Timing is everything.

Hope. That’s what this is. I’d forgotten. Or at least, I’d forgotten the pleasant side of it. This last month, being out of touch, I have been discovering hope again… in the strangest of ways.

I suppose it had been building for a while, leading me to this place of feeling again. Then I had a couple weeks where suddenly I was feeling all the pain of the traumas of the last five years – all at once. It was nearly unbearable, but I knew that if I could feel this pain, if I could find a way to walk along with it, then I could again feel love and have passion and find… hope. I just didn’t want to be numb anymore, but until then didn’t have the tools – the pain and heartbreak – to be free of the anesthesia.

The thing about pain is that without feeling it we can’t feel anything. Not really. Certainly not deeply. Overwhelmed, I had flipped that switch to “off” in order to deal with the fallout of various extreme situations that I was bombarded with in rapid succession. However, by the time I wanted it turned on, I couldn’t reach it. I was so far from it wandering in that darkness, I couldn't even see it.

When I then all these years later unexpectedly backed into it, I was blinded by the light. It was incapacitating to experience so much emotional pain all at once. Now my heart has adjusted. (I’m so grateful.) And I find I have passion again… so much of it! Yet, now it it tempered with wisdom and experience, so it is a fuller and a more beautiful sort of passion.

I’m not saying everything’s perfect, and frankly I hope I never will say so – how boring that would be! I am saying I feel [internally] prepared for what may come. More, I am moving toward it with anticipation while still endeavoring to be present even in these duller moments.

As this hope builds, and more specifically as I complete my few remaining (time consuming) projects, I will be much more consistent with my blog entries… and I would imagine they will be getting more interesting as I enter into the flow of, well, my destiny.

Here’s hoping…

ICE it.

I was watching the Sharks hockey game this evening when the color announcer (Drew Remenda for those in-the-know) gave his Keys to the Game. What the team needed to do, according to Remenda, was demonstrate Intensity, Consistency, and Expectancy. I generally ignore whatever he says because he really can annoy, as well as say the most absurd things and present them as absolutes (plus he worships at the alter of Crosby, so on principle I MUST distrust him). Then he made an aside about it spelling “ICE.” Okay, appropriate for a hockey game, if cheesy.

However, because he said the acronym, the three words stuck. As the game went from bad to worse and I was unconsciously looking for anything else on which to ruminate, I realized that those three words – intensity, consistency, and expectancy – are exactly what I need to remember and apply to my endeavors to reach my goals as well.

It’s good to get the vision and keep it in front of you. It’s good to speak it out and to believe it. It’s great to work toward it. But without those three words, it’s likely the goal will be a long time in coming.

For me lately, because of unforeseeable and rather exigent circumstances, I’ve found myself faced with setback after setback to even get on the road to where I want to be, much less there. In that state, everything seems more strenuous and it’s difficult to keep my energies positive and my vision focused. In other words, my hope wanes and I get smacked across the face with the glaring reality of where I am so that my eyes have no room to see where I am going. When that happens, it’s hard to take a step forward because you can’t see that it IS forward.

It reminds me of when I raced triathlons. In the swim portion, it was important to keep an eye on the next buoy. If I didn’t take a peek every few strokes the current could take me off in some other direction. So focusing on my current situation is like never taking my eyes out of the water. I may keep moving in the direction I think is right, but by the time I run out of energy I could have swum in a circle and gotten no where, or worse, ended up farther back than where I started.

Beyond that clear vision, that focusing intensely on my goal, I need to be consistent in my work toward achieving it. Letting myself not do that work one day because of distractions is bad, but it’s far worse when I don’t do it because I’m discouraged. That’s exactly when consistency is the key. If a hockey player allows his game to suffer because he is upset about a call, he won’t be playing much the rest of that game… and won’t achieve his goal – nor be helping his team to achieve their collective goal.

I’ve realized, however, that these first two don’t work without an expectancy. I get worn out on the work when I don’t have an expectancy to reach my goal. The sheer amount of stuff I have to tackle is overwhelming – paralyzing. But to do it and not think that it’s getting me any closer causes all motivation to wane, no matter how diligent of a person I am.

Honestly, I have to say that ICE is something I want to make a part of my way of life; my being. In the trauma of the last few years, the subsequent difficulties that piled on both physically and emotionally, and the general stress of daily life in the midst of turmoil, I think these three little words are good to keep as fixtures in my internal living room.

My only concern is if I can stay as conditioned in the areas I need to as the hockey players do physically for their sport. I want to, but I’ve never been one for routine and consistency does tend to lean on it quite a bit. However, I think I do have the power to change – I have done it many times – and while I will never embrace routine as a dear friend, I think I can learn to tolerate and even welcome it in when it serves my purpose… as a means to my desired end.

So thanks, Drew, for the Keys to My Future. (You don't know how much it rankles me to say that, as he really does get on my nerves.) I'll keep "icing" my bum areas to make them work better.

Intensity * Consistency * Expectancy

The moments that make us.

I’ve noticed that these posts are becoming more cathartic and less topical than I initially indicated this blog was going to be. I think I will again get to my stories and views on fun things in this world, but right now my journey is once more opening up. To share that is invaluable, but further, I’d like to hope some of my revelations might inspire. So I ask that you “stay tuned” and see what might come of it.

That said, I have been contemplating what the difference is between one’s purpose in life and one’s goals in life. Defining them alone is a difficult thing, but to recognize how they effect each other as well as how they may or may not work together is another level of mental arduousness. Yet, it’s a refreshing sort of deliberation. Anything that potentially compels refining is, I think.

To this point in my life I hadn’t put a firm definition on these things. There were things I wanted – to achieve, to experience, to learn. There were things I hoped for – love, joy, fulfillment. There were thing I sought after – adventure, passion, vivacity. There were things I craved – connections, hope, understanding. But there was no clear definition of my purpose, nor a vision of how to actively pursue my loosely known goals.

It’s an exciting place to be, on this precipice of the discovery of a lifetime. It’s a sort of threshold moment, and man I’m jumping!

Vision.

Over the course of several months last year, when in need of hope and encouragement, I put together a portfolio of images and sayings of what I wanted to make manifest in my life. It is a take on the Visualization Boards that are popular in various circles and schools of thought today.

I was quite pleased and proud of how mine turned out, because of course as an artist each page is visually impacting. Some of the pages focused on my plans to move to Scotland in the near future, some on my hopes for my spiritual life, some on my sports goals, and some on my visions for my writing, as well as other topics like financial stability, travel, and lifestyle.

But most of all, I took a quote from an ad for a television show and manipulated it a bit, making it my current life mantra…

For a while I was reading this out every day, and I still regularly go over it. It’s been really fun to see how things not only within, but without begin to change; things begin to happen. (I mean, my bro wasn’t even expecting when I adopted this!) I guess this is just an encouragement to you, and a reminder to me, to keep you sights on what you most want from life and to remember in the stress of it all exactly who you are… and draw strength from that knowledge.

The Leap.

I’ve always considered myself a writer, though I haven’t actually written much. It’s the telling of a story, spinning that tale out to perfection so that the delivery is as much the thing as the tale itself, that ever draws me to it.

For years people have told me I MUST write. But here I am, setting out on that bit of my adventure for the first time in a directed way. It’s exciting. It’s daunting. But mostly, I think it’s a natural result of the profound joy I find in connecting with people coupled with my fervor for conveying a true event in such a way that I illicit the most amount of laughter possible!

So here, in this little corner of the cyber-universe, I will share my tales of glee and woe, wanderings and stagnation, adventure and boredom, making sure to point out the silly and absurd in it all whenever possible. And I’m pretty sure it’s nearly always possible.

Occasionally I may grab a soapbox and climb up on it, or regale you with the ecstasy of a great book recently read, or rave/rant about a sporting event, or go on ad infinitum about some favorite British TV series, or give a bit too much detail about training for a race, or shower you with my geek fascination in the form of scifi, or gush about an inspiring friend… but in all that I will always look for our commonalities than bind us, and most of all find what is delightful in the situations and people that I experience and encounter. Life is, in all it’s complexities, a magnificent thing. I want to revel in it!

As for the friends that have encouraged, prodded, and inspired me to (finally) do this… YOU ASKED FOR IT!