A city of full moments and hard knocks

About a year ago, as the daffodils were breaking in Central Park, I left a heated board room on Park Ave, descended 30 floors, and walked a dozen blocks north to my favorite French bistro in the city.

I had one thing in mind: to have a long, lazy lunch.

By the time the poulet cajun landed on my table, accompanied by some tasty white wine, I began to imagine how I might occupy myself in the year ahead…

I would slow down, start writing a blog, read some important books, focus on having better conversations and work on a few projects with people I respected and admired (I wrote down three names).

A year’s gone by, so it’s time for a gut-check. How are things going?

So far, I’m pretty happy with the results. (I’ve learned that striving for perfection is pointless).

So tonight it’s time to savor the fullness of the moment, because as sure as I hear that garbage truck clanking and groaning outside my window, I know that NYC will remain a school of unpredictable, hard knocks.

Photo credit: OS

Ready for the wild life?

Are you leading your own life, or the life you or others think you should be living? Do you belong or feel abandoned?

These are the gnawing questions put to us by David Whyte in much of his poetry and writing.

Not your everyday cocktail chatter, but important questions nonetheless! How does one begin to frame an answer?

Mr. Whyte, not one to abandon us, throws a life-line:

“Every courageous life is lived in the grit and difficulty of existence. Dante says ‘in the middle of road of my life, I awoke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost.’ A beautiful authentic line and one of the reasons that The Comedia has been such an abiding classic through the centuries of western literature is because it is incredibly sincere. He is not basing his knowledge on all-knowing competence. He’s basing it on investigative vulnerability. He doesn’t say to you he has these three rules, these seven laws. He says you know one day I just stopped telling myself all the things I’d been telling myself and I stopped needing to know all the things I’d been needing to know and I just actually started paying attention to things as they seem to be in their own voices.