Category: Kendra

The Road Goes Ever On and On

posted 26th January 2010    Written by: Kendra    CATEGORY: All Posts, Kendra, Quarterlife Crisis, Season 1

Six months ago when I first started writing for Stratejoy I thought that by now I’d have a great job, be living in a great apartment, surrounded by amazing people – i.e my life before I moved back to New York.

That reality hasn’t happened.

I’m still unemployed, chilling with the parents an uncomfortable commute away from my friends. I still feel as though my life is a mass of unconnected dots and like I’m having a hard time finding a pen never mind figuring out the pattern I’m supposed to discern from the mass of dots which I swear move when I’m not looking.

It feels a bit like trying to pin the tail on the bucking bronco.

I am, I keep reminding myself, exactly where I need to be. The six months that I’ve spent writing for Stratejoy (and doing my own Joy Plan) have really forced me to take a good hard look at myself and at how I relate to the world. I’ve done a lifetime worth of soul searching and have managed to cultivate a level of patience the Dalai Lamai himself would envy. Sometimes, like right now, I even find myself being taken over by a deep sense of peace.

And, while a life unexamined is not a life worth living, there is such a thing as too much introspection. You can get caught up in your own head, and doing that introspection on a public platform can I think feed the crazies. As the wise Miley Cyrus (yeah I said wise) put it, can get easy to stop living for moments and start living for people.

While sharing my life and my thoughts the past few months have been really helpful in terms of finding my center and my own sense of peace (as well as helping me recognize that I’m not alone), I feel as though I’m at a place where I need to back off a little bit.

Much as a caterpillar enters a chrysalis to emerge a beautiful butterfly, I feel I need a break from publicly examining my own life, to enter into my own cocoon so that I can find my own inner butterfly.

It is, I think, impossible to truly transform while people are watching.

So thank you reader for being a part in my journey, for reading, for commiserating and I hope for laughing a little. It’s been a joy and an honor and I wish you best on your own journey.

In my heart of hearts I am a SciFi/Fantasy dork so I think closing with this quote from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings would be fitting:

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

With much peace and love,

[Kendra.  It's hard for me to sit here and not be moved by your "outer struggle" right now.  The part that allows me to make peace with it?  I know you've been undergoing some incredible inner growth.  The clarity and beauty of your posts have given all of us an incredible glimpse into your challenges, as well as your celebrations.  Believe me when I say this--that mass of dots?  Soon enough it will connect itself into a beautiful picture.  A stunning representation of your right life.  I believe it in my heart of hearts.  Thank you for sharing such an intimate slice of your reality.  It's been an inspiration and a source of many discussions in my world.  Love, Molly]

photo credit: Vicki’s Nature

divider

The Comparison Game

posted 19th January 2010    Written by: Kendra    CATEGORY: All Posts, Kendra, Quarterlife Crisis, Season 1

A friend sent me a link the other day to a book that a college classmate is having published this spring. My friend stumbled upon this nugget of information in a bit of classmate stalking.

“So and so is a published writer now”, my friend wrote to me with a mixture of jealousy and derision.

Inside a part of me sang.

I can’t deny that sometimes when I take a step backwards and look at the expanse of my life which is long on memories but short on stuff, I’m left wondering if I’ve done the right thing. When I end up at yet another perfectly decorated housewarming, or at a party of someone in a part of town that I couldn’t afford to rent a toilet never mind own an apartment, it’s hard to remember that I’ve climbed to the top of a volcano, gone body surfing in Biarritz, rang in the New Year in Dublin.

It’s much easier to remember that I’m thirty (yep my birthday was last week), unemployed, single, living at home, with just enough possessions to fill the back of my dad’s SUV.

I don’t even own a car.

I wonder if I shouldn’t have used my twenties to ramble, to ping pong, and flit and instead used it to plod the path that society said I should have taken. The path that at 24 I felt was soul crushing, but now staring down at thirty and longing for security, stability and companionship seems comforting in its own way. The path, in other words, that a lot of my friends and acquaintances have taken, to when I take a step back and assess objectively, to mixed results.

It’s hard not to get caught up in the comparison game; no matter how relatively successful society deems you. And the vague sense of unease and jealousy espoused by my friend, who by many measure’s of society is successful, in the shadow of our classmates accomplishments made me feel better about myself.

Not because, as Calvin and Hobbes so succinctly put it that nothing helps a bad mood so much than spreading it around, but because his jealousy helped remind me that in the comparison game nobody wins.

At a party a few weeks ago I was talking to a guy who expressed jealousy at how much I’d traveled. I was totally jealous that he had a job. The funny thing is, finances aside we were in much the same situation: afloat. His Investment Banking job was poised to end, making business school his only possible option, and his long-term relationship which had been headed towards marriage derailed leaving him totally single.

I guess the truth is there is no such thing as the safe path, the guaranteed path.  There is merely our path, and we can walk it with strength or with trepidation and fear but we will have to walk it nonetheless.

We may as well have a good time while we’re doing it.

divider

The Beauty of Pain

posted 12th January 2010    Written by: Kendra    CATEGORY: All Posts, Kendra, Quarterlife Crisis, Season 1

My freshman year of college floor mate, a short distance track runner who had turned down an acceptance from West Point but still had the discipline to match a military school cadet, had placed a homemade sign above her desk which read:

Pain is the weakness leaving your body.

It is one of those cliché’s that run through fitness circles that I, as a recovering anti-exercise activist (I still hate gyms) used to alternate between mocking and merely ignoring.

But the other day as my DVD trainer (i.e. the trainer leading the way on my new exercise DVD), pointed out that stress is what strengthens our body; I realized that my friend’s sign had within it a kernel of truth. Pain is the weakness leaving the body, and stress is what we need to strengthen us.

Yes, there is good stress and bad stress and like anything in life such a thing as too much stress, but ultimately we tend to talk about stress as a bad thing when really, stress can be good. The stress of a Quarterlife Crisis for example can allows us to become stronger, more centered, more generous, more grounded human beings.

This isn’t a given.

Emotional stress can beat us down and take away our light, just like physical stress can lead to breaks, strains, sprains and other physical injuries.

For example, I recently caught a talk show episode about women with sleeping pill addictions. Most of these women had gone to the doctor with real sleep issues that had spiraled into a physical addiction spurred on by a complex of situation (insomnia) and poor handling by their doctors. Their emotional stress had led to well, more stress.

But watching them me realize how lucky I was that my own dalliance with insomnia led me not to addiction, but to a shift in habits. I’ve learned how to cope with stress through meditation, exercise, and a host of other positive behaviors that I’m sure will serve to help me in the future as I come into contact with more of life’s hiccups.

In other words, this round of emotional stress has made me a stronger human being.

I just haven’t been able to see it because of the pain that comes with it, much as we often don’t feel stronger in the days immediately after a tough workout because the strength is obscured by sore muscles.

Viewing emotional stress, not as a negative, but as a round of emotional weight lifting is an interesting shift in thinking and one that moves us from the role of Victim to Actor. And I for one find that this is a role that I may not relish but can more easily sink my teeth into.

That said, I’d still much rather lay on my couch with a pint of cookie dough ice cream in tow then deal with weight lifting: emotional or otherwise.

photo credit : lanraga

divider