Writing

Stranded (or: going with the flow when you’ve got no other choice)

July 3, 2012 by Jessica Leave a Comment

For the past several days, I’ve had the Aerosmith song “Amazing” stuck in my head. Well, to clarify, I’ve had a single line of the song stuck, which has resulted in the rest of the song bouncing around inside my skull.

Life’s a journey, not a destination – and I can’t tell just what tomorrow will bring.”

I left Charlottesville last Friday, a sunny, hot (99 degrees and a heat index above 106 degrees) day on a train that was running less than 30 minutes behind schedule. We had to go slower than normal due to heat restrictions, and were running several hours late by the time we hit the West Virginia line.

I was relaxed in my seat, reading the book I brought along for the trip, not worried about the delay – I wasn’t leaving Chicago until Sunday afternoon, so my schedule was pretty darn flexible. As the evening progressed, I noticed dark storm clouds up ahead. I thought it would be pretty cool to experience a nice solid thunderstorm from a train – it’s not like airplanes, where weather can cause delays, reroutings and cancellations, right?

Right?

As the storm whipped by overhead, I realized that I might have underestimated the power of the dark clouds above. For a short time, I was even a little concerned that mother nature might have conjured up a tornado, just to make things extra fun. At around 8:00 pm, straight line winds blew through the valley, tossing tree limbs through the sky like tiny specs of fluff. The train had stopped completely because high wind warnings had been issued, and they were concerned about getting derailed by the wind.

(I learned later that the storm had produced wind gusts up to and above 80 mph, and the type of storm was a derecho.)

As darkness fell and the worst of the storm passed we started to move forward again, this time even more slowly, so that the conductor could see any detritus in the track ahead. As we rolled along, huge chunks of tree scraped along the side of the train, bumping and grinding down the cars. We left the Hinton station just before the storm hit, and it took us four hours to reach the next station at Prince, WV. I fell into a fitful sleep across two seats sometime around midnight, expecting that by the time I woke up, we would be moving again.

Dawn broke, and through heavy dry eyelids I peered out to see how much progress we had made. Looking around the train, and then looking out station-side, I saw that there were people out and about, despite the early hour. I pulled my shoes back on and walked forward through the train until I reached the open door. Hopping out, I went to find out what was going on.

Already-long story short, we sat at that railway station in Prince, WV for 20 hours waiting to continue on our journey. The storm had torn up trees and power lines, depositing them on the tracks for miles and miles ahead of and behind us; it had washed out roads, took out power to most of the state (and beyond), and caused a “state of emergency” to be declared in multiple states (including Virginia and West Virginia).

At 8:00 pm the next night, buses finally arrived – they took us to a rest stop in Kentucky where we boarded a second set of buses that eventually took everyone to their final destinations – most of us on board bus 63 were bound for Chicago, with a few others headed to stops prior. We arrived at Chicago Union Station around 10:00 am (central time), around 24 hours late, which left just enough time for me to head to the hostel, take a shower and walk back to Union Station to catch my 2:00 pm train to Portland.

*Sigh of relief*

Side note: apparently, 232 passengers stranded in the middle of West Virginia is a big enough story to make national news.

Now that I’ve laid out the background, let me explain more why I decided to share this particular experience here:

Note: I wrote this post on Monday afternoon, aboard the westbound Empire Builder, and it is now being posted from a hotel room in Seattle after another thwarted attempt at reaching Portland. The past few days provided some amazing social commentary for me, and put to the test some of the key tenants of my current life.

1. Life’s a journey.

This one’s pretty self explanatory – I planned on arriving in Chicago with over 24 hours to explore the city, but Chicago wasn’t my destination. I was just passing through. In fact, even though I’m stopping in Portland for a week, it’s not my destination. San Francisco after that? Nope. Charlottesville once this particular trip has concluded? Not so much. Seattle wasn’t even in the plan, until a split second midnight decision when I found out that there had been a derailment on the tracks headed to Portland – and yet here I am.

It’s all about the journey. It’s about what we’re experiencing at this very moment – there is only now. I’m not guaranteed to even make it to Portland (though it’s the plan) and if I waste the moments I have worrying about how things aren’t going to plan, then I’m wasting my life. The experience makes one heck of a story, and I’ll add it to the list of life memories that have brought me inevitably to the space that I occupy at this given moment.

2. People are community oriented.

It’s weird how sharing an intense experience can bond you with people who would have otherwise stayed strangers. I’m not the kind of traveler who sticks to herself – I generally connect with the people around me as I travel, sharing stories. Most of these people won’t become a major part of the fabric of my life; I spend time connecting, and our paths cross for some small segment of time. After that, we move on with our respective lives. Chances are, we won’t cross paths again.

But then there are those who we bond with in times of struggle. Much like my sisters with whom I bonded during our shared time in that DC metro holding cell, I forged connections with those who shared our common time aboard that stranded train. There are likely a few who I will keep in touch with moving forward, creating and weaving our own separate stories, but we will always have those threads of shared experience in common, connecting us.

3. You can learn a lot about a person by how they act in an emergency situation.

I’ll admit, this part was challenging for me at several points. When you’re faced with an uncertain situation, different people will handle things very differently – the more secure people are in themselves, the better they handle unexpected challenges. I kept having to remind myself that the adventure of life comes with a heaping helping of, well… adventure. Otherwise, it can get pretty boring. Everyone had different ways to handle our unexpected delay, but most handled it with compassion to the strangers around them.

I know sometimes it can sound like woowoo bullshit, but I truly believe that a person has quite a bit of control over their lives – not so much in the “what is happening” part of life, but in how you react to your circumstances. Upon realizing that there is nothing you can do to change the here and now, how do you react to it?

Taking things in stride is far easier said than done, but I have made it a point recently to try to do just that. Would I have rather spent the night in Chicago, exploring the city and eating amazing food? Duh. But did I let what could have been ruin the experience for me? No – that’s the difference.

When life hands you lemons, right?

The next time life takes an unexpected turn, take a deep breath and let yourself experience it. If there’s something that you can do to change the situation to be the way you want it to be – by all means, make that change! But, if the situation is totally out of your control, give yourself the freedom to experience it fully.

It may suck for a while, but I bet it will make one hell of a story. Allow yourself live your story – you’ll thank yourself for it later.

Admissions of Failure (and why they’re sometimes good)

June 26, 2012 by Jessica Leave a Comment

So. Maybe you remember that post I wrote a while back, about sticking to your schedule (link) and the admission of defeat if you miss a deadline? Well, here goes:

I failed! (And I’m okay with that.)

I’m hopping on a westbound train on Friday afternoon, and I have more work to be done than hours left to do it in before I leave. I’m getting ready to launch a new business venture, and have client work stacked up. Next week at this time, I’ll be in Portland, Oregon, gearing up for a weekend with 1,000 other world changers – seeing old friends again, and meeting new ones.

This week, writing a post didn’t take priority. In keeping with my schedule requirement, I’m openly admitting failure, and also making the realization that failure can sometimes be okay.

I’ll see you next week, from the other side of the country!

On Writing and Darkness (or: an external look into an internal world)

June 19, 2012 by Jessica Leave a Comment

We all have a face that we put on for the external world – a face that hides, to some degree or other, our innermost workings, our fears and our insecurities.

For some people, you can’t see the real person for the facade, where others are mostly transparent, letting their inner self shine through.

I like to think of myself as being of the latter category; I try to be true to myself in everything I do, and to just be me. That being said, I think even the most transparent of people have a side of themselves, an unconscious that lurks behind the scenes, watching and processing. In most people, that unconscious probably doesn’t come out to play very often – perhaps in dreams, or other moments where lucidity slips momentarily away.

What I have come to realize of late is that being a writer allows us to lure out that unconscious, to bring it into the light and to feed it. We live dangerously through our words, our writing conjuring up entire other planes of existence, places where we can bend the rules and play with reality. It allows us to stretch our beings and live through the characters we bring to life on the page.

And, my recent experience has shown that it can unearth an entire side of our selves that we might otherwise not realize existed. My author self is dark, and even when I write with a lighter hand, there is a snark to the humor. I don’t think it’s a negative thing – maybe the darkness that gets expressed in writing allows me to live my real life without that tinge of the unconscious hanging on. Perhaps it allows me to purge the unconscious onto the page, where it lives without clouding my day to day self.

There’s not much more of a point to today’s post, just an airing of a recent musing. That being said, I would love to hear from others who dabble putting pen to paper – do you find that your imagination takes you places that your “everyday self” wouldn’t dare? Do you find that your creative self is entirely different, or is there a blend of the two within?

As always, I would love to hear thoughts and continue this dialogue. (If you dare…)

Bookworm! (or: recapturing a lost love)

June 12, 2012 by Jessica Leave a Comment

Confession: I used to be a huge bookworm.

I taught myself to read when I was young. (Before you give me too much credit, my parents read to me every night from the time I was a baby, and I know that I picked up a lot of my reading comprehension from that activity.) If my memory serves, it was when I was around the age of 6 that I had a reading primer that I carried around with me, sounding out letters and picking out the familiar pieces. It didn’t take long to start piecing together words out of letters, and soon sentences out of words.

And then? I was hooked.

You couldn’t take me anywhere without a book. My parents severely limited the amount of television I watched (one show during the week, and one on the weekend – thanks, mom!), so I had lots of time to be a kid – I ran around outside and played with my dogs, kept myself entertained for hours in some part of my imagination or other, and read voraciously.

This carried on through elementary school and into middle school. Even when I entered high school, I kept my face in one book or another – AP English classes, stuff I read on my own, books my parents kept on the bookshelves at our house – it was all fair game. When I was in high school, I worked at an art gallery during semester breaks, and I read behind the counter when no customers were around; those summers, I would tear through a novel every day.

Then, college hit. I was in the Honors program at JMU my freshman year, as well as being in the marching band and the countless hours of required classes and ensembles for my major. I stopped reading for pleasure, because I simply had too much other work to do. My hours were precious, and usually spent in the basement of the music building.

Cue graduation from college, starting a teaching career, and the years that passed afterwards…

Somewhere along the way, I lost my love of reading. It got delegated to the “things that take time I don’t have” list, and started to gather dust. There have been several attempts to pick back up where I left off over the past decade, but none have stuck.

Now? It’s time for a change. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about why it’s important to spend your life learning, and reading is a huge part of that for me. To be a great writer, one must consume vast quantities of great literature, and success points to those who take time to read. I read a blog article recently that indicated that the most successful writers and bloggers usually read a book a week.

Just this morning, I read a Matt Madeiro post titled “How to Start Reading” – a timely reminder that building a habit has less to do with forcing yourself to get back into something, and more to do with taking small, consistent, achievable steps in the right direction. If you’re having a hard time finding your way back into your reading habit, I highly recommend that you pop over and read that article.

I’m taking bigger steps right now. I’m reading a Paul Theroux book at the moment, in preparation for my cross country Amtrak trip to Portland, OR. I leave in a couple of weeks, and I want to write about the trip – the Theroux is providing amazing motivation.

And, in the name of continuing education, I have a stack of yet unread books awaiting my hungry eyes. This is one restart that I intend to keep rolling – even if I have to go so far as scheduling in time for reading, it’s important enough that I’ll do it.

How about you, dear reader? What have you been reading recently, or are you like me and in need of a restart?

If so – small steps. Or big steps. Whatever works for you – just start!

Labels (and why I’m cutting mine out)

June 5, 2012 by Jessica Leave a Comment

Labels.

They’re the reason clothing companies created “tagless tees” – because tags chafe and itch, and otherwise drive you batty. (My grandmother used to cut all the tags out of her clothes; as soon as it came in her house, out went the tag. Not so helpful when trying to identify an article of clothing by size, or looking for laundering instructions…) Of course, you probably realize that I’m not talking about -those- kind of labels, but you know what I mean.

As I have wandered along the path that is my life, I have subconsciously put labels on myself:

Environmentalist (hippie) (organizer) (ruckus-raiser) (activist) (tree hugger)
(semi) vegetarian (vegan) (localvore)
Musician (teacher) (artist)
Designer (web) (social) (digital)

We as a society tend to label ourselves and others according to the things we do.

Can I tell you how crazy it makes me that the first question folks ask when they meet someone new is “what do you do for a living?” – not “what kinds of things are you super-passionate about” or some other (deeper) question. We get caught up in these superficial interactions, as though knowing that someone you just met is an accountant, and you’re a dentist, and… where do we go from there? Zzzzz.

(No offense to dentists or accountants, it’s just the first two standard-type jobs that popped into my head!)

That being said, if what you do for a living really sets you on fire, absolutely consumes you, and you love it enough for it to define WHO you really are, how you want other people to see you? That’s freaking awesome. Kudos to you.

For me? I have recently come to the conclusion that while labels can be helpful in some cases (if fitting us into neat little boxes is actually helpful), they’re awfully constraining.

I’ve talked a lot about finding your “hell yes” – some of those labels above were at one point or other (or currently) a passion of mine. However, they are not all a hell yes right now. By identifying as any of the things above, I often find myself less willing to be open to something else. Like I talked about earlier in the year in my post about saying yes more, many times it would behoove us to let go of preconceived notions and try something new.

Tried something new and it’s not a “hell yes”? Don’t do it again.

Something that you used to identify with no longer a “hell yes”? No reason to hold yourself to it, if it no longer resonates.

This path we’re all on is different for each of us. Chances are, it’s going to meander quite a bit: curving here and there, occasionally taking a sharp turn, sometimes uphill and other times down. The important thing is to enjoy it while you travel it.

You may get tired of hearing me say it, but life is short. Enjoy your path.

And don’t worry if you have to rip the labels out along the way.

Continuing Education (or: always be learning)

May 29, 2012 by Jessica Leave a Comment

Two points, one post:

1. As a former teacher, I lament the loss of school systems that actually teach children how to think; with the advent of No Child Left Behind and a strict adherence to the SOLs (Standards of Learning), we are slowly building generations of young people who have learned how to memorize and regurgitate specific information – nothing more, nothing less. If it’s not on the SOLs, it’s not important. I know that there are still teachers in the field who are fighting the good fight, attempting to teach their students how to think independently and how to learn on their own, and I am incredibly grateful to know that such teachers still exist.

2. Recent news from the education front seems to indicate a trend: traditional higher level education is worth less than it used to be. This might not be the case with more specialized fields, but it holds true in many progressive (read: constantly advancing) job fields. Especially in technical fields like software development (with a never-ending cascade of new programming languages and ever-evolving technology coming down the pipeline), a traditional four year degree may see students graduating from college who have spent obscene amounts of money on a piece of paper that proudly declares that they have a degree in now-outdated languages, technologies and methods.

Those two points being raised, it makes me wonder how well we are equipping future generations to forge a path for themselves. Being of the college-graduate-who-no-longer-utilizes-her-degree category (hello, music education major who changed career paths less than 5 years after graduation), I can say that my college experience was highly beneficial, but more for the experience of learning how to learn, and widening my horizons. It’s still a good idea to go through college if you want to be a teacher, being that it’s one of those more traditional, specialized fields that requires licensure after degree completion.

That being said, when I decided to switch directions, I chose to go a more vocational route. I looked at grad school as an option, but realized that as an aspiring digital designer, by the time I completed the program I would not only be broke (and very much in debt), but I would have invested my time and money into learning that was cutting edge a decade ago. Not so great as investments go!

So, what’s the answer? Good question.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” ~ Gandhi

Many of my amazing colleagues in the design and development fields are self-taught. These folks have made the decision to invest in themselves in a less traditional manner, by jumping in and learning as they go as opposed to spending years chained to one institution or one course of study. Many of them have made a name for themselves along the way, carving new paths as they moved forward – not being molded by any one brand of teacher or academy, they are less stifled by other people’s methods and thereby more likely to be unique.

Personally, I have made it one of my goals to invest in myself and my business this year. I spent the first year-plus concentrating so hard on finishing up my last two semesters, focusing on clients and exterior projects that I never left time for myself. Reason number one I had a less than stellar website during that period of time? You guessed it!

Starting this past spring with my site redesign, and continuing into the foreseeable future, I’m changing that pattern. It took a while, but I finally came to the realization that it’s a win-win situation; I’m learning more and becoming better at everything I do, which benefits not only me, but my clients as well.

Coming full circle to my point about our youngest generations never being taught how to learn, I really want there to be a vector change in that situation. Without early education, it makes it incredibly difficult for these students to make the investment in themselves later in life.

But… maybe I’m wrong, and maybe these kids will be the first generation to really teach themselves starting from a younger age. With the wealth of information readily available at our fingertips, it’s possible to learn without a teacher, outside the establishment. Let’s hope that as education undergoes a massive transformation, we don’t lose our students in the wake.

As for me, I’ll be here in my little corner of the world, drinking in the world around me; always learning.