Life, Work & Wonder

Tag: life-lessons

  • Some Days All We Can Do Is The Best That We Can

    Some days all we can do is fight best we can!

    I have chronic fatigue that I try my best on a daily basis to fight through. And some days are worse than other days. Today is one of the worser days.

    Larissa woke me up at 8:30am. I was in a deep sleep and dreaming so deeply. And here we are six hours later and I’m so tired. Which makes me so unmotivated. But there is a house to run. And bills that need to be paid since I’m not independently wealthy. Which means I have to try my hardest to soldier on.

    In spite of everything, I think I’m doing okay. I did the dishes and changed the sheets on the bed and did three loads of laundry. I wrote a blog post, I coordinated a pest control call, I prepared for and then had one interview, scheduled a second interview. Now I’m starting to turn my attention back to real estate like I’m supposed to.

    There was a time when it wasn’t hard at all to move. My ex-wife used to tease me like that US Army commercial: “You do more before 9am than most people do all day.” Except that was 25 years ago. Today, 15 years after lung disease and 15 years into Ankylosing Spondylitis, I barely am out of bed before 9 am. And all day long is a battle to stay productive. But whether I succeed or fail, I can honestly look in the mirror and say I do my best. Even when I’m laying down (as I’ve done twice today) I’m hollering at myself inside to get up, to get moving, to keep fighting. Which is why I’ve been able to get (as little) done as much as I’ve gotten done by 2pm today.

    Anyway. I remember reading about chronic fatigue in a magazine in the 1990s and thinking, “That must be hell.”  I had no idea that I too would someday come down with chronic fatigue. And I can indeed confirm that it’s truly hell. Except I’m doing the very best I can to pull myself out of the flames and to at least have a few good moments each day. That’s all I can do.

    Here are to good days. And here is to life. And here is to the will to fight. I wish for all of us good days, and life, and the will to perserve.

  • The Beauty Of Sunday Work

    We worked yesterday, on a Sunday. Because Larissa and I are real estate agents and working on a Sunday is just part of the job. Which honestly makes me grateful.

    I’m thinking of 2019. I was working on a $4 million opportunity for my company, and on the Wednesday before Easter Sunday I got a call from the Executive Sponsor. They’d decided to go with us, he told me, but before they signed the deal the CEO wanted to meet with our CEO. Could our team (including my boss and CEO) meet with the CEO’s team (including the entire Executive team) in two weeks? Of course we could!

    But here’s the problem. Here we were, on the cusp on a $4 million contract that would make my boss’s team numbers for the year, and he was just so afraid that what was technically a formality (CEO handshakes) would somehow go awry. So he insisted we work over the weekend preparing.

    So Easter weekend that year was spent working on a lengthy word document that we could give to our CEO. Among all the standard details about the opportunity and the company, the document included long profile descriptions (including links) for every executive who may attend the meeting. Want to know where they went to college? Where else they worked at? What hobbies they partake in? Their spouse’s background? It was aaaaaalllllll there. It took hours and hours to put this document together, and that was before we started formatting it, which my boss was obsessive compulsive about in the best of times.

    Oh my gawd.

    It was so frustrating, so maddening, such a waste, to work that Sunday. And I had no control over it since I knew to refuse would probably cost me my job since that was the type of company it was. Of course we won the opportunity, but it had nothing to do at all with that document or its formatting or its creepy detail that we invested an entire weekend in compiling or even with the work of my CEO who was actually painstakingly and shockingly quiet and awkward in that CEO handshake meeting.

    That memory created some pain for me for a long time for reasons that go beyond Sunday work.

    But yesterday was different. Yesterday — and working yesterday — was in a strange way redemption seven years later.  Because yesterday I felt sooooo grateful looking back on that frustrating Sunday in 2019. Because the work I was doing was important for our client(s), who were regular people, and more importantly the work was essential and I was doing it not because of a micromanaging detail-obsessed-on-a-pathological-level boss but instead because I myself was choosing to do it. And there is beauty and tremendous satisfaction when we work 100% by choice.

    So yesterday was Sunday. Much of America was off, especially in lieu that it was a holiday weekend. But Larissa and I worked. And I didn’t mind at all and fact it helped me come to peace (redeem) that weekend in 2019 because I realized how much of a better place I’m in today.

  • A Night Of “Sunset Boulevard” And “Breakfast At Tiffany’s” (AKA The Risk Of Being Kept. Or Suckered)

    Last night, for the first time in maybe five years, we walked two movies back-to-back. It just so happened that both were classics.

    The first was Sunset Boulevard, picked for the primary reasons that we haven’t seen it in a long time, we love it, and it was free. The second was Breakfast At Tiffany’s, which I’ve seen twice (not in a long time) and couldn’t recall either of it other than it was two young kept people who develop a friendship. It was surprisingly good.

    It was interesting that we watched both movies on the same night because there is a similar string in a way. In essence, all the main characters are younger people struggling to pay bills who are at risk of (or dream of) becoming kept people by people with means.

    It is an interesting dynamic in a romantic relationship, a financially struggling person and financially comfortable person. Both people have to be totally grounded (I believe) and noble for it to work. The risks otherwise of course, is that one person takes advantage of the other. This can work how we might expect it to work, wherein the wealthy person exploits the poor person; in Sunset Boulevard, the struggling “hero” as consumed by the wealthy older person until he loses his independence and identity and becomes a virtual prisoner. But it can work the other way too, where the struggling person wraps their tentacles around the poor person.  In my own instance, I think of how I was 20-something with work ethic and a college degree and a savings account who met a high school dropout with bad credit and literally nothing to her name. I feel like she latched on to me and drove me to get what she wanted in life until such time 30 years later that I was no longer capable or needed and so was put to pasture, all the while gaslighting me. I was duped. I should have been wiser. Smarter. I became a victim. It worked out for me in the end (I was free!!!) but I lost 25 years of my life and my health in the process.

    So it definitely can be where a person-in-need becomes entrapped, but so too can it work the other way. So it’s very important always that we enter a relationship with our eyes wide open, and we are aware of the potential dynamics, and we work to stay on sound footing, whether financially or otherwise. Anyway, that was my take.

    I loved watching those movies last night. It was a fun way to relax on a stormy evening. And I liked Breakfast At Tiffany’s a lot more than I thought I would. And how much I wish I’d been wiser about relationship dynamics when I was 23.