s freaking me out. All his legs are sticking up and everything. I gave up shopping for Lent, though (purchasing anything other than food), so here’s hoping that Adam feels compelled to replace him. Even Hermes feels bad for the little guy.
Seriously. How do you kill an air plant? Sigh…
NB: I just read up on air plant care and it turns out they do NOT live on air after all. Kind of misleading, actually. Still, though. I was watering it. I swear I watered it. HOW DID YOU DIE, LITTLE PLANT DUDE? Maybe it is the singing…
The above is the message that was in my fortune cookie yesterday. I don’t normally ascribe a lot of meaning to the things I find in cookies or horoscopes, but this time, it made me smile. It’s true: Things are a-changing over here in my world.
It’s been a long time, My Blog. A long time, indeed. It’s weird, how if I don’t write anything on here, nothing happens on my blog. I need blog elves. Partly because then my blog would be updated and partly because then I’d have an elf, and that would be be pretty much the coolest frigging thing in the world.
At least this time, I have a good excuse for being incommunicado: Like I said, I’ve been busy making some big changes and some even bigger decisions. You probably know that I write over at www.evergrowthcoaching.com, the blog that Adam and I share for our coaching company. Coaching has been getting cooler and cooler and busier and busier, all of which is really good news. I’m loving the work I’m doing.
I less love working nine zillion hours a day, but I’ve been doing it (okay, more like 10–12 hours) in service of a cunning plan: I wanted to build my coaching practice so that I could go to part time at my job and eventually be self employed. It turns out that “eventually” was a lot sooner than I thought!
Long story made short, I have [at last] resigned my position with the provincial government/public service of British Columbia. This decision was a really big one for me. I’m talking throat-constricting-and-gasping-panic-attacks-while-jogging kind of big decision. Not-sleeping-and-tossing-and-turning-coated-in-cold-sweat kind of decision. Several factors precipitated my choice and I immensely grateful for the whole experience: Without the stuff that went on, I would not have made the choice I’ve been wanting to make since, oh, before I began working with the provincial government.
I’ve always wanted to freelance, but couldn’t figure out how to make it work. I didn’t trust myself and I didn’t trust the universe, either. Without doing the work to become a coach, and utterly transforming who I am being in my life and in this world, I am pretty sure that I wouldn’t have been able to choose to let go of my desperately clasping hands and step outside of my comfort zone. Thank God I let go.
Now, I am not a person who would describe herself as brave. I’ve always been a timid little thing, from the time I was, well, a timid little thing. I know I’ve done a lot of things that were atypical or different, but for the first time ever, I really, really understand that courage isn’t the absence of fear; rather, it is something that is created when you face your fear and move forward anyway.
I am so excited for what’s ahead. I’m exhilarated. Every now and then, I’m afraid, too, just to keep it interesting. What I learned this week, and shared with my team (I’m a mentor coach in Seattle—so much has happened since I last blogged here!) is this:
It turns out that fear doesn’t stop me from doing things: I do. It turns out, I can have fear and move forward anyway. Forward movement doesn’t only happen in the sunshine.
First, just picture it.
No seriously you guys, you’re really gonna need to actually use your imagination, because I haven’t figured out yet how to add tabs on my blog. I mean, yeah, I have a couple of pages, but I haven’t sorted out the logistics, so anything I post is just added onto the existing post, thus creating The Longest Post in History. But you don’t care about all these details, do you? Nope. You don’t. I don’t blame you. I almost don’t, or at least I don’t care quite enough to do anything about it.
Yet. Just wait. No really, you’re probably gonna have to wait.
See, what I want to do is have this be all awesome and my website. I want a page dedicated to clothes and style and, of course, shoes. I very much enjoy these things (especially shoes) and would like to pull together some style notes. I have many Instagram photos of my lower outfits. It’s hard to take a full-body selfie that captures my outfit, so generally, it’s a photo from my middle down. Hey, you do what you can, right?
On another note, do you know how much I love Pinterest? I do. Hint: It’s a lot. 7,198 pins a lot. Oh, wait—7,199. See? See what happens? What a great site. I love that I can be a hoarder of beautiful things without actually hoarding them. This site has literally changed my life. Or at least my style. I will happily admit that between Pinterest and my trip to France last year, my style has evolved into something that is definitely Bay (and whoever else has pinned my gazillion same pins).
I sort of feel like anyone who has gotten engaged, gotten married, decorated a home or ever done pretty much anything ever, prior to the dawn of Pinterest, should get a redo. Not because I would change my wedding—it was perfect!—but I would do other extra crafty things and it would be amazing. I would paint chevrons on my office walls and add glitter to my bathroom paint. I would bake cake pops and decorate them like miniature pumpkins and I would finally know what to do with my hair.
I love it. Though, one thing I don’t love is the misguided, but probably well-intentioned weight-loss motivation. “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” is lame. Come on. There are lots of good ones, but I wish my Pinterest peeps would just can it with the weight-loss pins and all the “amazing” before and afters.
Now I’m going to go look at my Creatures board. You might want to, too. If you like The Cutest Animals in the World. Or not. Your choice (what’s wrong with you? Look at the cute animals I have pinned!).
Where’d you go? It’s been all silence for at least a month!
Just kidding. It’s not you, it’s me: I was busy doing busy things [read: procrastinating on studying]. So really I have no excuse for not blogging. You’d think I’d have been posting twice a day. You know, in all the time I should’ve been studying, but was clearly just examining air molecules. Did you miss me?
In other news, I just received word yesterday that I passed my written final, so that’s good news. I was on the fence about how I’d done. I wasn’t too worried, being that I’ve only ever failed one other test in my life, and it was finance and so I don’t care, because I passed the course. So there, Finance.
And now you have get to read about that exam. Finance was my nemesis during my MBA days. It didn’t make sense, it involved math and therefore was The Worst. Accounting also involved numbers, but at least it made sense: Debits and credits, people. Cash in, cash out. Just for the record, accounting totally made me cry, too (okay, I made me cry about accounting), but it made waaaaaay more sense than finance.
On the last day of class before the finance final, we did what one does in every penultimate class and reviewed the concepts we’d covered over the previous months. Oh, wait—nope, no she didn’t. My finance prof did NOT review anything, but instead taught one last concept: Weighted Average Cost of Capital, or WACC (and yes, I did call it “whack” in my head, feeling like I was winning by name calling).
She thought this was okay. I did not. “But Rachelle,” she said condescendingly, or what others would’ve described as encouragingly, “it’s the same as what you’ve already learned. We’re just putting it together.”
No, I thought, it is most definitely NOT the same.
“You need to understand,” she snipered (or said kindly. Whatever).
No, I do not. I do not need to understand. I need to pass. Scrape by (“scraping by” in the MBA program meant anything above a B, which was some ridiculously high percentage, like 90%. Anything less was a fail.).
I wanted to complete finance and never use it again.
I go home and study effectively freak out because I can’t. Get. This. Thing. It makes no sense. It’s not going to be on the formula sheet, because it’s supposed to be so frigging “understandable”.
This is when Adam reminded me that I knew how to study and it didn’t include hurling myself on the sword of the thing I understood the least, but rather reviewing my strongest areas. Excel where you can and take the hit on the things you don’t get, instead of trying to ace the stuff you don’t know and then missing the stuff you would’ve known if you hadn’t wasted all your study time on the financial equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle.
This guy. He is smart. So that’s what I did. It was common sense. After all, how much could a few questions on one topic be worth? We had a whole course to be test on our knowledge.
This was good thinking. Until I got to the exam and turned over my paper. The exam was out of 35. This is never a good sign. There are a lot of points on each question. You mess up a few answers and those heavily weighted percents really start to add up. Or down, I suppose, more accurately describes what happens.
Like any good student, I flipped through so as to see the beast I was facing. And this is when I saw the one question on WACC. Yup. Just one measly little question, which is good news, right?
Wrong.
That one question was worth 14 marks. HOLY CRAP IF I DON’T GET THIS THEN I PRETTY MUCH HAVE TO ACE THE REST OF THE ENTIRE EXAM. PANIC. PANIC.
I wrote the rest of the exam. I was pretty sure I did okay, but I knew I hadn’t aced 21 questions. Then I stared at the WACC question. I stared at the wall. I had more than 1.5 hours left of the exam and nothing to do but cry (which I did), pray (looking upward for divine intervention/inspiration) and worry. Oh, and write a passive aggressive note about why I couldn’t answer the stupid question.
Then I went out into the hallway and burst into [more] tears. I’d failed. If I failed finance, I didn’t get to rewrite: It was one of the few classes in which a fail meant a mandatory retaking of the whole bloody course. Extra time, extra tuition and, let me be honest, I could take the course about 30 times and still not get the bloody concepts.
It was the end of the world. Seriously, I think purgatory for me would involve a never-ending finance class. It’d be a special kind of hell.
Anyway, long story made short: I failed the exam. But, let the record show that I got 17/35. Yup. One-half a percent more and I’d have ridden the pass line. So, I was pretty impressed with myself.
Oh, and I’d busted my rear on all the course work all term, so when all was said and done, my class work grade carried my failed exam score and I passed the course.
Hallelujah.
Every day for over two years, I’ve journaled three things for which I’m grateful. Okay, so I have occasionally missed a day here and there. Some days, I can find it hard to be grateful. Those days, I’m lucky if I can think of three things, but I struggle with it because I feel like those days, it’s probably more important than ever. Those days, things like ice cream, new socks and hair products make up my top three.
I do try to remember to be grateful. I hate it when it’s reflected to me that I’m not and I’m sorry to admit that the most recent time I received that reflection was about two weeks ago. The quick fire of defence I felt in reaction to the comment told me it was well deserved. And it was: The arrow hit the mark, because it was true. In my constant striving to get somewhere, I often forget to be thankful for things like my job, my condo, my car or, really, just about anything that I have that makes me incredibly fortunate and a part of an awfully slim segment of humanity that doesn’t have to struggle much for my basic needs.
With that in mind, and because it’s Thanksgiving Weekend (my favourite holiday after Christmas!), here are a list of things for which I’ve recently felt grateful:
There are about a zillion other things I’m grateful for right now, but that’s a start.
What are you grateful for right now?