The Edge of 2013

2012 can kiss my ass. 2012 will always be the year I lost a bitter custody battle with my ex over my 11 year-old daughter - Emma. It was like losing my best friend and was the hardest thing I've had to face in my life.

I have referred to Emma in my posts but not the loss of custody. I was processing and still very much on the Edge of Grief. Now that the dust has settled, and I am well into the calm waters of acceptance, I don't mind sharing it with you folks. This Blog is about my experiences - good and bad - and how they have shaped my life and made me a better man. If I am not willing to put myself out there, to show some vulnerability, then I might as well write about someone else's life. 

Adversity has always been my greatest teacher. If not for the challenges in my life I would never have had to engage in the soul searching, the taking stock and renovations in my life that I have. I would never have learned to cherish the good times if it wasn't for the bad. This was no exception.

For years I have been bordering on burn-out from being a workaholic. I have been saying, "this year I'm taking some time off to rest." I have talked about taking up creative writing and developing my passions. I have told my family that I would spend more time with them and not be so serious and tense. But it was always tomorrow.

It was the loss of custody that pushed me to make these things happen. I took six months off work that I never would have of my own volition. I took care of some health issues I had been neglecting. I reviewed the business model of our small consulting firm with my wife and saw how we could do more with less. I started writing. 2012 was also the year my youngest daughter Abigail was born and the year I fell in love with my Wife again.

I took time to hang out with my Wife when she was pregnant rather than working fourteen hours a day. I have been involved in the early raising of Abigail and watched all the early development phases that I missed while I slowly worked myself to death during the other two pregnancies. I came to appreciate how fortunate I really am and how abundantly I live. My relationship with  my Wife and daughters, including Emma, got broader and deeper. I even came to resolve some long standing tensions with my own parents.

So since all these wonderful things are happening due to the adversity and personal anguish resulting from loss of custody I guess I should be grateful for 2012 - right? NOPE! I am a child of the Eighties. I grew up on ACDC, Ozzy Osborne and Judas Priest's, not Bob Dillan, James Taylor and most definitely NOT Kurt Cobain. You see, I get stronger and my life gets better in spite of adversity - not because of it. So ya - 2012 can kiss my ass and 2013 here I come :)

Happy New Year, From the Edge.

The Edge of the Humans

I never know which one of my posts is going to get a good reaction. This just proves that I really have no idea what is going on with the Humans. While I do recognise that we are all part of the same basic species, I feel like m interactions are part of some complex experiment. I am constantly surprised and baffled by Human behaviour. 

I have managed to identify two subsets of the Humans through my observations:

1. Easy-to-be-around-people, and 

2. Hard-to-be-around-people.

I am not sure exactly what it is about hard-to-be-around-people, but these are the people who make me tired when I am around them. They are the negative people who always have a reason why you shouldn't do something, why it won't work or what is wrong with you.  They are spirit-suckers who seem to stick a straw right into my chest and suck the life right out of me.  In their most extreme form they offer nothing useful, they produce nothing and even worse they make it hard for anyone else to produce anything.

The easy-to-be-around-people are the opposite. They are almost always content and always have a word of encouragement. They find the positive in any situation, rarely find fault in others and I feel energised and creative when I'm around them.  My wife is one of these people - she makes me a better person by osmosis because she is so easy to be around.

I don't really have much more to say about that except that I do have a choice, for the most part, as to who I allow into my life. Today I chose to have the positive people around me and I also choose to be one to those people. I don't hold any grudges against the hard-to-be-around-people life is just too damn short to waste on them. The good news is that we all have a choice to be easy-to-be-around-people. So over the Christmas Season take the time to hold the door open for an elder, give you seat up to someone who needs it more than you, say thank-you, clean up a mess you didn't make or have a real conversation with a little kid. If someone does something you like - tell them. What do you have to loose? 

Respectfully, from the Edge

The Edge of Grief

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” C.S Lewis

Ever had the sense of impending doom? I have. For most of my life I have walked around with the feeling that the shoe was about to drop. So far it never really has but the feeling that it ultimately will is unshakable. When I try to get to the origin ... I can't. There is no logical reason to have this feeling - but there it is.

I used to joke that while I was sleeping my mind was awake plotting against me. Hovering above me staring at me waiting for me to wake up. Something like this:

ME "Yawn ... what a beautiful day!"

BRAIN "How's that retirement going asshole"
And there it is my first 10 seconds of the day and I'm fucked. Ugh. I have come to believe the elusive origin of the dark cloud that hovers around masquerading as fear is actually grief. Now we usually think of grief in terms of someone close to us dying - but any deep loss can cause grief. And grief is one of those slippery feelings that tricks you into thinking its something else. It's common to refer to the 5 stages of grief:

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression 
5. Acceptance

These stages of grief are no picnic in their own right. So its not a stretch to say that GRIEF SUCKS. (T-shirt Idea???) It sucks so bad that our minds squirt off to less painful endeavours that, with the exception of acceptance, are based in fear - which also sucks.

What are we afraid of? Feeling that deep sense of loss, I guess. I have had to deal with my share of loss. My paternal father died when I was young and I handled it poorly. I went straight to anger. The anger, more like rage really, was so bad that ultimately I was forced to deal with it or it would have unraveled me. I was finally able to come to acceptance after a good round of depression. In the mean time two of my three Grandpas also passed on.

By the time my third grandpa passed I was able grieve in "real time". I was able to comfort my other family members, rather than make them more worried. I was able to feel the sense of loss in a more reasonable time frame and did not carry the denial and anger with me for years as I had before. When I held on to those toxic emotions they compounded and turned on me creating a whole new set of troubles. In a relatively short time I was able to reach a level of acceptance around his death and the other loved ones who had passed on before him.

I believe that the spirit, or whatever it is that guides us through life, is like a muscle and if you don't exercise it you get "spiritual atrophy". On the other hand, when you exercise your spirit it remembers the path you took like "muscle memory". So the first time I dealt with grief I had no muscle memory. Through the pain caused by the loss of my father, I was forced to find my way to acceptance. Now that I've been there once each time after gets easier.

So why the black cloud? Well, I have had other deep losses in my life. Through a series of unfortunate events, I had to cut my childhood short. I can trace the feeling of impending doom to those events. That sense of loss has caused me all kinds of problems in my life - especially in dealing with the Humans.

I wasted many years denying, raging, bargaining and wallowing in depression. It was only after internalizing the lessons I learned from the passing of my father that I was able to find the peace that comes with acceptance. I still pinball all around the five stages of grief. Happily I am spending more and more time in acceptance... Thanks Dad

Respectfully, form the Edge

The Edge of Adolescence

Well, I am well off my mark for 5 posts this past week... by 5 posts. Not to make any excuses but ... I got a flat tire, the dog ate my homework, I had a terrible flu and no one really understands me. 

I have had trouble at home with my internet connection which I now realize is on a dead tie with food and water for basic essentials to my existence.  In my absence Google Analytics informs me that my readership has broken the Iron Curtain and Russia and China have joined the party. Welcome comrades.

My parents visited a week or so ago and dropped off what is apparently the last box of things I have stored at their place. In retrospect I realized it has taken me over 46 years to completely move out of my parents house. Now if that isn't a lame enough milestone in my life the box was full of toy soldiers that I have been obsessively playing with since they dropped off the box. I have completely rearranged my office to accomodate my new toys and reenactments of battles. In fact, I have become so fascinated with my toys that I have barely slept. 

Afghan Rebels Charging my Monitor 

Many of the soldiers were broken and in need of repair, so the first job was to gather all the broken soldiers and return them to their original condition.  I do maintain a strict "no man left behind" policy. 

I then had to construct a series of shelves and levels to accomodate and display my toy soldiers and reconstruction of battle scenes.

Nazi Party plotting to overtake my Scanner

...And of course Batman overseeing it all.

In order to maintain authenticity I had to  segregate the different size groups. I have soldiers ranging from 4 cm to 12 cm so each arrangement and battle had to not only have the authentic opposing force but must be the same size. 

I consulted my 5 year old at one point who informed me that when she is playing with her dolls she always makes sure there is an even amount of each for every make believe activity scene.

I vaguely recall thinking I may be too old for this as I was planning the assault on my scanner when I realized that I did remember to include Batman to add some link to reality.

In one of my first posts on "Notes from the Edge" I explained one of my core beliefs that we move through a series of cycles from infant to adolescent to adult to elder and back to infant in our lives. It is a great gift that my kids give me that I can access what is left of the little boy in me and let him out to play once in awhile. It's fun. I encourage the rest of you to give it a try.  

Respectfully, from the Edge

The Edge on Success

I have certainly had my share of successes and failures in my life. In fact, in my experience failure seems to be a rite of passage to success. I wouldn't want to give the young people the wrong idea - if you can go straight to success and skip the failures by all means .. do that. The point is - don't fear the failures, embrace them, because they make the successes all that much sweeter.

I took a management seminar early in my career where the speaker referred to a progression we move through in our professional lives as shown below.

Survival ----; Stability ----; Success ----; Significance

The idea of a progressive movement through these stages of existence identifies, not only the growth we experience as Humans, but also that success is not an end in itself but a step towards Significance. We all move though this process in our lives with varying speed and efficiency. Significance is where we use lessons learned in Survival and Stability and the resources we acquired through our Successes to give back and help others.  

Significance will mean something different to each of us. The metric by which we will gage our Significance will be based on our internal compass. The critical point here is that we ought to always move through our lives with the understanding that we are capable of Significance. By acknowledging this we save ourselves from falling into the mediocracy of Stability or the indulgence of Success - both comfortable states in their own right. 

Even though we know that we are headed towards Significance, most of us have little or no idea of how this will manifest itself in our lives. An orientation toward goals or a vision based on our internal compass is important. If we narrow it down much more than that we run the risk of selling ourselves short or missing it altogether. It has been my experience that I really don't know what's good for me. My successes have mostly involved me getting out of the way and working hard. 

I believe that if we are true to our beliefs and put 100% of our attention into doing "the next right thing" in our day to day lives we will move through this process in the most effortless and efficient manner.  Conversely the harder we try to project and force this to happen the  harder we will work and the end result will be watered down. 

As I move though the rest of the day, week, month, year and so on I will remember to focus my attention on the next right thing. As I look back and take inventory I will see that the Significance I have achieved in building families and communities is far better than if I had fixed myself on a goal and worked towards it with singleness of purpose. 

Respectfully, from the Edge