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

Letting Go is the Goal

posted 5th January 2010    Written by: Kendra    CATEGORY: All Posts, Kendra, Life Lesson, Quarterlife Crisis, Season 1

For months now only one thought has propelled me forward: 2010.

I have wanted to put the general crappiness of 2009 in my rearview mirror since at least August.

Consequently, I’ve spent a lot of December preparing for the tweenies aka 2010.

I went through box after box of my stuff in storage and weeded out the things I no longer needed, culling from an ever dwindling amount of stuff.

I gave books and clothes to charity, stepped up my meditation practice, took several cleansing bath, enacted a solstice ritual, went belly dancing (whoops that was just for fun), saw a reiki healer (an interesting experience), and even dabbled with the thought of returning to my Catholic roots and going to confession.

Except I couldn’t figure out what to confess, `cause yep I’m just that angelic.

And now, just a handful of days into 2010 guess what? Nothing’s changed. I’ve manifested no miracles. I’m still at the same temp job, still putting in hours of ‘I thought I’d outgrown this’ retail work, still coasting on my parents couch and feeling the deep sting of disappointment that comes from yet  another round of employment rejection.

So, for 2010 I’ve made loads of private resolutions, but the one I’m willingly to publicly state is that my goal of for 2010 is to let go.

Let go of what?

Of everything. Of the person that I used to be and the person that I’d thought I’d become, of the job that I thought I’d have, of the way I believed I’d be living, of the people that I thought I’d be sharing my life with.

Because none of that is where I am right now and focusing on that, on what I wanted instead of what I have, is just making me feel worse.

So instead, I’m just going to get very still and very quiet and let life unfurl itself before me. It’s going to do so regardless.

photo credit

divider

Shiny, Happy, People

posted 29th December 2009    Written by: Kendra    CATEGORY: All Posts, Inspiration, Kendra, Quarterlife Crisis, Season 1

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about happiness.

True happiness that isn’t dependent on external circumstances but rather that arises from a deep sense of internal peace.

It’s the kind of happiness that Eastern religions often call Enlightenment.

I’ve been thinking about Enlightenment because, well, I’ve realized that I don’t want my sense of peace and contentment to be dependent on external things: the right house, the right car, the right job, the right partner, or the right friends.

All of these things, while sometimes wonderful, are ephemeral. They don’t last forever and even while they last the fear of things ending can make us miserable.  It’s like this story I read years ago by Krishnamurti that just popped into my head. A man has a wonderful job, a wonderful wife, beautiful daughters, but he lives with a constant low level of anxiety. Why? He doesn’t merely love and enjoy those things, they define him. The loss of any one of these things through divorce, firing or death means death of his sense of self.  Consequently, he lives every day in vague fear and unease at the loss of these things.

“We are seldom happy with what we now have, but would go to pieces if we lost any part of it.”  -Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

This is silly.

If you take a happy kid and stick her in an amusement park she will ride the rides, and fill herself with cotton candy until she is sticky with sweet and sweat and utterly exhausted.  She knows intuitively that eventually she will lose the amusement park, but that doesn’t diminish her pleasure of the amusement park today; it actually increases it. She knows that tomorrow will bear other wonders and even if it doesn’t, she has her own imagination and spirit to keep her company.

This is something that makes sense to me intellectually and intuitively and yet as I sat here I found within me a strong resistance to the idea of even striving for that kind of deep peace. The problem, I realized, wasn’t that I was afraid to fail, but rather that I feared success.

“There is only one cause of unhappiness: the false beliefs you have in your head, beliefs so widespread, so commonly held, that it never occurs to you to question them.” – Anthony de Mello

The way we’ve positioned enlightenment, inner peace, spiritual achievement or however else you want to phrase it, is as a solitary pursuit. Achieve enlightenment and you’ll have to go live somewhere in a yurt or travel the planet trying to spread the word of your life’s lessons. You won’t want to meet the gang for beer anymore after work (will you even work?), you won’t be able to stay with your partner or spouse, you will be an insufferable know it all and in the process of becoming enlightened you will find yourself… alone.

And I think for most of us, more than anything we fear being alone.

“Happiness is a function of accepting what is.”  -Werner Erhard

“Most people would rather be certain they’re miserable, than risk being happy.”  -Robert Anthony

So let’s look at history. The two enlightened people that I know the most about offhandedly are Jesus and the Buddha neither of whom lived solitary existences. If anything, their deep spirituality propelled them forward making it easier for them to be among people; not harder.  Both found, interestingly enough that their deep sense of inner peace didn’t isolate them, but rather connected them more deeply and without fear and actually brought people to them.

Enlightened people, apparently, are attractive people.

The Buddha was even said to have something of a kicking sense of humor.

As I release the notion that my search for happiness will somehow lead to my own unhappiness, I can’t help but wonder what other deep resistances we hold that act as barriers towards our own self-development?

photo credit: donna cymek

divider

Next Page »