Monthly Archives: February 2014

The right limit of (1 life)/x as x approaches 0 = infinity

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Today was one of those spectacular spring days in the Pacific Northwest.  The sky was this amazing shade of blue, the sun was out, it was relatively warm. It is one of those days that teases us that spring is just around the corner.

I love this time of year.  It is the time of year that winter and spring war for dominion over the land so there are great swings in temperature and weather. The buds on trees are swelling with signs of the potential of new life.  The deciduous trees are starting to leaf out and there are so many shades of green that it almost hurts your eyes.  It is a season in which you can see the potential that the world holds, the promise of tomorrow. It makes my heart just sing.

On a day like today, I can’t stay in the house, I have to be outside.  I also needed to exercise so instead of going to the gym, I ran to a nearby park that has a great jogging path around it.  To get there, I had to go about a mile up a pretty busy street that has a really major hill on it. It is uphill there, downhill home.  So I put my music on, went to the park, ran a few miles, enjoyed the beautiful sunshine, laughed at the unrestrained kids that wave back when I wave at them, just in absolute awe of the beauty of the distant mountains (both the Cascades and Olympics can be seen from the top of the hill) and then turned around to head home down the busy street.

On the way home, my music trifecta comes on:  Good Riddance by Green Day, Learning to Fly by Tom Petty, and Wake Me Up by Avicii.  They are songs that were made for moving.  All of a sudden, with the sun on my face, birds singing, the glory of the big northwest evergreens all around, I just wanted to dance.

Now remember, I am walking down a really busy suburban road.  When I lived on Capitol Hill in Seattle, the sight of a 50 year old crazy woman dancing down the street in her black capri leggings and a big purple University of Washington hoodie wouldn’t have even raised an eyebrow, in fact, there probably would have been people dancing with me.  However, where I live now everyone drives, no one is walking down the street let alone dancing. Hmm… didn’t change anything, when it is time to dance it is time to dance. So I danced. Guess what happened?  No one noticed.  I didn’t even get one glance. People were so focused and in a hurry to get wherever they were going that they failed to notice a crazy woman dancing down the side of the road. The less they looked, the more outrageous I got trying to get at least one person to honk at me and smile.

Social media seems to be filled with people who are sad and lonely, people longing for simpler lives with less stress, and to have the spirit and the joy of children again.  Guess what? In order to have that, you actually have to be willing to do it. You can’t say that you want a simpler life and not be willing to find the joy in simpler things, things like sunshine, fresh air, dancing, and noticing the world around us.  And you can’t be restrained by being worried about what other people are going to think.

Here is my advice.  Take the handsome man or beautiful woman you are with or, if you are by yourself, take the handsome man/woman that you are and go for a walk.  And while you are walking, just dance, arms in the air, unrestrained by what people think, heart and senses open to the world around you. You will feel fantastic.  What is the worst that can happen?  People might think you are crazy?  Guess what, being crazy isn’t a crime. You might make someone smile?  Yeah, that would be tragic. Of course, you might make it on YouTube like this guy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSy7h3TPB-M.   If you do, I will be so jealous, I couldn’t even get one person to look at me.

Tonight, I am going to Drag Queen Bingo.  I am going to wear a feather boa. The great part about that is I am riding the bus.  Who wants to speculate about how many pictures make it to instagram tomorrow of the crazy old woman riding the bus in a feather boa? It is going to be a hoot.

Life is short, whereas, when divided by x is infinite as x approaches 0. Go ahead, divide by zero.

No regrets…just lessons learned

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I was watching a TV show yesterday. For those who don’t know me personally, I haven’t had a TV in a couple of years so watching TV feels like a whole new activity for me.  Anyway, it was a talk show and during the show, they had a twitter feed in the background.  The host was talking about how every experience in our lives can teach us a lesson, so rather than look on those experiences as negative, look on them as lessons.  A viewer tweeted a quote that went something like “instead of being a victim, be a student”. I really like that thought.

I have several friends who have gone through amazingly difficult struggles in their lives. Their lives were divided by zero many times.  Abusive childhoods filled with alcoholic parents, marriages with abusive spouses, dealing with infidelity from someone who made sacred vows to honor and cherish, amputated limbs, quadriplegia from a car accident, death of a child, recovering alcoholics/addicts, cancer, Lou Gehrig’s disease, and so many more.  Most of the people I admire the most have overcome tremendous obstacles, it is what refined their character.  They used those struggles as opportunities to grow, they refused to become victims.  They became students of life instead.  I would say that most of them have the equivalent of a PhD in life lessons.

Then there are the people in life that are mired in what has happened to them, refusing to let it go.  Now, I am not saying that all of us don’t go through that, heaven knows I have had my walk through the dark side of life where I just couldn’t seem to claw my way out of the pit of despair.  It might take awhile, but the trick is to not stay there. And it doesn’t just happen that you come out of it magically on your own, you have to fight for it.

So how is it that some people can make hard choices, do the right thing, feel compassion and forgiveness for those who have wronged them, own up to their mistakes, problem-solve, and move forward while others just wallow, refusing to take responsibility for anything they have done and making the same mistakes over and over again?

I don’t have the answers to those questions only my own ideas.  I believe it has something to do with what the person tweeted… people who can move on and build a better life out of the emotional ruins of trauma are people who are unwilling to stay the victim, instead can morph themselves into learners.  They refuse to take life as it is, just because people believe they should stay down.  They refuse to stick to the stereotypes that people force upon them. They are willing to muck around in the dark times of their lives as a chance to learn.  Why would they do that? Because they don’t want to make the same mistakes, they want to do it better the next time.  I once had someone say to me on an internet forum that “you’d think some of us would learn as we get older, but that isn’t the case”.  Guess what?  Age by itself isn’t a teacher.  Age is only a teacher if you learn the lessons as you go along and do the hard work needed to overcome challenges.

I believe the people who can grow from adversity are people who are willing to reflect on their lives and who have the courage to say when they made a mistake and are willing to make amends.  They aren’t afraid to put themselves out there, to be vulnerable, to risk, to be authentic, and to care.

I was just sitting here at the student union of the amazing university I get to teach at, reflecting on learning as I get ready to be immersed in an incredible professional development program, and I find I am in awe of where I am in my life.  I started to say I was the luckiest human being on the planet, but it isn’t luck. I have learned, that is why I am here.

Soon I will begin my traveling adventures again.  All the experiences I have had, the choices I have made, the people I have met and the obstacles I have overcome have brought me to this place. I have no regrets… just lessons learned.

TextMatt.com

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I had a lovely meeting with my friend Sally yesterday.  She wanted to hear about my sabbatical adventures.  I told her about being in Spain and feeling like I was emotionally and mentally going backward and texting my friend Matt and saying “I am taking one step forward and three steps back” to which he replied “take bigger steps forward”.  He always knew just what to say to make me laugh and put my issues into perspective.  Sally was laughing at the story and said the same thing many of my friends have said.  She said “I need a Matt to text when I am struggling”.  To which I thought…don’t we all?

So we thought, why not a website?  TextMatt.com.  Why not indeed?  In the absence of such a great website, today, I am trying to channel my inner Matt. There are a few women I can think of that need some Matt wisdom.

To Sally, Jessica, Heather, Rachel, Keri, Amanda, Tracy and all the other young women I know, some that I have spoken with recently.  You are young women who are struggling to figure out how to do it all, to love deeply the men and women you care about, risk having and raising children, push forward in careers, struggle with worries about money and how you are going to accomplish everything.  You think about the impact you are having on the world around you as you are managing the mundane of everyday life… Here is what Matt would say to you:

Embrace it all.  All of those moments, put together like pieces of fabric in a quilt, is what will ultimately make up your life.  Love, loss, careers, staying home with babies, cooking, cleaning, saving lives, teaching, jumping out of planes, skiing, getting a dog, playing softball, getting a PhD, going to China… each moment, together with the moments before it and the moment after it, become your life.  None of it is wrong and every moment is as important as the last, whether you are cooking dinner, carting kids around, programming software, or marrying the person you love.  All of it has value.  Stop spending all the time worrying about doing it wrong and just do it.  Because whether it is right or wrong, at least you didn’t let the moment pass by, unlived.

Many people live their whole lives refusing to take risks, sitting safely on the sidelines watching their lives go by, fearing the unknown of change, wrapped up in bubble wrap in a state of perfection which, underneath that façade is anything but perfection.  They live in an endless struggle of wanting others to believe that their lives are perfect, afraid to show vulnerability, afraid to be real.

Matt would tell you to live a life that is sloppy, messy, and imperfect.  Just let it hit you with all the struggles, joys, challenges and opportunities and embrace them all.  Find sloppy, messy, and imperfect people to surround yourself with.  People who accept you in all your crazy glory. You are strong and will get stronger as you get older.  Don’t let anyone make you believe otherwise. Be true to yourself and keep dancing around the kitchen, unrestrained. Be vulnerable, authentic, whole, and wide open… people will think you are batshit crazy because of it, but Matt would say to you… batshit crazy is the best way to live your life.

Love the men and women you love, live the life that makes you happy, and never ever let anyone tell you that you are doing it wrong. Soon, the day will come and you will be looking back across the years at all you have accomplished.  You will be watching those children become adults, with struggles of their own.  You will be laughing about the adventures you had, remembering the people who have come and gone from your life, and being thankful that you were given this ride on the planet.  You will look across your career at the lives you touched and impacted, whether directly through occupations like teaching and nursing, or indirectly through creating clean water or a better living environment of a newly designed house. And you will know that your lives were well-lived.  There is no greater joy than that of a well-lived life.  That is what Matt would say.

From me:  I am so proud of all of you.  I am grateful that you all came into my life. You have enriched my life and changed me as a person.  I am a better person from knowing all of you. I know that when my time is up on this planet that there will be a generation of strong confident women who are impacting the world around them, making it better for the women and men of the next generation.2013-12-26 21.01.25

Oh, and Matt also says:  Just say no to crack.

Title IX – Lessons learned from a book on knitting

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My roommate bought me a book on knitting for Christmas.  I finally got around to reading it last weekend as I was ensconced in a beautiful cabin next to a lake looking out at the snow falling on the cedar trees. The perfect place to not only read a book on knitting but to actually knit.

If you know me then you know I am the most unlikely knitter.  I majored in math, I like sports, and although I come from a family of creative talented craftspeople, I have never gravitated toward making crafts.  I can do a minimal amount of woodworking and in another life, I used to sew.  I do love to cook but my time and energy has been devoted to what are typically seen as “men’s” pursuits… sports, outdoor activities, fixing things, etc. I have spent most of my lifetime in a world where men held power.  Thus for me, activities traditionally thought of as “men’s” were seen as having more value. That is, until the knitting book…

The author of the book talks about her own resistance to knitting, which is seen as a very female gendered activity. She is a woman about my age, having grown up in the era where we watched our older sisters and mothers burn their bras in protest of unequal rights, where we have watched women struggle to get hired or compensated equally to men, and where we watched men get ostracized because they chose professions or clothing that typically belongs to “women”.  So she, like me, resisted what we saw as “women’s” hobbies, or as my brothers would describe as “skirt work”.  But what I realized is that to devalue certain tasks because they are typically thought of as a female activity is the very epitome of anti-feminism and smacks of the idea that only activities that traditionally belong to men have value.  Hence, I started knitting.

Since I started thinking of this, I have had a couple of discussions with people that have really stuck in my psyche.  Both discussions were regarding female athletes “not being as good as men” or women’s sports (for example snowboarding at the Olympics) being perceived as “boring”.  It made me reflect on Title IX, which as first written, didn’t have anything to do with sports at all but that is what it became known for.

Some history (source Wikipedia):  The first person to introduce Title IX in Congress was its author and chief Senate sponsor, Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana.  Bayh was working on the Equal Rights Amendment and abolishing discriminatory treatment based on gender however was having difficulty getting the bill out of committee.  Since the Higher Education Act was on the floor of the Senate already, Bayh introduced an amendment, Title IX which said:

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance…

In his remarks on the Senate floor, Bayh said, “We are all familiar with the stereotype of women as pretty things who go to college to find a husband, go on to graduate school because they want a more interesting husband, and finally marry, have children, and never work again. The desire of many schools not to waste a ‘man’s place’ on a woman stems from such stereotyped notions. But the facts absolutely contradict these myths about the ‘weaker sex’ and it is time to change our operating assumptions….an equal chance to attend the schools of their choice, to develop the skills they want, and to apply those skills with the knowledge that they will have a fair chance to secure the jobs of their choice with equal pay for equal work”. 

Title IX became law on June 23, 1972.  At that time, less than 2% of women participated in athletics. There were several subsequent attempts to exempt revenue sports from the impact of Title IX (Tower Amendment) and it wasn’t until 1988 when the Civil Rights Restoration Act was passed that it was fully implemented. 1988… By then I was 25 years old and had two children.  1988…this isn’t ancient history, in fact, it is barely history at all.

People still don’t get it.   It isn’t about sports.  When I hear the conversation that women aren’t as “athletic” or that women’s sports don’t have the same excitement, it makes my blood boil. I have actually heard someone recently say that “women have their place” and that it isn’t in sports known as “men’s sports”.  When the Seattle Seahawks won the Superbowl and the press reported that it was the first national championship Seattle had won since the Sonics won the national championship for basketball, they totally disregarded the two National Championships the Seattle Storm has won.  And I repeat…this isn’t about sports… it is about respect.  As much as I love my Seahawks, it makes me want to never give my money or time attending or watching another Hawks game without first giving equal time and respect to the Storm.

Regardless whether you are a man or a woman, whether you stay at home or work a job, if you like or hate sports, if you are conservative or liberal, that isn’t what Title IX is about.  It is about choice.  It is about having the choice and freedom to participate in the activity you want to participate in, go to the school you want to attend, have the same chance to get hired for a job you are qualified for, or to stay home and take care of your family regardless of your gender.  Title IX is about equal rights for all people regardless of gender.  It isn’t about wanting to stay home with your family, there is nothing wrong with that and equal rights doesn’t mean losing that. It is about having a choice.

When I was in high school, women made less than 50 cents for every dollar a man did. Now, that is at 72 cents.  Progress right?  Wrong.  That means for a man who is making $20 a hour that is $800 a week, a little over $40,000 a year… for a woman in that same job, it would be $14.40 an hour or $576 a week which is less than $30,000.  That is a big difference.

It would be really easy to get complacent and say “we have come a long way” or “I am happy with my life now”.  I look at my granddaughters and I want better for them. I don’t want to stop fighting until they have the opportunity to make the same pay for the same job, until they can be a NASCAR driver if they want to without being seen as a “pretty token who actually can’t drive”, until they can get Red Bull to build them their own snowboarding park and sponsor them at the same level they sponsor a male snowboarder.  I want them to know a world where people give credence to their accomplishments, not because they are beautiful or because they wear the right clothes, but because of who they ARE.

So today, if you have a choice in your life to marry the person you want to marry, to go to the school you want to attend if you are qualified, or to participate fully in a sport, then take a moment to thank those of us who are in our 50-70’s who fought for you to have that freedom.  Thank those of us that played sports in skirts because we weren’t allowed to wear shorts but we did it anyway. Ask us about what it was like, our generation won’t be around much longer to fight the battle for you. Take time to thank the men and women who believe the world would be better if we didn’t belittle half of our population. And by the way…you are welcome.

And then do us a favor…don’t stop fighting.  Whether you are a man, woman, a career person or a stay-at-home caregiver… don’t stop fighting until we all have the right to live our best life, unrestricted by gender constraints, unbound, free and equal.  That goes for the man who wants to stay home with his kids while his wife works as well as the woman who doesn’t want kids but wants to be an engineer, or a NASCAR driver, or a snowboarder… and for equity’s sake, stop disparaging women in sports or objectifying them.  Treat them as equal human beings. Please. And go to a women’s sporting event, even if you are bored, just to show your support.  Do it to support all those of us who came before… who have sacrificed and fought so that women can earn $0.72 for every dollar a man does.  And don’t stop fighting even after we are gone.

Letter to my older self…

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So many people asked me to do this that I had to comply.  Last week, I wrote a letter to my younger 25 year old self of things I would want her to know from what I have learned over the last couple of decades.  A lot of people asked me to do the same with my older self, that is, what I would want my older self to know.  Since I am 50, I decided to write a letter to my 70 year old self.  I have to admit, I struggled with this one more than the last letter.  Thinking about being 70 and entering the last couple of decades of life is harder than looking back and imparting wisdom on a younger Robin with a future stretching before her.  I am not afraid of death, but I am afraid of getting old.  When I get old and outlive my usefulness, I want to have the capacity to walk off into the wilderness where I can look up into the mountains that I love and just die. No fuss, no fanfare.  Just the natural end of a life well lived.

Robin,

Wow, you’ve made it to 70. There have been many times in your life that you didn’t think you would ever see this day.  Yet here you are.  Hopefully, you have taken care of your health and are still active.  Finally, you get to have that discounted ski pass at Stevens!!!  Woot!! You’ve been waiting for that for 25 years.  I hope you are still active enough to enjoy it.  I hope you are skiing every weekday and get at least 50 days in.

Retirement finally came for you two years ago.  I hope you stayed on track to have at least a million dollars in your retirement account.  It will suck if you didn’t and you have to eat cat food to survive. My hope is that you learned from the lean years of paying off all that debt incurred during your marriage and have kept saving money.  It is okay if people call you fiscally conservative or even if they call you cheap.  It still beats having to survive off cat food.

I hope you kept on learning and trying new things and experiences, it is how you stay young. Try not to be like some older people and get too set in your ways.  Remember Matt? Remember how much you learned from him all those years ago and the fun that you had? Don’t forget that you can learn a lot about life from people of all ages, so don’t be the old fuddy-duddy who thinks they have all the answers and won’t listen to anyone else, especially younger people.  Be open, listen, learn.

And don’t forget, if you are lonely and think no one comes to see you, then get off your ass and go to see them.  People want you to care about their interests, they want you to be interested in their lives and what they are passionate about.  Go to your grandchildren’s games, graduations, weddings… call them, listen to them, make time for them.  Don’t just sit around and bemoan that no one wants to visit with you because if you do, guess what will happen?  No one will want to be around you. If you want people to be interested in your life, you have to start by being interested in theirs.

P1080687The twin granddaughters are about 23 now, graduated from college.  Hopefully, you kept your word and have been taking them on trips every year to show them how big the world is and that you made that same commitment with your other grandchildren you had too. I hope you took them to Nepal, Africa, Myanmar, South America and let them see some of the remote places of the world.  I hope you took them diving, paragliding, cycling, and I really hope you taught them how to ski.  A great graduation trip might be a ski trip to the Alps or to Whistler where you can rent a nice apartment and your old lady self can go to bed early and where the grandkids can stay up and party all night.  Remember that experiences are worth more than stuff, spend your money and time having experiences with them.  It is the best legacy you could leave them. 

I hope you are living in a place where it is easy to get around.  A nice, one bedroom condo in an urban area.  Easy to clean and you can spend your time going to the theater and concerts and have adventures easily. That way you can give up the drivers license and still have your freedom. Give up the driver’s license before you don’t want to, that way it isn’t an issue for your kids having to take it away from you.  Make plans for the last years of your life.  Pick out the retirement community and assisted living facility you want to be in now.  You’ve worked your whole life to take care of your family, take care of them now by making those decisions for yourself while you still can so that you won’t be a burden to them in a few years.

The end of your life is coming.  Just like with the rest of your life, you get to choose how you face it.  Face it with grace, courage, and dignity.  Choose to live your life on your terms, each day giving your best, caring for the people in your life, and remembering how much you are loved.  Choose to keep having amazing adventures and always be thankful for how great your life has been.  It truly has been an incredible ride. 

No regrets, just go enjoy the sunset of your life. 

Robin