My days in NYC are numbered.  if you know me, you know that is a hard statement to make; a hard thought to think. 

the friends i have made in NYC are more than i could expect; more than i could expect to deserve. 

i don’t think there are words to articulate my emotions; how deeply i love and will miss my friends. they are my family.

i love every inch of my apartment. i love my walk to work.  this decision did not come litghtly.

it’s hard. it will be hard. it is hard. i will be better off - for the friends that i’ve met here and the ones i’ve yet to meet.

stayed tuned … it will be awesome, but all awesome comes as bittersweet.

Title, salary, address, popularity are some of the few ways that narrowly define a life. The problem though, is that it’s easy to believe that these are the only stats that matter. The world has a way of zeroing in on these details and magnifying their importance, which makes it easy to forget how big and full life is and can be, if you widen the lens around you.

Recently, I’m guilty of caring way too much about my job and how to climb the corporate ladder. I’ve allowed little things to stress me out and freak me out, and I realize that I’ve lost perspective. I’m stronger than that. I’m stronger than the stress around me.

At issue is what is your treasure? What is your meaning of identity? As usual, I’ve over-complicated the matter, and thus must untangle myself from the little things that I’ve allowed to bind me.

Jesus told his disciples (John 13:34-35) to, “love one another. In the same way I loved you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples - when they see the love you have for each other.”

Love is identity. Love is the identity I want. It really doesn’t matter where you work, how much you get paid, how pretty or cool you think you are —- how do you treat others? That is what matters to others, and what should matter most to you and me.

A Year in NY in 5 Minutes.

Beautiful. It’s like this guy has been following me around all year. :) Truly remarkable and the illustration of why I love NY.

I was fortunate to get to meet Dan Wheldon a few days after he won this year’s Indy 500. He came to NY for some media, which I set up for him, and he could not have been a more gracious or considerate human being. He was at the top of the world in his sport, yet he was modest, gracious and truly thankful for the efforts of everyone around him. His death is a huge loss to not only the sport, but to all those who knew him and those who didn’t get a chance to know him.

New York is one of my favorite places in the world. It should be, as I just celebrated my nine year anniversary here, which is longer than I have lived anywhere but home.

Though every part of my life has been blessed with the most supportive and loving family in the world, and I have more friends than I deserve, I’m always struck by how life in New York can make you feel alone, even as you battle through crowded streets and venues.

Mark Twain once called New York “a splendid desert — a domed and steepled solitude, where the stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race.” Twain gets it. The city, though vibrant and exciting can be isolating, and I’m just not sure why. 

What I do know though, is that you can’t go it alone in New York.  We need each other. Without a supportive community around us, we’ll never survive this metropolis.

Thankfully, and by the grace of God, I have an amazing community of friends that surround every part of my life. They make me laugh, cry, release stress, laugh at myself, and just bring me joy.  

Last night we had a party to celebrate my friend’s new job. Her new and old colleagues and friends gathered to wish her well, and I was uplifted by celebrating the accomplishments of one of my cherished friends. I realized that one of the things that made the night so special was that we started together in this city nine years ago, as NBC Pages. Many of our ”core group” (Page start group) was there to celebrate, and we realized how far we’ve come since we put on the “blues” and gave tours through the NBC studios. We’re all still friends, and have had many parties celebrating the achievements in each other’s lives; and it’s a phenomenal experience and feeling to celebrate something that nine years ago you never would have thought would happen, or ever believe would happen to you.

Events like last night add light to this New York life, as does running into old and new acquaintances and friends on the streets, at bars, at work events, etc. All these run-in coincidences make me smile, knowing that I have a real community around me in this huge, crazy city. Each party and run-in leave me walking away uplifted and knowing that I am not alone.  

This week, in The Atlantic, there’s a fascinating (yet long) look at the single life. Completely worth the read, “All the Single Ladies”:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/all-the-single-ladies/8654/1/

 I excerpted the below graphs from the article because they really hit home for me:

Bella DePaulo, a Harvard-trained social psychologist who is now a visiting professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, is America’s foremost thinker and writer on the single experience. In 2005, she coined the word singlism, in an article she published in Psychological Inquiry. Intending a parallel with terms like racism and sexism, DePaulo says singlism is “the stigmatizing of adults who are single [and] includes negative stereotyping of singles and discrimination against singles.” In her 2006 book, Singled Out, she argues that the complexities of modern life, and the fragility of the institution of marriage, have inspired an unprecedented glorification of coupling. (Laura Kipnis, the author of Against Love, has called this “the tyranny of two.”) This marriage myth—“matrimania,” DePaulo calls it—proclaims that the only route to happiness is finding and keeping one all-purpose, all-important partner who can meet our every emotional and social need. Those who don’t have this are pitied. Those who don’t want it are seen as threatening. Singlism, therefore, “serves to maintain cultural beliefs about marriage by derogating those whose lives challenge those beliefs.”

Over lunch at a seafood restaurant, she discussed how the cultural fixation on the couple blinds us to the full web of relationships that sustain us on a daily basis. We are far more than whom we are (or aren’t) married to: we are also friends, grandparents, colleagues, cousins, and so on. To ignore the depth and complexities of these networks is to limit the full range of our emotional experiences.

Personally, I’ve been wondering if we might be witnessing the rise of the aunt, based on the simple fact that my brother’s two small daughters have brought me emotional rewards I never could have anticipated. I have always been very close with my family, but welcoming my nieces into the world has reminded me anew of what a gift it is to care deeply, even helplessly, about another. There are many ways to know love in this world.

—-I could not agree more that loving relationships are all around us and in our lives and simply because you’re “single” doesn’t mean that your life isn’t full of love and relationships. Also, what she says about caring deeply and helplessly about her brother’s kids and how they have brought her emotional rewards she never could have anticipated is exactly how i feel about my nephews and niece. If i ever doubted that I could love so fully and unconditionally, i know I can because of the love I feel for Landen, Parker and Olivia.

The lessons of Steve Jobs’ life and career that most impacted me are from his own words about simplicity, intuition, trust, curiosity and teamwork.

BRIDGE BUILDER/SIMPLICITY: “That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
— BusinessWeek interview, May 1998

• Jobs was a bridge. A bridge between engineers and investors and programmers and the public and all the other constituencies he served. Without him, no one could have understood the work and its importance. He wasn’t the smartest guy in the group, but he hired the smartest people and was able to translate their work, which is true brilliance. 

INTUITION: “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
— BusinessWeek interview, May 1998

• Jobs wasn’t a politician. He didn’t poll people to find out if his ideas were acceptable, he just had the confidence to deliver what he believed was right.

TRUST YOURSELF: ”[Y]ou can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
— Stanford University commencement address, June 2005.

• This mirrors my favorite quote from Rainier Maria Rilke which asks you to be patient with all that is unresolved in your heart and, “try to love the questions themselves … and to live everything, live the questions now and someday, without even knowing it, you’ll live your way into the answer.”

CURIOSITY: “Picasso had a saying: ‘Good artists copy, great artists steal.’ We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas…I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, artists, zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”
— 1994

• In this life we don’t have to be experts at one thing. What makes us great is curiosity about all facets of life and drawing from all of life’s experiences to make us good at any particular thing.

TEAMWORK: “My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.”
— Interview with 60 Minutes, 2003

• Even the most successful man knew that he couldn’t do it alone.

ROLE MODEL?

Ken Auletta in the New Yorker brought up an interesting point that Jobs was never known for his kindness towards people, but rather his hard-driving personality. His cruelty won’t be remembered but his great products will. As the New Yorker puts it:

“Ideally what you want to have is a greater balance between being nice and being effective than he achieved. But one of the questions is whether he could have achieved what he achieved if he were nice.”

Interesting question, indeed, but his legacy isn’t in question.

ryanosborn:

Always gets me.

Lately, men and dating have been dominating the conversations of myself and my friends. It seems that right now, all my married friends and serious-boyfriend-friends are having issues with their significant others, and hearing it all is making me very happy that I’m not in a relationship.

However, that doesn’t stop me from wondering why I’m not, and I fluctuate between being blissfully happy in my single life and the freedom it offers and wondering when I’ll have an awesome partner to explore life with.

My friend (who has sworn off guys for the time being, as have I), forwarded me a thought-provoking article that helps explain my bipolar feelings toward relationships. Basically, it’s not just me.

Here’s my favorite part:

“Did we find love because we grew up, got real and worked through our

issues? No. We just found the right guys. We found men who love us

even though we’re still cranky and neurotic, haven’t got our careers

together, and sometimes talk too loudly, drink too much and swear at

the television news. We have gray hairs and unfashionable clothes and  bad attitudes. They love us, anyway.

 What’s wrong with me? Plenty. But that was never the point.”

NY Times: “Modern Love”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/fashion/sometimes-its-not-you-or-the-math-modern-love.html

Basically, ladies, let’s stop focusing on what behaviors we can change to attract a guy, and just focus on how to improve ourselves FOR OURSELVES and the RIGHT guy will come. Anyone who asks you to change is obviously the WRONG guy. Quit wasting your time.

Sometimes we need to be more like guys … maintain a laser focus on only what makes you happy. For example, just look at the covers of magazines. Men’s magazines feature articles on interesting, thought-provoking topics such as travel, wine, cigars, business moguls, world issues, and how to survive shark attacks. Here are the cover headlines of this month’s leading women’s magazines: shiny hair!, whiter teeth!, how to lose 8 pounds and be happy!, sexy new makeup!, how to please him!, 10 tips to be sexier for him! … you see my point.

A blogger on one of my favorite sites, www.thehairpin.com puts it:

“You can tell by looking at the ads in the back of these magazines, as, unlike the articles, the ads demonstrate who the magazine believes you to be, not who they’ve found it lucrative to make you think you are.

And the back of “Men’s Journal” is a sea of those small metal-and-plastic devices intended to improve your grip strength, so make of that what you will.”

Jason —

Today you would have been 32. i miss you so much.  there really isn’t a day that goes by that i don’t want to call you; wonder what your reaction would be to XYZ situation in my life.

i’ve changed a lot since we last talked.  Progressed on topics that you thought i was rock-solid on.  time and experience changes a lot.  even though i said i would be the same forever.  you would get a good last laugh at some stuff that’s gone down in the last year; and yes, “i told you so.” you said it first. i know. you were right. the concept of, “you want what you can’t have” is true, and i want you to know that you’re right. Gosh, at 17 you were right.

i miss you. i’m glad that you really “saw” me at 16. you saw exactly who i was and all that i want to be, all that i am, all that i can be  … at 16.  i didn’t know as much about myself now as you knew about me then.

you will always be a sweet, sweet, beautiful memory for me and for my family. you knew that you had me, always. you had my family … even my brothers.

i miss you every day. i miss you every Thanksgiving. I miss you every time we gather around the dining room table.

i love you. you are the only person that i fully believed i have ever loved (outside my family). i hope you and Jesus are rocking it upstairs.

Love,

L