Fortune: This is your year!

I’ve spoken before about this woman I met in New York many years ago while attending a Woman in Media conference that I was invited to – she was a Life Coach type speaker and after she spoke, she came and sat down next to me in the audience – I was sitting near the front but to myself – and I whispered to her that she looked better with light brown hair than the blonde photo that was on the flyer. After the next speaker, we both got up to go mingle and found ourselves standing next to each other again, I offered her a hypothesis of a gal-pal of mine who was struggling through some personal stuff and she said to me, never you mind about your friend, keep this in mind, the best place to be is airborne, swinging between the branches.

She had just spoken to the group about how letting go of the familiar handlebar and about to grab hold of the next secure bar put you in a precarious position or at least that is how you will feel – precarious. But the truth is you are in the best place, the interstitial between known and unknown – the place where all things are possible. And why is it so hard for us as human beings programmed to cling to let go and enjoy the space?

I cut out a photo of a woman looking straight ahead but with one foot about to step off the precipice – it read: Sometimes the best place for a woman to be is out on a limb. I pasted it into my scrap book.

Yesterday, I was watching Ruby and waiting for Tin to wake from his nap and a neighbor friend stopped to sit with us on the porch. She is in charge of quality control at her large corporation and she made a comment about my other neighbor who had just returned from work, looking a little harried at first, but who then donned the Jazz Fest banner they were about to put up as a cape and held up a wand and came out twirling it on the porch. She said to her, “Good, you need life work balance.”

Then she turned to me and said, “She’s just like her father, a hard worker, but works too hard.” And I said, well tell me about that because I’ve been going through a lot of questioning in my mind over the last nine months about work, life and of course, balance. We meandered through subjects that included work, age, relationships, children, and running and at the end of this happenstance conversation on the front porch of the LaLa, I had an epiphany of where I am in my life – on a ledge.

But while I’ve been clinging and yelling HELP, people around me have been killing themselves literally. A neighbor hung herself last week, another neighbor’s boyfriend blew his brains out and there was a vigil for him just a little down the bayou from where we were sitting – they sent a toy boat into the bayou and set it aflame while a friend strummed her guitar. My other neighbor friend had been to the vigil and was returning with three others I knew who were getting in their car to go home. She came and sat with me and another friend who had stopped by to sit on the porch – now it was evening – Tin was in bed – and she brought a book that Marianne Williams had written about life changes, and career changes, and about letting go of money as the main goal and embracing other currencies, ones of social worth and import.

I thought about life, about how fragile it is and overwhelming to some of us, and how incredibly exciting a ride it is to others. And I figured that in this transitional state where I am learning to be in love with a partner who does not need me, to work at a job where what is expected is not for me to be up all night but to be smart and to use the almost 52 years of wisdom I’ve accumulated, and to be a mother to a child that has already pretty much mapped out where he needs guidance and where he needs independence, that I’m killing myself by fearing that I’m going to drop off when I take the next step, when in fact, I’m about to launch.

In the words of Tony Bennett who I was lucky enough to see at Jazz Fest a couple of years ago, “The best is yet to come.”

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