#33 On Turning 30

At 30 you finally start to catch up to those dreams you’ve been chasing for the last 10 plus years.
~Bonnidette Lantz

 I think it's obligatory to talk about it. It's a month away, but I've been thinking about how to make it count. I've been thinking about a lot of things.

When I was younger I used to drink a lot of wine, smoke pot in my apartment with my roommate, and create all sorts of ideas. I could invent anything. I could think of a book outline on the spot. I could create poems just with keywords; it became a game.

As I got older, I started to get distracted with conventional life. Having a boyfriend. Having a job. Getting promoted. Having my boss notice me. Quitting in a rage.

Getting another job. Moving. Going back to school to be a personal trainer. Getting married.  Doing married things like having PartyLite parties and running 1/2 marathons. I wanted to chase security down and hold it my prisoner. I was working at a great government job, my ex-husband was battling depression, and I was living for the weekend. I would allow myself to create extravagant things at work: filling a co-worker's cube full of balloons for her birthday, having a "ribbon cutting ceremony" to celebrate the new women's bathrooms on our floor, organizing pot-lucks and birthday parties and redecorating the front reception area. Did I mention we turned the office into a drive-in bat-cave, dressed up as self-created superheroes, and played black and white horror movies for Halloween?

And I was happy in those fleeing moments of creativity. I was doing well, I really was. And then I'd get home and get sucked into the TV. I'd cry myself to sleep wondering if this was all there was? Maybe I was happy? Is that was happiness was?

I had it all: check. check. check.

But I wasn't healthy. I would spend my time looking at diet plans on the internet, trying to find something that "worked". And by worked, I don't just mean made me thinner. I mean, made me happier and magical. Essentially, I wanted to turn into a unicorn and I didn't know how to do it.

So I left my life after a really trying few years. I blamed my partner. I think the words are, "you are like a big black hole if you don't want to help yourself, I can't sit here and watch you go down, because I'm going to go down with you."

If that's not love I don't know what is.

And the last year has been about revelling in some of those choices. This year is no longer about all the stuff that makes me sad.

"Happiness is just a positive perception from our brain. Some days you will be unhappy. Our brain is a tool we use. It’s not who we are." - James Altucher

I used to pride myself on being a happy person. I always thought that it was harder to go from being jaded back to innocent. So I put on rose-coloured glasses and hopped around until someone pushed at me and banged me and then I cried.

Somewhere in between the two there is a happy medium. The person who is happy, creating, pushing and moving forward. The person who can see the positive and doesn't care about the negative. But the one who calls bullshit when treated badly, instead of whimpering until an emergency is at hand.

#32 Inspiration for 2014

I'm reading amazing book called Choose Yourself by James Altucher.

"The word mantra has two parts (in Sanskrit): "man" - thoughtfulness with zeal, and "tra" - to protect"


I got it guys.

I got my thing.



My mantra for 2014: I love myself.


It's the thing I was looking for, and it has been here all along.

#31 Sitting with Space

I went for a walk over the weekend with a friend of mine that I consider enlightened and gorgeous. She has an energy that reaches out to meet your energy. I have been telling her that I've been stuck on my inspiration for 2014. In 2012 it was "Change" in 2013 it was "Explore" and now that's 2014, I'm looking for something more sustainable: a sentence and not an imperative.

I said, "I want to live in the moment, have inner peace". She laughed, "ooohh, just inner peace? just living in the moment? That's the highest level of enlightenment, you know that right?"
"So, yea, I want that. And whatever comes after that. What comes after that? After you've spent so much time trying and pushing and working on peace? What do you do then?"

She took my question in her mouth and savoured it for a few minutes. I was preparing myself to memorize a series of complex instructions, but instead I got an answer that was too simple for my liking.

"You live. You get up each day and you are present with nature, yourself, other people and your world. You send people love and joy through your own energy. You go to your job, and you talk to your family, and you cook. You do all the things that bring you joy."

It seemed really anticlimactic at the time. You mean, I can just be happy by being happy? I don't need to buy any more books, subscribe to any more blogs, or listen to anyone else?

Quite simply yes.

But to me that is very difficult. I am very uncomfortable knowing that I am, in fact, the one responsible for myself. I'm sitting here thinking about my life and how to best live it. I'm sitting here trying to make mountains out of mole hills. Trying to will my brain into accepting my heart. But that's the issue isn't it. Your brain isn't your heart. Your cat isn't your dog, and never will be. So of course your heart and head are conflicted. They are two different things. Your actions have to come from your heart and your head will help you put the plans together. Not the other way around.

You need to accept these things and move past them. By doing things. Stop creating problems that don't exist. Let them go.

Isn't it strange how sometimes we need to create drama in our lives? We need a problem, so that we can solve a problem. Life seems so stagnant when you're not solving problems. When you're not crossing something off the list. But that's just because we're used to all the electricity floating around us, connecting us to imaginary problems and things. Stop connecting yourself to the wrong things. Let all your connections go - reset - and choose to connect to the ones that your heart wants.

Detach. Go for a walk. Create space inside yourself and sit with it. It's ok. You're not wasting time, because time doesn't exist in the way we know anyway. The whole concept is man made.

And when you're ready, go out into the world and talk to someone. Get some ideas. Get back to the list. The things you want to do. The small things that you will savour in this moment.

#30 Generation Me: Chasing Butterflies

I've been reading Gene M. Twenge's book, Generation Me… It's helping me understand this void that follows me around. The one that says, you are a very special person who had been born to share yourself with the world. Buy an iPad, it will help you along your quest. I thought it was just me. 

But it's not just me. It's my generation. I like her use of iGen, "This generation has been profoundly shaped by technology, including the Internet (which is what the "i" stands for in "iMac") and of course iPods. The "i" also captures the essence of my description of Generation Me: it can stand for the first person singular or be "i" for individual." (G.Twenge) 

It's very true. We have been shaped by the internet, the i: individualism, identity, iPad. This leads to a high level of narcissism and entitlement and a low level of actual desire to do work. Especially in North America. In Europe - in Italy, people don't have that choice. They don't have the same opportunities to live back home after University to figure out "what they want to do" with their lives. They are forced to stay at home through the whole experience because there isn't any work. 1/4 are unemployed. 

And yet we all feel the same way. We all feel like we need to make a difference, do something with our lives, live in a proper way. Be happy. 

I was discussing the key to life with a friend the other day. We went on a walk and commented about how grey the weather was, how no where is open, and how all our friends are out of town: how boring life is! What a terrible way to start the day, lamenting that we're not plugged in to something entertaining. 

That's when we realized that we weren't plugged in. We were looking for stimulation. We had become Curt Cobain, yelling, "here we are - entertain us"! Our generation relies on stimulation to exist. We look at advertisements and the way that other people live on TV. We wish we were having the same wonderfully funny experiences as the cast of Big Bang Theory. 

In 1972 we saw between 200 - 500 ads a day. "Yankelovich, a market research firm, estimates that a person living in a city 30 years ago saw up to 2,000 ad messages a day, compared with up to 5,000 today. About half the 4,110 people surveyed last spring by Yankelovich said they thought marketing and advertising today was out of control." (NYTimes, 2007) 

A person living in a city sees 5, 000 messages a day?! Consider that article was printed in 2007 and it's now 2014. We live in a time of YouTube Ads, and Blog Ads that didn't exist in the same way a few years ago. I tried to find studies for today, but I couldn't. 

And we wonder why we are running around feeling unfulfilled, wanting to be movie stars and famous singers. Everyday, 5000 times a day, we see something that someone else has, that we can't have. That we need. Desperately. Because people will only like us if we have glossy, shiny hair. 

Who are we without what we buy? And what we want is enough money to choose. That's what it comes down to. Recently, a mutual friend won about $3000 betting online. It spun quite a discussion about free money and what one would do if one could just have free money for life. In the end, after all the clothes are bought and the parties created, what would you do with your life? Endless money to buy endless stuff?

That's not a life worth living.