Chapter 10.
Dealing productively with your life intersections,
roadblocks and detours.
The day I wrote the first draft of this chapter is a perfect example of how I have learned to deal with intersections, roadblocks and detours in my life and some of the strategies I use.
That day, Sunday, February 24, 2002, I woke up around 8 am or so. Once again the sun was shining in Athens, which it does more often than not each year, far more often than some times I think or feel I deserve. The sky was pale blue and the sun so bright, casting a beautiful array of shadows formed by my small forest of trees that surrounds my home and half acre yard.
When I pulled back the curtain covering the sliding door to my back deck several birds flew away, startled by the sudden movement. Within a few minutes several different specific species of birds returned to eat their breakfasts of mixed seed from my hanging “squirrel proof” feeders: brilliant red male cardinal, chickadee, sparrow, finch, red headed woodpecker, small white and black woodpecker, titmouse, bunting, wren and tern. That time of year the variety each day ranges from 9 to 13 or 14 species. Often watching them fly up to my bird feeders or onto my deck to pick up fallen or discarded seeds as they hop around is enough to clear away my more wake depressive mood.
I read some of an inspirational book to help further remove the very deep and dark depressive mood I was in. I wrote some on another chapter for this book. I went upstairs to read the early morning’s supply of email messages. Then I got dressed and went bowling, to the church of the rolling ball and hopefully falling pins as I had called the bowling alley and my weekly Sunday morning ritual. I averaged over 190 pins per game and was bowling smoothly and accurately. I rewarded myself with breakfast at a favorite Sunday brunch restaurant, the Blue Bird Café. My breakfast consisted of an order of wonderful German pancakes: one with chocolate chips, one with pecans and one with apple chunks; and an order of Heuvos Rancheros: beans, scrambled eggs, red sauce, a spoonful of sour cream with no Jalopena peppers.
While waiting for my breakfast to be served I studied the restaurant, inside and outside, the 3 or 4 outside tables. Once again there was no one there that I knew except for some of the pretty young waitresses who each have kindly waited on me over the past year or so. Then I wrote several pages in my rainbow paged, looseleaf type journal. I wrote about how I had been feeling, how I was feeling a little better than I did when I first woke up, how my breakfast would probably help me to feel. I wrote about common themes in my life, one of being alone, lonely at times but not always feeling lonely, do things that I did completely alone most of the time: reading, writing, drawing, designing, bowling, walking, hiking, traveling.
Why share a description of a repetitive, ritualistic, boring morning?
I have shared it to demonstrate how I deal with my morning depressive moods.
I first accept that I am feeling depressed.
Second I list both why I may be feeling depressed and why I could be happier if I chose to be instead of being apathetic or depressed.
Third I often read a few pages to a short chapter of a motivational or inspirational book primarily pretending that the author is talking directly to me and virtually in the room with me.
Fourth I do something I enjoy doing such as bowling or walking. Both have helped me for years to crank up the internal bodily chemicals that appear to offset the chemicals that produce my negative and depressive moods.
Fifth I take myself off to enjoy a breakfast, a treat.
Finally sixth I choose one or two small projects that I need to do; such as: 1) discover what needs to be done to fix my non-functioning right automobile turn signals and 2) cut down the caterpillar egg clusters or sacks I noticed yesterday morning while I strolled around my yard to discover what flowers were coming up and which ones were blooming. One of the many wonderful things about the Athens, Georgia area that I love the most is our early Springs and all the wonderful flowers and flowering trees that grow here. Then I tackle the two little projects.
That afternoon the young man at the auto parts store was right about my problem being just needing to change the lamps in my rear tail and turning lights. I took out the manual for my car. Found the correct page. Collected some tools and systematically attacked the problem. Within a couple minutes my turn signals were working again. Viola! I had done something successfully.
Then I got out my multiple fold folding ladder, hand clippers, plastic bag for discarding the egg clusters, a small hand saw and a pair of garden gloves. Within a few minutes I had once again become a successful gardener.
I then picked up, cleaned up and put everything away.
Once again I had been successful.
Those two small successes broke my mood. Or the wonderful personal gift of a great tasting Sunday brunch. Or bowling 3 good to great above my average games. Or simply the mix of those strategies had counteracted or wiped out the wake up, morning depression.
I have just described a short life journey. A 4 or 5 hour journey that led me from a moderate to dark depression to a sense of pride and a more positive outlook on life.
That type of journey I have taken much of my life and often take nearly daily in my life.
Many years ago in 1977 I took my first, all alone, extended journey to deal with the emotional scars and depression caused by the deaths of both parents, the loss of my favorite job, nearly two years of barely getting by financially, a fire that only my sons and I got out of in which I lost most of my belongings and clothing, divorce from my first wife and having to be alone every night for the first time in my life.
My greatest strategy for dealing productively with life intersections, roadblocks and detours has been to take journeys. I take my personally created journeys to get off the guided tours that people around me, whether family, friends, employers, co-workers, clients or society in general seem to try to control me with.
In the Fall of 1976 after my father died I decided I would take some of the money that was left to me in his will and take myself on an extended journey to Europe, a journey I wanted take for several years since I was first studying architecture in college and had attempted to finance by trying to win the Architectural Rome Prize a few times. That November I began my planning. First I got books out of the library. Second I wrote to the consulates of the various countries in Europe for information. Third I started asking a Kiwanis friend, who was a successful travel agent for help on how and what to do to make my dream journey a reality.
I kept my plans secret for months except from my closest friend and client Ed and his wife, my virtual partner/developer/contractor Tim and his dad and the travel agent friend who was helping me with details.
In February on the first day it had ever snowed in both Miami and West Palm Beach area my ex-wife had called and asked if it would be okay for my sons to come and spend the night with me because I had power. I hadn’t had the gas tank turned on in the small rental house I was living in because of my life time fear of gas furnances and pilot lights. Instead I bought an electric room space heater to set up in my bedroom and set up the boys on the twin beds I used as a king and put my sleeping bag on the floor between them.
We went to bed about 9 or 10 I vaguely remember.
The next thing I remember is waking up in a room filled with flames. My first reaction was to get Jeff and Scott safely out of the room and then to close the door to try to put out the fire. I tried to fight the fire unsuccessfully for what seemed like a very long time, which was probably only for a couple minutes. Giving up I closed the bedroom door tight to trap the fire. Then I stretched my phone cord across the living room floor to the front door where the 3 of us stood and called “O” for the operator because I couldn’t remember to dial 911 on my rotary phone.
Within a couple minutes fire trucks and fire fighters were there to rescue us and save the house from burning completely down.
The following parts of the story are vague and confusing. I took the boys to the emergency room to have them checked out, called their mother to let her know they were okay and I would be bringing home shortly and then called my friends Ed and Mary to ask if I could stay with them until I worked out the situation.
That was another journey I hadn’t planned. It just happened. The fire caused me to take many short journeys over the next 5 months before I would live for my long pilgrimmage journey to Europe. The journeys would involve my sons, my ex-wife, my friends and my clients.
That journey and all its related short ones were generated by a mix of life intersections, roadblocks and detours.
Most of those journeys were taken and completed without real plans except those created on the run daily or by the hour each day. Each were done to remove short term roadblocks and detours in my daily life.
My journey to Europe would involve much planning. I was determined to go on that journey. No fire was going to destroy that. No client work load. No roadblocks or detours were going to stop me.
Completing my bachelors degrees in architecture. Winning the student council presidency. Making it into Alpha Gamma Upsilon. Getting accepted into the Masters of Art program and completing MA in Art. Getting Ruth to marry me. Landing my job at Schwab & Twitty. Getting my divorce. All were journeys I had committed myself before and had accomplished because they had become passions that produced the necessary driving forces for me to deal with the various roadblocks and detours that occurred during my attempts.
Each of those successes had prepared me to take on and accomplish the greatest journey of my life at that time…traveling completely around Europe with my first passport, a Euro-Rail Pass, and an American Express Credit Voucher all alone with no AAA Triptik. I would not have a Triptik prepared by someone else for the first time on that trip. Instead I had a Euro-Rail book, map and a hand written schedule on 8 1/2 x 11 yellow legal paper that would serve as my Triptik for almost 100 days.
The roadblocks of speaking only American English, having only traveled back forth to and from Florida from Michigan when I moved there to live and work and having never been out of the United States except to Canada several times while growing up and once to a northern Mexican border town were eventually dealt with by agreeing to travel for a week or two with a Chinese friend, Kwok-Yee (David) Wong and his South Carolinaian wife Mindy.
They were going on a month and a half tour of Europe that same Summer. David had worked with me as a graphic designer a couple years before and was by then working as an independent designer at the same time I was trying to run my own architecture and design firm. We knew that each other was going on our respective trips. He called to tell me about an International Graphics Conference that was schedule that summer in Dusseldorf and encouraged me to go with them. He spoke a mix of Chinese dialects from growing up to the age of 14 in mainland China and Hong Kong and pretty good American English. His wife spoke only southern American English and I middle American English. None of us had been to any country in Europe. So after much discussion we decided it would be a good idea to travel together while we got use to Europe. Plus David and I would attend Drupa the once every ten year design conference.
David’s father gave us our basic survival strategy. If we ran into any problems with language we were to find a Chinese restaurant and then David was to talk to the chef who would probably speak one of the Chinese dialects that he could still speak well enough. We only had to do that once during the first week in Cologne, Germany and ended up sharing one of the finest Chinese meals I have ever tasted in all my travels up to now.
Life Roadblocks
divorce
firings
layoffs
deaths: mother, father, son, wife
moving
school
other people
language
food
health
illness
detours
job changes
moving
different countries
different cities or towns
trains, busses, planes, taxi, foot, boats
intersections
life changes
deaths
endings
beginnings
graduations
job changes
divorce
deaths
new friends
loss of friends
What life intersections, changes have you experienced?
Did you detour? Did you pick yourself up and dust yourself off and continue onward towards your original destination?
I have quit jobs, been laid off, let go, fired actually, technically I have never been fired. I was almost fired from my first architectural job. Instead I buckled down and was not fired. Then about two months later I quit instead. Some of the layoffs would now be called downsizing or rightsizing. In other words times got bad in my profession a few times both in Detroit and the Palm Beach County, Florida areas and I was let go.
When I quit I usually had other jobs already that usually I had been working at part-time at night or on the weekends for weeks or months.
When I decided not to go to work one day at Gunnar Birkerts Associates, my greatest fantasy job of working for a world renown architect, I had decided on my own without input from anyone: parents, wife, inlaws, friends. I simply packed up some things I thought showed that I was qualified to get a job in an advertising firm and drove into the city instead of out to the suburbs and began looking for my first real advertising and graphics design job.
Nine weeks later I landed a job as a graphics designer with a large architectural firm. Coincidence? It was the same firm that I had been allowed to spend a day at and tour as an eighth grader in 1958, a firm that I swore to myself and fellow young architects and fraternity brothers I would never work for because they did ugly architecture.
That self-created journey, without any true planning involved or any external input or support, provided me with many lessons and experiences that I will never forget as a professional and a person.
The roadblock was feeling stuck in a bad marriage to someone who did not understand nor appreciate what my professional daily life was like nor my personal dreams of becoming a fine architect some day. She and I were night and day different. She was 3 years younger and had only been to college for less than one year when she was expelled for going to a party where there was liquor. I had a bachelor science degree in architecture, had worked for worked over 6 years by then for a total of 5 different architectural firms, 1 interior design firm and had been doing moonlight design work for about 3 years. She had worked just about six months only as a beautician before becoming pregnant with our first son and quitting to become a full time mom.
My first major badly chosen and not planned tour was convincing her to marry me. The only good results were two wonderful sons and some fun times. Most of the time I was on several simultaneous journeys: working full time (often over-time hours), doing moonlight work as well, going to school at night and on the weekends and trying to be a husband and father, most of which I felt I was doing poorly or not was very qualified or skilled to do.
It was 6 to 7 years later before I used divorce to change that cluster of journeys.
I have often heard speakers and trainers who have said that audiences tend to remember the first thing and the last thing that we say and that we should therefore include many first things (beginnings) and last things (endings) in our keynote speeches, workshops or training programs. I have done that in entire my life
I have experienced many beginnings and endings
starting new jobs 43 separate ones
starting new careers 8
starting new marriages 2
developing friendships
starting of two children’s lives
starting new degrees 9
architecture, art history, urban planning, advertising, interior architecture, gifted education, middle school education, guidance and counseling focusing on creative people and educational psychology focusing on creativity
starting to live at 25 addresses in 3 states in 58 years
ending jobs 42 separate ones
ending careers 7
ending degrees 9 completing 4 completely and 1 technically
ending a marriage
ending of a son’s life through a DUI accident
ending of mother’s and father’s lives through their deaths
having a marriage ended by my wife’s illness and death
starting pilgrimmages 2
1 around Europe
1 around the World
starting many trips Turkey, South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago
starting new assn CEF, NCCI, IN, ACA, ICINC
What strategies have I learned to use during these intersections, roadblocks and detours?
plan
be willing to be flexible
ask for help
keep moving
be creative
keep generating ideas
keep looking for ideas
learn to accept ideas and temporary revisions and not look for permanent solutions
Dealing productively with your life intersections,
roadblocks and detours.
The day I wrote the first draft of this chapter is a perfect example of how I have learned to deal with intersections, roadblocks and detours in my life and some of the strategies I use.
That day, Sunday, February 24, 2002, I woke up around 8 am or so. Once again the sun was shining in Athens, which it does more often than not each year, far more often than some times I think or feel I deserve. The sky was pale blue and the sun so bright, casting a beautiful array of shadows formed by my small forest of trees that surrounds my home and half acre yard.
When I pulled back the curtain covering the sliding door to my back deck several birds flew away, startled by the sudden movement. Within a few minutes several different specific species of birds returned to eat their breakfasts of mixed seed from my hanging “squirrel proof” feeders: brilliant red male cardinal, chickadee, sparrow, finch, red headed woodpecker, small white and black woodpecker, titmouse, bunting, wren and tern. That time of year the variety each day ranges from 9 to 13 or 14 species. Often watching them fly up to my bird feeders or onto my deck to pick up fallen or discarded seeds as they hop around is enough to clear away my more wake depressive mood.
I read some of an inspirational book to help further remove the very deep and dark depressive mood I was in. I wrote some on another chapter for this book. I went upstairs to read the early morning’s supply of email messages. Then I got dressed and went bowling, to the church of the rolling ball and hopefully falling pins as I had called the bowling alley and my weekly Sunday morning ritual. I averaged over 190 pins per game and was bowling smoothly and accurately. I rewarded myself with breakfast at a favorite Sunday brunch restaurant, the Blue Bird Café. My breakfast consisted of an order of wonderful German pancakes: one with chocolate chips, one with pecans and one with apple chunks; and an order of Heuvos Rancheros: beans, scrambled eggs, red sauce, a spoonful of sour cream with no Jalopena peppers.
While waiting for my breakfast to be served I studied the restaurant, inside and outside, the 3 or 4 outside tables. Once again there was no one there that I knew except for some of the pretty young waitresses who each have kindly waited on me over the past year or so. Then I wrote several pages in my rainbow paged, looseleaf type journal. I wrote about how I had been feeling, how I was feeling a little better than I did when I first woke up, how my breakfast would probably help me to feel. I wrote about common themes in my life, one of being alone, lonely at times but not always feeling lonely, do things that I did completely alone most of the time: reading, writing, drawing, designing, bowling, walking, hiking, traveling.
Why share a description of a repetitive, ritualistic, boring morning?
I have shared it to demonstrate how I deal with my morning depressive moods.
I first accept that I am feeling depressed.
Second I list both why I may be feeling depressed and why I could be happier if I chose to be instead of being apathetic or depressed.
Third I often read a few pages to a short chapter of a motivational or inspirational book primarily pretending that the author is talking directly to me and virtually in the room with me.
Fourth I do something I enjoy doing such as bowling or walking. Both have helped me for years to crank up the internal bodily chemicals that appear to offset the chemicals that produce my negative and depressive moods.
Fifth I take myself off to enjoy a breakfast, a treat.
Finally sixth I choose one or two small projects that I need to do; such as: 1) discover what needs to be done to fix my non-functioning right automobile turn signals and 2) cut down the caterpillar egg clusters or sacks I noticed yesterday morning while I strolled around my yard to discover what flowers were coming up and which ones were blooming. One of the many wonderful things about the Athens, Georgia area that I love the most is our early Springs and all the wonderful flowers and flowering trees that grow here. Then I tackle the two little projects.
That afternoon the young man at the auto parts store was right about my problem being just needing to change the lamps in my rear tail and turning lights. I took out the manual for my car. Found the correct page. Collected some tools and systematically attacked the problem. Within a couple minutes my turn signals were working again. Viola! I had done something successfully.
Then I got out my multiple fold folding ladder, hand clippers, plastic bag for discarding the egg clusters, a small hand saw and a pair of garden gloves. Within a few minutes I had once again become a successful gardener.
I then picked up, cleaned up and put everything away.
Once again I had been successful.
Those two small successes broke my mood. Or the wonderful personal gift of a great tasting Sunday brunch. Or bowling 3 good to great above my average games. Or simply the mix of those strategies had counteracted or wiped out the wake up, morning depression.
I have just described a short life journey. A 4 or 5 hour journey that led me from a moderate to dark depression to a sense of pride and a more positive outlook on life.
That type of journey I have taken much of my life and often take nearly daily in my life.
Many years ago in 1977 I took my first, all alone, extended journey to deal with the emotional scars and depression caused by the deaths of both parents, the loss of my favorite job, nearly two years of barely getting by financially, a fire that only my sons and I got out of in which I lost most of my belongings and clothing, divorce from my first wife and having to be alone every night for the first time in my life.
My greatest strategy for dealing productively with life intersections, roadblocks and detours has been to take journeys. I take my personally created journeys to get off the guided tours that people around me, whether family, friends, employers, co-workers, clients or society in general seem to try to control me with.
In the Fall of 1976 after my father died I decided I would take some of the money that was left to me in his will and take myself on an extended journey to Europe, a journey I wanted take for several years since I was first studying architecture in college and had attempted to finance by trying to win the Architectural Rome Prize a few times. That November I began my planning. First I got books out of the library. Second I wrote to the consulates of the various countries in Europe for information. Third I started asking a Kiwanis friend, who was a successful travel agent for help on how and what to do to make my dream journey a reality.
I kept my plans secret for months except from my closest friend and client Ed and his wife, my virtual partner/developer/contractor Tim and his dad and the travel agent friend who was helping me with details.
In February on the first day it had ever snowed in both Miami and West Palm Beach area my ex-wife had called and asked if it would be okay for my sons to come and spend the night with me because I had power. I hadn’t had the gas tank turned on in the small rental house I was living in because of my life time fear of gas furnances and pilot lights. Instead I bought an electric room space heater to set up in my bedroom and set up the boys on the twin beds I used as a king and put my sleeping bag on the floor between them.
We went to bed about 9 or 10 I vaguely remember.
The next thing I remember is waking up in a room filled with flames. My first reaction was to get Jeff and Scott safely out of the room and then to close the door to try to put out the fire. I tried to fight the fire unsuccessfully for what seemed like a very long time, which was probably only for a couple minutes. Giving up I closed the bedroom door tight to trap the fire. Then I stretched my phone cord across the living room floor to the front door where the 3 of us stood and called “O” for the operator because I couldn’t remember to dial 911 on my rotary phone.
Within a couple minutes fire trucks and fire fighters were there to rescue us and save the house from burning completely down.
The following parts of the story are vague and confusing. I took the boys to the emergency room to have them checked out, called their mother to let her know they were okay and I would be bringing home shortly and then called my friends Ed and Mary to ask if I could stay with them until I worked out the situation.
That was another journey I hadn’t planned. It just happened. The fire caused me to take many short journeys over the next 5 months before I would live for my long pilgrimmage journey to Europe. The journeys would involve my sons, my ex-wife, my friends and my clients.
That journey and all its related short ones were generated by a mix of life intersections, roadblocks and detours.
Most of those journeys were taken and completed without real plans except those created on the run daily or by the hour each day. Each were done to remove short term roadblocks and detours in my daily life.
My journey to Europe would involve much planning. I was determined to go on that journey. No fire was going to destroy that. No client work load. No roadblocks or detours were going to stop me.
Completing my bachelors degrees in architecture. Winning the student council presidency. Making it into Alpha Gamma Upsilon. Getting accepted into the Masters of Art program and completing MA in Art. Getting Ruth to marry me. Landing my job at Schwab & Twitty. Getting my divorce. All were journeys I had committed myself before and had accomplished because they had become passions that produced the necessary driving forces for me to deal with the various roadblocks and detours that occurred during my attempts.
Each of those successes had prepared me to take on and accomplish the greatest journey of my life at that time…traveling completely around Europe with my first passport, a Euro-Rail Pass, and an American Express Credit Voucher all alone with no AAA Triptik. I would not have a Triptik prepared by someone else for the first time on that trip. Instead I had a Euro-Rail book, map and a hand written schedule on 8 1/2 x 11 yellow legal paper that would serve as my Triptik for almost 100 days.
The roadblocks of speaking only American English, having only traveled back forth to and from Florida from Michigan when I moved there to live and work and having never been out of the United States except to Canada several times while growing up and once to a northern Mexican border town were eventually dealt with by agreeing to travel for a week or two with a Chinese friend, Kwok-Yee (David) Wong and his South Carolinaian wife Mindy.
They were going on a month and a half tour of Europe that same Summer. David had worked with me as a graphic designer a couple years before and was by then working as an independent designer at the same time I was trying to run my own architecture and design firm. We knew that each other was going on our respective trips. He called to tell me about an International Graphics Conference that was schedule that summer in Dusseldorf and encouraged me to go with them. He spoke a mix of Chinese dialects from growing up to the age of 14 in mainland China and Hong Kong and pretty good American English. His wife spoke only southern American English and I middle American English. None of us had been to any country in Europe. So after much discussion we decided it would be a good idea to travel together while we got use to Europe. Plus David and I would attend Drupa the once every ten year design conference.
David’s father gave us our basic survival strategy. If we ran into any problems with language we were to find a Chinese restaurant and then David was to talk to the chef who would probably speak one of the Chinese dialects that he could still speak well enough. We only had to do that once during the first week in Cologne, Germany and ended up sharing one of the finest Chinese meals I have ever tasted in all my travels up to now.
Life Roadblocks
divorce
firings
layoffs
deaths: mother, father, son, wife
moving
school
other people
language
food
health
illness
detours
job changes
moving
different countries
different cities or towns
trains, busses, planes, taxi, foot, boats
intersections
life changes
deaths
endings
beginnings
graduations
job changes
divorce
deaths
new friends
loss of friends
What life intersections, changes have you experienced?
Did you detour? Did you pick yourself up and dust yourself off and continue onward towards your original destination?
I have quit jobs, been laid off, let go, fired actually, technically I have never been fired. I was almost fired from my first architectural job. Instead I buckled down and was not fired. Then about two months later I quit instead. Some of the layoffs would now be called downsizing or rightsizing. In other words times got bad in my profession a few times both in Detroit and the Palm Beach County, Florida areas and I was let go.
When I quit I usually had other jobs already that usually I had been working at part-time at night or on the weekends for weeks or months.
When I decided not to go to work one day at Gunnar Birkerts Associates, my greatest fantasy job of working for a world renown architect, I had decided on my own without input from anyone: parents, wife, inlaws, friends. I simply packed up some things I thought showed that I was qualified to get a job in an advertising firm and drove into the city instead of out to the suburbs and began looking for my first real advertising and graphics design job.
Nine weeks later I landed a job as a graphics designer with a large architectural firm. Coincidence? It was the same firm that I had been allowed to spend a day at and tour as an eighth grader in 1958, a firm that I swore to myself and fellow young architects and fraternity brothers I would never work for because they did ugly architecture.
That self-created journey, without any true planning involved or any external input or support, provided me with many lessons and experiences that I will never forget as a professional and a person.
The roadblock was feeling stuck in a bad marriage to someone who did not understand nor appreciate what my professional daily life was like nor my personal dreams of becoming a fine architect some day. She and I were night and day different. She was 3 years younger and had only been to college for less than one year when she was expelled for going to a party where there was liquor. I had a bachelor science degree in architecture, had worked for worked over 6 years by then for a total of 5 different architectural firms, 1 interior design firm and had been doing moonlight design work for about 3 years. She had worked just about six months only as a beautician before becoming pregnant with our first son and quitting to become a full time mom.
My first major badly chosen and not planned tour was convincing her to marry me. The only good results were two wonderful sons and some fun times. Most of the time I was on several simultaneous journeys: working full time (often over-time hours), doing moonlight work as well, going to school at night and on the weekends and trying to be a husband and father, most of which I felt I was doing poorly or not was very qualified or skilled to do.
It was 6 to 7 years later before I used divorce to change that cluster of journeys.
I have often heard speakers and trainers who have said that audiences tend to remember the first thing and the last thing that we say and that we should therefore include many first things (beginnings) and last things (endings) in our keynote speeches, workshops or training programs. I have done that in entire my life
I have experienced many beginnings and endings
starting new jobs 43 separate ones
starting new careers 8
starting new marriages 2
developing friendships
starting of two children’s lives
starting new degrees 9
architecture, art history, urban planning, advertising, interior architecture, gifted education, middle school education, guidance and counseling focusing on creative people and educational psychology focusing on creativity
starting to live at 25 addresses in 3 states in 58 years
ending jobs 42 separate ones
ending careers 7
ending degrees 9 completing 4 completely and 1 technically
ending a marriage
ending of a son’s life through a DUI accident
ending of mother’s and father’s lives through their deaths
having a marriage ended by my wife’s illness and death
starting pilgrimmages 2
1 around Europe
1 around the World
starting many trips Turkey, South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago
starting new assn CEF, NCCI, IN, ACA, ICINC
What strategies have I learned to use during these intersections, roadblocks and detours?
plan
be willing to be flexible
ask for help
keep moving
be creative
keep generating ideas
keep looking for ideas
learn to accept ideas and temporary revisions and not look for permanent solutions
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